“Surge of Interest in Firearms among Urban Black Women”

By muroPhotographer @ Shutterstock.com

In urban America, residents are realizing that their politicians’ decades-long policies of disarmament have left them, the law-abiding members of their communities, at the mercy of the lawbreakers. Now, they’re fighting back. Peter Jamison reports in The Washington Post that there has been a ” surge of interest in firearms among urban Black women.” Jamison writes:

A 16th week had passed with no arrest in the murder of Patrice Parker’s son, another week in which she had struggled through grief for him and fear for herself and her surviving daughters.

It wasn’t just that the person who had turned a gun on 24-year-old Markelle Morrow was still at large, but that so many other armed criminals were as well.

Shootings were ravaging the nation’s capital, on track for its highest number of homicides in two decades. In Prince George’s County, where Parker lives, carjackings had more than quadrupled since 2019.

But there was a place where she felt safe, and that was here, at a remote property amid thick woods an hour’s drive south of her home in District Heights, Md. And there was no time the 52-year-old felt safer than when holding a weapon like the one her friend Mark “Choppa” Manley now handed her: a 9mm pistol similar to those that regularly ring out in neighborhoods experiencing the worst of the region’s bloody summer.

“I’ve got some ammo for you,” Manley said, “when you’re ready.”

There was a time when Parker never would have been ready. During a long career as a nursing aide she had cared for countless shooting victims. Like many Black women in Southeast Washington or just across the D.C. border in Prince George’s County, she’d viewed guns for most of her life as the root of the violence that had wrecked countless lives in her community.

That changed, paradoxically, after her son was shot to death in a parking lot not far from her home. Exasperated with the police response and in despair over the sheer number of weapons on the streets, Parker decided there was only one way to protect what remained of her family. And that was to pick up a gun herself.

“I always felt like you needed to take the guns off the street. But the way things are now …” Parker’s voice trailed off.

“I don’t feel safe anymore,” she said. “You can’t trust nobody.”

Across America, Black women are taking up arms in unprecedented numbers. Research shows that first-time gun buyers since 2019 have been more likely to be Black and more likely to be female than gun purchasers in previous years, a finding that aligns with surveys of gun sellers.

Gun sales spiked across all demographic groups during the coronavirus pandemic, and remained high through the protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd, the attack on the U.S. Capitol and other events that many saw as signs of a nation in chaos. The National Rifle Association and other gun-industry lobbyists have long exploited such fears to boost sales of firearms and weaken the laws that restrict their use.

But Parker and others like her are part of a new chapter in the long-running story of America’s relationship with firearms. Scarred — sometimes literally — by the firsthand consequences of gun violence and disenchanted with decades of urban gun-control policies that they regard as largely ineffective, some Black women in D.C. and other cities are embracing a view long espoused by Second Amendment activists: that only guns will make them safer.

It is a development that could upend America’s gun-rights debate, traditionally seen as pitting largely White rural and suburban firearms owners against city residents, many of them Black, whose elected leaders have pursued some of the nation’s strictest gun-control policies.

Action Line: Politicians have used race as a dividing line between Americans for so long, that they are terrified citizens will come together to protect their Second Amendment rights. Get your gun and your training now, no matter where you live, or what you look like. If you need help along the way, click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, and we’ll weather the storm together.

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E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. His focus at all times is on preparing clients and readers for “Times Like These.” E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zildjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart (RIP) of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West (RIP JB) and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com To sign up for my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, click here.

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