Should Every Black Adult Own a Gun?

This piece was originally published in January 2023, long before the recent election results were considered. It is as relevant now as before, if not more so. — William Spivey

I don’t own a gun. Until recently, I’d never tried to shoot one except for that one time when I could have killed myself as a little boy. Guns are dangerous and are meant to be taken seriously. Guns can also be used for self-defense. In this context, I write this article; about whether Black people need guns for self-defense. The enemy is real whether we choose to recognize it or not.

My subtitle refers to a possible race war. Some will see this as an exaggeration despite the number of people and groups actually trying to start one.

“I would like to make it crystal clear. I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed.” — Dylann Roof

When Dylann Roof walked into an Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church prayer meeting, sat and prayed with its members, and then killed nine people wounding another. His stated intention was to start a race war. He further believes that no death sentence will be carried out against him because white supremacists will save him. It may be true that Roof is suffering from mental deficiencies, but he is not alone and, unless you consider racism, a mental illness. Many allegedly sane white people wish for a race war as well.

In addition to Roof, multiple white supremacist groups have advocated for a race war. Kaleb Cole, a member of Atomwaffen, was arrested and had multiple guns seized while planning to start a race war in 2019. Some neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen and Feuerkrieg Division believe their whole purpose is to fuel a race war. An active-duty soldier at the Iron March in 2017 in Charlottesville (the last such march after the negative publicity) said the following:

“I’m friends with the police. Most of my revenue goes into equipment for myself and my group. I’m not the type of person to show up at rallies or brawls…. But in the instance where we have a RaHoWa [“Racial Holy War”] or some shit, I’m going to be a n — — r’s worst nightmare.”

A leak from a neo-Nazi website revealed hundreds of extremists, including Atomwaffen and Vanguard America members, including James Alex Fields, who drove his car into anti-racist protesters, killing Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017. Then-President Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides,” referring to the anti-racist protesters on both sides and the collection of neo-Nazis, skinheads, and Klan members stoking violence. When Black people consider getting guns, it’s important to note there are really people out to get us.

Would that it be only a few on the lunatic fringe wishing to start a race war? The fear of a race war and the intense desire to keep guns out of Black people’s hands has permeated throughout American history.

When James Madison wrote the bulk of the Constitution, he was confronted by Virginia lawmakers Patrick Henry and George Mason, who were concerned militias not be controlled by the federal government. They (being concerned owners of enslaved people) wanted to ensure states retained control of militias and quell slave revolts. The result was the Second Amendment which was never intended to include Black people but instead suppressed them. After every major uprising of enslaved people in American history, more laws were passed to keep guns from Black people, whether they were free or not. Black people were not meant to possess firearms but to fear them. I’m guessing Patrick Henry’s famous quote, “Give me liberty or give me death,” only applied to white people.

After the Civil War, when enslaved people were freed, one of the first actions Southern states, in particular, took was to pass different versions of the Black Codes. Forget about Jim Crow, which came over a decade later. The Black Codes were designed to replicate slavery. They found Black people subject to a criminal code designed just for them, leading to mass incarceration, for which the penalty could be sending them straight back to the plantation from which they were freed. One of the provisions was that Black people weren’t legally allowed to possess guns. The slave patrols that once kept the enslaved in check had evolved to enforce the Black Codes. Soon, they would become America’s police forces.

Several Black veterans of the Civil War had been given guns and didn’t readily give them up. Some of them went on to form some of these well-regulated militias so dear to the framers of the Constitution. When the war ended, the existing white militias created havoc, running roughshod over white and Black people to the point where the federal government briefly banned them. They eventually allowed them to reassemble, with some Black militias forming in Texas, South Carolina, and Arkansas. The Arkansas black militia helped rout the Ku Klux Klan, which began right after the war, and ran them back to Tennessee. The South Carolina Black militia didn’t fare well after white militias attacked them with better arms, including cannons. Many of the Black militiamen were captured and killed. Their leader, Dock Adams, managed to escape and was later interviewed after the ordeal.

“I could look right into my bedroom and sitting room window. I saw them taking down my pictures and breaking up the furniture. They took all my clothes, my mattresses and feather-bed and cut it in pieces, destroying everything I had. They took all my wife’s clothes and everything.

