“By the light of the law, the answer is easy: The Constitution prohibits racial discrimination in all rights, including the right to bear arms. By the light of history, however, the answer is far more complicated. From America’s earliest days, the right to bear arms has been profoundly shaped by race. Indeed, for much of our history, the right’s protections extended almost exclusively to whites.
-- Adam Winkler, professor at UCLA School of Law and the author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America
White America has traditionally been leery of Black people with guns. From the founding generation that adopted the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms has mostly been for white people.
Let's look at American history.
Fearing slave revolts, early American lawmakers prohibited slaves – and often free blacks, too – from possessing weapons of any kind. After the Civil War, the question of guns and race changed: Many blacks from the South had obtained firearms when they fled to join colored units of the Union Army. When the war ended, the Army allowed them to keep their guns as compensation for unpaid wages. As many of those black soldiers returned to their home towns, those guns were seen by white racists as a threat to the enforcement of white supremacy.
Then, Southern states passed the Black Codes which barred the freedmen from possessing firearms. Racists formed groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Congress, still controlled by the North, reacted by proposing the 14th Amendment to make the Bill of Rights, which previously limited only the federal government, a limit on the states, too.
Winkler says …
“But, discrimination continued despite the 14th Amendment, and it affected the scope of the right to bear arms. In the early 20th century, an influx of immigrants from Italy, Greece, Hungary, and elsewhere in eastern and southern Europe – who, in the biases of the era, were seen as inclined toward committing crime and carrying hidden weapons – led states and cities to enact laws to restrict concealed carry.
“These laws, which were supported by the NRA, gave broad discretion to local authorities to decide who had sufficiently good reason to carry guns in public. In a society marred by racism, minorities were rarely deemed worthy of exercising that right. Even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was turned down when he applied for a concealed-carry permit in 1956 after his house was bombed.”
(Adam Winkler. “The right to bear arms has mostly been for white people.” The Washington Post. July 15, 2016.)
During the civil rights movement Malcolm X and the Black Panthers took up arms and coupled a novel view of the Second Amendment: Not only did the amendment guarantee the right to have a gun at home, it also protected the right to have a gun in public, where the threats (at least to blacks from police) were usually found. These activists also interpreted the Second Amendment as providing a right to take up arms against a tyrannical government – which, in their case, meant racist police officers.
Armed civil rights activists were also early forerunners of the modern gun rights movement. In standing up against police violence, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers were ancestors of Black Lives Matter. Lawmakers in states such as California responded by passing new gun regulations intended to disarm black radicals. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies eventually destroyed the Black Panthers because photographs and videos of armed Black men sparked deep fears among some White Americans.
Winkler contends that today, gun rights activists echo Malcolm X when they say the Second Amendment entitles people to own weapons in case they need to revolt against a tyrannical government. And when open-carry advocates go to a protest with rifles slung across their backs, they are mimicking the Panthers, who in 1967 showed up at the California statehouse to protest gun-control proposals with long guns in their hands.
The irony: The modern gun rights movement — mostly white, rural conservatives — grew out of ideas first promoted by black, urban, left-leaning radicals. Gun politics remain highly racialized. Racial minorities are currently among the biggest supporters of gun control and whites the biggest opponents.
“A White man carrying a gun in public is seen as a patriot, a Black man a thug.
– D.L. Hughley
Recent Surge In Black Gun Ownership
A record number of Americans have purchased guns this year, including Black Americans. From KUNC in northern Colorado, Leigh Paterson reports that incidents of violence against people of color have pushed some to purchase guns for the very first time.
Jim Curcuruto, the National Shooting Sports Foundation director of Research and Market Development, wrote in a report, according to AOL News …
"The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women, who show a 58.2% increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year. Bottom line is that there has never been a sustained surge in firearm sales quite like what we are in the midst of."
(Christianna Silva. “Some Black Americans Buying Guns: 'I'd Rather Go To Trial Than Go To The Cemetery.'” NPR. September 27, 2020.)
Philip Smith, the president of the National African American Gun Association, said that he had a massive influx of members in two waves: Once, in 2016, following President Donald Trump's election, and again during the recent racial justice protests. He said a year ago, NAAGA was getting maybe 10 new members a day; now, its seeing 10 new members an hour. He said there are many factors pushing Black people to buy firearms, including "the politics right now, the pandemic and the racial tone: Those three things together act as kind of a three-headed monster that is driving folks to come to us."
