Black women seeing guns as protection as crime rises

TAYLOR, MICH. >> Valerie Rupert raised her right arm, slightly shaking and unsure as she aimed at the paper target representing a burglar, a robber or even a rapist.

The 67-year-old Detroit grandmother squeezed the trigger, the echo of her shot blending into the chorus of other blasts by other women off the small gun range walls.

“I was a little nervous, but after I shot a couple of times, I enjoyed it,” said Rupert, among 1,000 or so mostly Black women taking part in free weekend gun safety and shooting lessons at two Detroit-area ranges.

Black women like Rupert increasingly are considering gun ownership for personal protection, according to industry experts and gun rights advocates.

Fear of crime, especially as shootings and killings have risen in cities big and small, is one driver of the trend. But a new motivator is the display of public anger in the last 15 months beginning with confrontations in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis under the knee of former police Officer Derek Chauvin.

Worries about the anger over COVID-19-related restrictions and the outrage over the outcome of the presidential 2020 election, driven by lies, are contributors, too. About 8.5 million people in the U.S. bought their first gun in 2020, the National Shooting Sports Foundation said. The trade association for the firearms industry adds that gun purchases by Black men and Black women increased by more than 58% over the first six months of last year.

Gun ownership tends to increase when people lose faith in government and the police, said Daniel Webster, professor of American Health in Violence Prevention at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy.

“We’ve seen such an increase in white nationalist violence,” Webster said. “Some combination of the lack in faith in police protecting you and hate groups has motivated a lot of Black people to arm up.”

Black firearm owners still represent a relatively small portion of the gunowning population, with 9.3% of gun owners being Black men and 5.4% Black women. Nearly 56% of U.S. gun owners are White men. Over 16% are White women, the National Shooting Sports Foundation said.