By that time they commenced getting very thick in the [town] square. I jumped over a little fence and went up in the postmaster’s house . . . Right on the street, there were over a thousand men. They had their headquarters there. Every time the party would bring a colored man that they had captured they would bring him to what they called the “dead-ring.” Every time they would come in General Butler would yell, “Good boys! Goddamnit! Turn your hounds and bring the last one in,” and they would ask, “Can you find that Dock Adams? We want to get him.” Some asked what kind of man I was and some would agree — “man with side-whiskers and a moustache.” One man said, “We’ll have him before day.” And I was standing right there looking at him through the blinds. That was between two and three o’clock. So finally they said, “Well we had better go to work and kill all the niggers we have. We won’t be able to find that son of a bitch.” They called them out one by one and would carry them off across the railroad, and stand them up there and shoot them. M.C. Butler was telling them what men to kill. They were shot, I guess, about four o’clock in the morning. The moon was shining very bright — about as bright as ever you seen it. I remained in the house until you could just discover day. I went out through the back way and got on the South Carolina Railroad and came to Aiken.

Q: When they were killing those colored men, was anything said about politics?

A: Yes, sir. You could hear it all the time. “By God! We will carry South Carolina now. About the time we kill four or five hundred men we will scare the rest.” Even before it begun you could hear, “We are going to redeem South Carolina today!” You could hear them singing it on the streets, “This is the beginning of the redemption of South Carolina.”

Jim Crow lasted in the South and the North until the mid-1960s with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. During the ninety years of Jim Crow, Black gun ownership was legal but often led to an excuse for the massacre of Black people. A lot has been in the news about the 100th Anniversary of the Black Wall Street massacre, where a large mob of white people murdered hundreds of Black people, destroying thirty-five blocks of the wealthiest Black-owned area in America and eventually taking much of the desirable land paying little or in most cases nothing. It started with the accusation that a long Black male accosted a white woman in an elevator. He was arrested, and when a white mob came to lynch him. They were met by armed Black citizens protecting him. The Black men were chased back to the Greenwood district that housed Black Wall Street. They had brought guns to a gunfight; the white mob retaliated with guns and planes dropping makeshift bombs.

The previous year in Ocoee, Florida. Two Black men tried to vote in the 1920 Presidential Election and were turned away. One of them was alleged to have had a shotgun in his car, enough to enrage a white mob who sought to lynch him. They sought him out at a friend’s home, where two white men were killed by those inside defending their home. Klansmen and police officers (often the same) were called from nearby Orlando and Winter Garden, and they killed hundreds of Black people while burning out the rest. Ocoee remained all-white for the next forty-one years. The land owned by Black people was taken, and the owners were paid little or nothing. Sound familiar?

“At the time that I visited Ocoee, the last colored family of Ocoee was leaving with their goods piled high on a motor truck with six colored children on top. White children stood around and jeered the Negroes who were leaving, threatening them with burning if they did not hurry up and get away. These children thought it a huge joke that some Negroes had been burned alive.”

Walter White — NAACP

Black people were legally allowed to own guns, but using one against a white person was generally met with a totally disproportionate response. You shoot one of mine, and we’ll wipe out your whole town. The fear of revolution made white people afraid of Black people with guns. Harriet Tubman had guns, and so did Nat Turner. Owners of enslaved people were always fearful of Black revolt, particularly after the successful Haitian Revolution, during which they gained freedom from France. There were over 270 revolts of enslaved people in the United States. Fears of another revolution arose with the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966.

Originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Panther’s first mission was patrolling Black neighborhoods and protecting their citizens from the police. They later expanded their mandate to feeding the poor, rejecting the idea that Black Americans be forced to serve in the Vietnam War. They sought to arm all African Americans and wanted reparations for enslavement.

“Being hungry is the hardest thing, & to this day I have prayers of gratitude for the Black Panthers, who made Breakfast for Children a thing that schools should do. We qualified for free lunch & breakfast, & without them I am almost sure we wouldn’t have made it out of childhood alive despite my hardworking parents.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

The idea of Black men and women with guns has always made America fearful. It responded in several ways, including degradation, infiltration, and execution. The Black Panther Party was equated with terrorists, which would also happen with the M.O.V.E. movement in Philadelphia. Some of the Panther’s leaders, like Fred Hampton, were executed by law enforcement. Police bombed the M.O.V.E. headquarters in Philadelphia. When all was said and done, eleven people were killed, including five children, and sixty homes were destroyed. The labeling of M.O.V.E. as terrorists was immediate, while the truth of that day is still coming to light.

