by RJ Young
Still, because there is money left on the table—blacks own guns at only half the rate (15 percent) as whites (31 percent)—it’s no coincidence that the NRA’s annual national convention of 2017 was held in Atlanta, Georgia, a gun-friendly state that boasts a large black population.
It’s no coincidence, either, that a black alternative to the NRA has arisen. When the country’s most powerful gun lobby is either late in commenting, not interested, or both, when a black man is gunned down while abiding by the law, it gives the rest of my country permission not to care what happens to me. It allows Americans to treat the killing of upstanding citizens as normal—as long as they are black.
This thinking has, more than anything else, led to more black men and women arming themselves: No one will protect us. So we must protect ourselves.
THE NATIONAL AFRICAN-AMERICAN Gun Association (NAAGA), which bills itself as welcoming to all “religious, social, and racial perspectives,” was founded on February 28, 2015, by its president, Philip Smith. Smith has said he would like to see the group reach a membership of 250,000. Yet Smith hadn’t even been introduced to guns until well after he’d graduated from college: “The only time I saw a gun was on TV or with a police officer walking down the street.” NAAGA began as a way to honor Black History Month, according to Smith. “Our organization is working hard to show that we are law-abiding citizens just like everyone else,” Smith said. “We have families. We work. We care about politics and enjoy sports and want to have a gun to protect ourselves and our families.”
After three years, the organization boasts forty-seven chapters in twenty-six states. NAAGA’s membership saw a jump during the lead-up to, and following, the 2016 election. Between November 2015 and February 2016, the association added 4,285 members. During the same time span a year later, it added 9,000. NAAGA offers membership at $29 annually, although no one has yet been turned away for not being able to pay. “There’s nothing hidden, nobody’s funding us, the NRA or the Democratic party or the Republican party . . . nobody owns us,” says Smith.
Perks of membership include a membership card, access to NAAGA’s monthly newsletter, voting participation in local chapter meetings, invitations to gun-safety courses, and discounts on firearms, training, and shooting events. The total membership of NAAGA numbers more than twenty thousand. Other newly formed groups of black gun owners, like the New Black Panthers Party for Self-Defense and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, are also pulling in numbers. “A lot of African American gun owners don’t go to the range and we hope, as NAAGA continues to grow, that they will feel comfortable visiting ranges and developing their marksmanship skills,” Smith said. “This is why the group was developed, to give our community a path to get firearm training and education.”
Smith insists the group’s agenda is not unlike the NRA’s. He wants to facilitate firearm instruction and safety while educating black Americans about exercising a Second Amendment right that had once been stripped from them. “I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say there’s an apprehension in the community based on some of the political rhetoric, regardless if you’re a Republican or Democrat, left or right,” Smith said. “A lot of folks are just concerned with the way the country’s being run right now.”
Douglas Jefferson, NAAGA’s media content director, is more blunt. “When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter whether or not our people are armed, because that’s not the weapon some people are afraid of. Our blackness is the weapon. That’s what they’re afraid of.”
Since he cannot take that moment when a white person might pull a gun on him to educate or inform, he’s preparing for what might be the worst day of his life: the day he might have to shoot a person in self-defense.
Doug Jefferson’s fear is my fear too. Except I have chosen to remove the option of shooting someone in self-defense from my toolbox. There’s no difference between NAAGA and the NRA in that respect. Both associations advocate shooting back. And I will not.
JEFFERSON CHOSE TO attend the NRA convention in Atlanta in 2017 because the NRA is the biggest and best there is today at defending and advocating for the Second Amendment and at instituting training programs. “I give them props on that. Outside of that, as far as political stances, there’s a lot that me and the NRA are not going to agree with. Much of what they represent is not in line with my politics.” Jefferson became an NRA member while at the convention. He had resisted joining until he saw the NRA offered a means for him to pursue many of his personal goals. Jefferson plans to become an NRA-certified instructor, and then, once he achieves certification, he’ll let the membership go. “Across the board, everyone I talked to with knowledge of firearms training pointed me to the NRA’s courses,” he said. “It’s a baseline for proficiency. So I’ve had to compartmentalize my beliefs and the NRA’s [politics] for my own personal and professional goals.” The NRA makes its courses much cheaper for its members and has discount programs in place with gun ranges, stores, and manufacturers. From a purely economic standpoint, if you’re a gun enthusiast, it makes sense to be an NRA member.
Jefferson lives in Atlanta, in one of the most gun-friendly states in America. He shoots often at Stoddard’s Range and Guns in Atlanta when not working in security at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
He began shooting a decade ago at the encouragement of friends while employed by the Georgia Department of Defense. Some of the men he worked with were veterans. Upon finding out that Doug had never shot a gun, a few made it their personal task to get him to a range.
“I was like, OK, ‘I kind of like this,’” he said. “I tried a couple of handguns. Tried out an AR-15. Instantly fell in love with it. This is great. This is fun stuff. Then I saved my pennies up and went to the gun store and was like, Yeah, I’ll take that one on the wall. Bought it, and that’s how it started.”