(Christianna Silva. “Some Black Americans Buying Guns: 'I'd Rather Go To Trial Than Go To The Cemetery.'” NPR. September 27, 2020.)
Not all of these Black groups are challenging White vigilante groups. Many say they formed for a variety of reasons: to protect protesters, to assert their Second Amendment rights and to guard their communities against corrupt police officers as well as White supremacists.
One member said that Black people "can't just sit there when your family gets murdered or people get murdered."
More Black women are buying guns. And, organizations of Black gun owners are forming. Many say they joined because stories about Black people being killed by White supremacists convinced them they needed to be armed.
“The only person you can count on to protect yourself and your family is you. I put this statement out because the police cannot always get to you on time, and the world is not a just place. We cannot assume that everyone who wears a police uniform is just and fair."
– Michael "Killer Mike" Render, hip-hop artist and activist
Why the White Attitude Toward Black Gun Owners?
Research suggests symbolic racism was related to having a gun in the home and opposition to gun control policies in U.S. whites. The findings help explain US whites’ paradoxical attitudes towards gun ownership and gun control. Such attitudes may adversely influence US gun control policy debates and decisions.
Mean scores for symbolic racism, and to a lesser extent the race IAT, indicated anti-black sentiment; however, participants had mean scores considerably below the midpoint of scoring for the stereotype that “blacks are violent.” After adjusting for all explanatory variables in the model, symbolic racism was significantly related to having a gun in the home.
(Kerry O’Brien, Walter Forrest, Dermot Lynott, and Michael Daly. “Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions.” PLoS One. 2013.)
O'Brien et al. Explain that racism is related to policies preferences and behaviors that adversely affect blacks and appear related to a fear of blacks (e.g., increased policing, death penalty). This study examined whether racism is also related to gun ownership and opposition to gun controls in U.S. whites.
After accounting for all explanatory variables, logistic regressions found that for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism there was a 50% increase in the odds of having a gun at home. After also accounting for having a gun in the home, there was still a 28% increase in support for permits to carry concealed handguns, for each one point increase in symbolic racism.
Guns remain central to the reproduction of whiteness from colonial America until the present moment. Other researchers found “in our current moment, guns are a material outcome of racialized demands for self-defense, but guns have become a mediant (in a relationship), intersecting with other mediants, of race itself, whitening certain kinds of gunowners while darkening others. This is not just true of those who possess guns, but those who are the victims of gun violence as the question of who is and is not a legitimate victim is in part mediated by the gun.”
Princeton anthropologist Brandon Hunter-Pazzara found among the many fears gun rights advocates worry about, perhaps we can frame their concern about their weapons being taken away not simply as a rhetorical plea in the service of America’s culture wars, but as a material fear that threatens to upend their white identity and their sense of self. In the same vein, we might begin to view gun manufacturers not only as “merchants of death,” but as builders in what we routinely refer to as the social construction of race – a co-constituted set of relations between people, places, objects, and events.
(Brandon Hunter-Pazzara. “The possessive investment in guns: towards a material, social, and racial analysis of guns.” Palgrave Communications 6, Article number: 79. 2020)
As the gun demonstrates, objects can represent a paradox for people of color when both their possession and dispossession leave them vulnerable to racial violence. Carrying a gun in public has long been coded as a white privilege. Advertisers have literally used words like “restoring your manly privilege” as a way of selling assault weapons to white men.
History confirms that when African Americans started to carry guns, White opposition soared. The U.S. has always had an uneasy time with the idea of black agency. That is especially true when it comes to owning weapons. The truth is that the gun culture has always been about White supremacy and White identity. It still is. And, it is especially troubling that gun rights proponents have largely been silent when police kill Black people for lawfully using their guns.
“A measure of anti-black attitudes, is a significant predictor of the gun control preferences and related beliefs held by whites, and to a similar extent among Latinos. The same is the case for beliefs that blacks are more violent than whites. Racial prejudice, even though it is no longer a dominant attitude among whites, still influences their gun control policy attitudes.”
– Alexandra Filindra, associate professor of political science and lead author of a study of factors that drive support for gun control among whites, Latinos and blacks
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