The coordinated decimation of the Black Panther Party may have begun after they legally showed up on the steps of the California State Capitol Bldg. armed with guns. It caused an unlikely combination of parties; Governor Ronald Reagan, Democrats, Republicans, and the National Rifle Association (N.R.A.) to join forces and pass The Mulford Act was being debated at the Capitol at the time. The Panther’s showing up to protest with guns probably guaranteed its passage. The Act allowed anyone Black with a weapon to be arrested if officers thought they were violating the statute. It was used against Black Panther Party members, other Black people, and anyone of color who dared to arm themselves.

“I see no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons. Guns are a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” Ronald Reagan

Let’s skip to the present. Black men utilizing their Second Amendment right to be armed no safer today than in the past. In 2016, Philando Castile legally owned a gun. Philando was pulled over for the forty-sixth time by police, this time for allegedly looking like a robbery suspect because of his “wide-set nose.” He advised the arresting officer he had a gun he was licensed to carry and was then gunned down in front of his girlfriend and four-year-old daughter. The officer who killed Castile was found not guilty of second-degree murder and a couple of lesser charges. Given the response that Black people often receive when possessing a gun legally and for self-defense. Should all Black adults own a gun?

Before answering that question, there’s one more thing to consider. White people have been arming themselves since weapons were a thing. Often explicitly to protect themselves against the threat of Black people. In 2017, America had approximately 326 million people that owned 393 million firearms. More guns than people. Most, by far owned by white people. Every event that suggests guns or bullets may be harder to come by, white people rush to their local Walmart or gun shop to buy even more guns and ammo because you can never have enough.

Recently I fired a gun for the first time; my wife treated me to a trip to the firing range, which included a brief training session before being allowed to shoot. I observed the other people at the range co-located with a gun shop. White people were comparing weapons, marveling at the magazine’s capacity, and debating accuracy vs. precision. I noted the number of short people present, perhaps compensating for some perceived deficiency. Some people wore at least partial camouflage outfits and a few M.A.G.A. hats. Many looked precisely like the kind of people I would be concerned about walking around armed. If there ever is a race war, some say we’re already in one; white people are ready. They’re armed; half the Black population is compacted into close-knit urban locales. They can roll their militarized equipment to the federal government on the railroad tracks that split almost every Black community. I’m not asking whether white people would ever engage in genocide against Black people. My question is, how effectively could they? And the answer is scary.

So should every Black adult own a gun or several like some white friends and neighbors? Certainly not! In every race, some people have no business owning a firearm. People are unprepared to safeguard their guns from inquisitive children that might discover those weapons. One could make a case for keeping guns from violent felons if you didn’t consider how Black people are over-policed and over-charged for offenses. One of the goals of mass incarceration has been to keep Black people from voting; another could easily be to prevent gun ownership if that isn’t already the case.

I don’t own a gun, nor have I ever felt the need to. I’m a big guy and have always walked the streets feeling like I could protect myself. Now, I have no young children underfoot and realize that the odds are increasing that anyone I confront might be carrying a sidearm, negating any perceived advantage I might have. I am moving to a relatively rural area where the percentage of gun owners is higher, along with the whiteness of the population. I see confederate flags, M.A.G.A. hats, and gun racks on white pickup trucks. And I’m unarmed.

I’m ultimately unable to say whether every Black adult should own a gun. To say the day could never come when you might need to protect yourself from an intruder, a neighbor, or the police would be to ignore American history and what’s happening in the world. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are happening in Sudan, Myanmar, and recently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Northern Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Is the United States of America so principled that it could never be attempted here?

Gun ownership for a Black man in America is a double-edged sword. It may protect you, but it can also be an excuse to kill you. A white man with a gun in some circles is considered a patriot, and a Black man is regarded as a thug or at least a threat. For, I will soon be buying a gun for myself. I feel the odds have changed from where it was more likely in my household that a gun would harm one of its residents to where it would be used in protection against outsiders. I will keep going to the range to improve my proficiency because I don’t want to hit anything other than my target.

My preference would be to live where guns were few and laws strict. But that isn’t America, where anyone can get a gun, and using it against me might not carry a penalty. Black Americans would objectively be safer if more of us owned guns. Some will experience greater risk from white people, accidents, and criminals within the race as white people do. The odds of greater safety may be little more than the flip of a coin, yet I choose to control my destiny rather than let things happen.

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This post was previously published on AfroSapiophile.

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