The rifle was a Bushmaster AR-15. Jefferson shot it for about two months before he bought and sold a couple more assault rifles. Slowly, he began to see shooting as more than a hobby. He began to see it as a form of self-defense. That’s when he decided it was time to purchase a handgun. He didn’t spend a lot of time shopping around. He bought a Glock 19.
“I had to,” he said. “I literally live five minutes from the Glock factory. I can throw a rock into Smyrna. They’re like the Honda Civics of handguns. [The Glock is] not real flashy, but it works, it’s reliable, it’s got everything you need.”
Jefferson began practicing with the pistol almost immediately, knowing he was going to conceal-carry. But he wasn’t practicing to gain a handgun license. Georgia residents don’t have to have any firearm training, safety courses, or qualification to obtain a handgun license. “The turnaround—they tell you it will be thirty days,” he said, “but it was way shorter than thirty days. It took all of two weeks, to the day. You go to the probate court to fill the application out, take your photograph, write your check, and then you go home. Two weeks later it comes in the mail.”
Jefferson is becoming more proficient with firearms because he fears what might occur if he doesn’t. He recognizes that crime happens everywhere, and that its frequency depends as much upon geography as socioeconomic demographics.
“White people are victims of black criminals. Black people are victims of black criminals,” he says. “But there is also a history of black people being victims of racist white violence. And me living in a state where a lot of that has taken place in the past, it would just be irresponsible to not own a firearm, train with it, and prepare for a situation. I hope and pray it never happens to me or a loved one, but I don’t have the luxury of making that decision. The other guy gets a say. I need to be prepared if the other guy puts that say into action.”
He fears the implicit bias of white people—those who see us and think we want to hurt them.
I WAS SITTING at Barnes & Noble on a Sunday when I heard Sondra Stidham Holt’s name called from the coffee shop. I’d seen her walk in, but this was our first meeting, and I had only he
r Facebook profile picture as a way to identify her. I’d wanted to be sure it was her before speaking.
“Sondra?”
She cocked her head and smiled at me. “RJ, right?”
I showed her to my table and was about to sit in the chair facing the door when she stopped me.
“Do you mind?” She motioned to the chair I had chosen.
I shook my head. “Not at all.”
“You got muscles. You’ll be OK.”
This was a nod to a mutual understanding. We both lived in the same world—the same reality. But I am a man, and I do not worry about all forms of assault—a privilege she will never experience. Still, we both occupied a space where we do not always feel safe and must take precautions. Anybody could come through the front door of that bookstore and decide to make this day our worst ever.
I learned Sondra has held a concealed-carry license in Oklahoma since 2009. She carries a .22 pistol when she’s out running errands and a Glock 42 when she feels shit could get real. Her hair is twisted into beautiful dark dreadlocks on one side of her head, with the other side shaved. Her nails are painted copper and silver and laced with glitter. When I asked her if she was carrying a gun, she chastised herself.
“Today I’ve been kind of lazy because it’s Sunday,” she said. “And I shouldn’t be. Today is exactly the kind of day I should be more vigilant. Just because everybody just got out of church doesn’t mean they were in church hearing the sermon.” She carries her gun most days, always after dark; she never sits with her back to the door, and loves to tell stories.
“This Christian, you see I’m using air quotes around Christian,” Sondra said, “dude was like, Oh you carry a gun? You must be crazy. Please, you carrying a Bible for protection—instead of a gun. Who’s the crazy person here?” Sondra told another story about a woman contemplating carrying a gun, but only if it was a girly gun—pink-colored. This, Sondra could not abide. “Irks the shit out of me,” she said. “Like who’s gon’ stop because your gun is pink? ‘Oh, you got a pink gun. I’m not gonna hurt you.’ Who cares? Does it have bullets? Does it shoot? That’s the shit to care about.”
Sondra had watched as a coworker, a woman, at her job was continually sexually harassed by another coworker, a man. She watched as this man became so devious and physical with his harassment that Sondra feared for the woman and told her to get a gun. “I don’t think you have to be just like ‘rah-rah feminism’ to carry a gun,” she said. “I just think you should have it in case something happens. But [my coworker] felt like she couldn’t say anything. She felt too scared to say anything. I think knowing how to use a gun, knowing what it’s for, would’ve helped her feel safe telling that dude to quit it. I don’t feel like I’ll get sexually harassed less, but if a guy knows I might have a gun, he might not say anything at all.”
In 2001, only 6.6 percent of American women owned a handgun. That’s fewer than one in ten. But for every incident in which a woman used a handgun in self-defense in 1998, 101 women were murdered with a handgun. Just over a decade later, things had hardly changed for black women. In 2009, black women were murdered at more than twice the rate of white women. Today, black women are the fastest-growing demographic among concealed-carry handgun licensees. Though no group keeps track of gun sales according to race, Kevin Jones, the director of the Ohio chapter of NAAGA and the former owner of Urban Sports Limited, said he saw “about a three- to four-fold increase in African-Americans coming to his shop to buy firearms. Most of them are black women.”
Black women like Sondra are so fearful for their well-being that they have purchased guns. Sondra had a bad scare twenty years earlier when a Georgia Tech football player kicked the door of the apartment she shared with roommates. “We had a rule,” Sondra said. “If you ain’t in our apartment by 1 a.m., you ain’t coming in. I don’t care who you are.” The roommates all adhered to that rule. So when Sondra’s roommate’s ex-boyfriend knocked on the door “like nobody’s business, like he was the police or something,” they weren’t about to open it. He was mad that one of the women had broken up with him, felt he’d been cheated on, and his approach to illustrating his frustration left the roommates cowering in the back of the apartment. He kicked in the door, yelling and throwing things.
Sondra’s roommate tried talking with her ex, but he grew only louder, angrier. This led Sondra’s second roommate to retrieve a gun her father had given her. She brought it into the living room. It didn’t matter that the gun was not loaded. When the ex-boyfriend saw it, he immediately calmed. He even asked her not to shoot him and left quickly. They decided not to call the police because, despite the incident, they didn’t want to relive this violent experience.
“When my dad found out,” Sondra said, “he was like, We not playing this game. He was not thrilled about that at all.” She was twenty-four when he gave her the .22 pistol she still carries today. “It kind of made that light bulb turn on for us,” Sondra said. “We felt pretty secure where we were. But here’s this guy, a football player for Georgia Tech, breaking in, essentially, to hurt somebody. It woke us up. This dude kicked in the door, and we could’ve all been hurt.” She’s carried a gun most days for twenty-one years now, and she doesn’t see why other women don’t. “For all intents and purposes for me, you should. Because of threats. There’s subtle feminine threats that you get. There’s subtle political threats that you get. You should just be armed and know.”
NO ONE KEEPS statistics on gun sales by race. Firearms dealers across the country have, however, reported a rise in black folks buying guns. A 2017 Pew Research Center poll found 49 percent of white households, compared to 32 percent of black households, had one or more guns. The same poll found that 49 percent of all black Americans see the immediate threat of gun violence against them as a “very big” problem. Couple these polled opinions with the knowledge that 57 percent of black folks know someone who has been shot. It’s little wonder that a group like the National African American Gun Association took root and grew exponentially a mere three months after the 2016 election.
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You’re Worth More to Me, Asshole
HE WAS LOUD and arrogant, and he carried his sidearm in plain view while talking about the way things once were in his country, when it was apparently an idyllic if overpopulated Mayberry. So I’ll call him Barney Fife.
I was standing in Barney Fife’s apartment in the part of southwest Oklahoma City that rich white people tend to avoid when he launched into his soliloquy. There are more than 310 million guns in circulation in the United States—a gun for every man, woman, and child. Gun owners outnumber local, state, and federal law enforcement seventy-nine to one. All reasons why my about-to-be gun dealer, who was federally licensed and legal, was moaning about the flooded market. The market had forced him and his ilk to drop their prices, and it was beginning to hurt his bottom line. “What we need,” he said, “is another wacko with an assault rifle—that’ll send a run on.”
The insensitivity and hate of that statement hit me full-force. But even I know you don’t pick a fight with a man who has an AR-15 lying on his coffee table and a hand cannon strapped to his thigh, like Samuel L. Jackson in the only cop movie I like. Besides, I needed this man. I’d bought my Glock 17 online through a firearms forum with nothing but a debit card. That got me a sheet of paper that directed me to pick up the gun from a federally licensed dealer. Which is where Barney Fife came in. I signed my name, refused to shake his hand, and continued to wonder what I was missing about most gun owners’ view of the world. Why didn’t they believe the physics of what carrying a gun can and can’t save you from, or the statistics related to accid
ental and unjustified gun killings in our surreally gun-overwhelmed country? And why were they so much more likely to pull a gun on me than on someone who looked like them?
I HAD CONTRACTED to buy my Glock 17 because I needed it—or any pistol with a full-size magazine—to complete the requirements of becoming a Self Defense Act Instructor in the state of Oklahoma. The instructor course lasts at least sixteen hours and must be administered by a professional organization recognized by the Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training. The NRA is on the list. I decided to use the nation’s most powerful defender of the Second Amendment for my two days of instruction.
By this time, I had spent a lot of time learning to fire my Glock 26 with the kind of proficiency that garnered attention from onlookers at my local gun range—the same range where Waldo had trained me. I had a routine. I practiced with purpose, and I did not deviate from it. Not for the white men who spat at my feet as they went by my stall. Not for the man who faked shooting a jump shot at me as he went by. Not on the days when I felt I was practicing without improving. Most folks wouldn’t even mention that I was shooting well for a black guy, which has happened on four occasions as of this writing. Overt racism at my gun range, and every other gun range I have visited, isn’t common. I’ve found most people keep to themselves. Like I imagine most people do at peep shows. It’s just the supremely hateful and supremely ignorant who say such things.