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Are You Uncomfortable with an Armed Black Man?
If you are, then maybe you should be asking yourself: Why am I worried about armed black men?
After all, the vast majority of citizens of this country, of any color, are not violent criminals. When I visit our local gun range, I see that most of the customers are black. They believe in being able to defend themselves and their loved ones, and so they go to the range to become proficient with firearms. They are the least likely people to commit criminal violence with a firearm.
We already know that police are not the answer to every question. Police shot Philando Castile despite the fact that he was a legal gun owner. The very idea of a black man with a gun scared them. It wouldn’t scare them so much if we decided law-abiding black men should own guns, if when police hear of “black man with a gun” they think “lawful,” instead of “criminal.”
The Second Amendment should not only be for white people who jump through the hoops to obtain permits to purchase or carry a concealed weapon. The current bureaucratic system in Maryland leads to a big racial disparity in outcomes; it is simply easier for the average white person to obtain a Concealed Carry and Wear permit.
So we need to empower blacks in Baltimore City! Baltimore needs, now more than ever, an engaged citizenry that looks out for each other. And our gun-owning citizenry should reflect the full diversity of our city: every race and ethnicity.
The safest cities in America have the highest proportions of legal gun ownership. Maryland has issued all of 17,000 concealed carry permits. Florida has issued 1.7 MILLION such permits. Yet you are five times more likely to be murdered by gunshot in Maryland than in Florida. It may be counterintuitive, but it is clear that more citizens owning firearms leads to less crime.
If we just focus on the cities: Baltimore is ten times more dangerous than Miami-Dade (at close to 1 homicide per thousand people versus 1 homicide per 10k people). It is not as if Miami is a paragon of virtue compared to Baltimore. It is, after all, also a city awash in gangs and drugs. But Miami-Dade also has a high percentage of gun ownership among legal citizens, people who just want to mind their own business. Legal gun ownership deters criminals.
In Maryland, you have to be important to obtain a carry permit – one way to get a permit is to own a business. If you are “just” an employee, then you cannot obtain the right to carry a firearm. And so criminals know that an ordinary person, someone who is just trying to make ends meet, and just cashed in their paycheck, is a soft, unarmed, target.
So what we are doing, time and again, is making sure that criminals target those who are not so well off. Those who cannot afford to be robbed. The good citizens who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It is time to face the facts: gun control in Baltimore City has not worked. Comparing Baltimore to any city with higher proportions of legal gun ownership makes it clear that the opposite is true: stricter gun control leads to MORE crime, not less.
So I ask each reader to ask themselves this question: “Do I have a problem with arming law-abiding black men in Baltimore City?” If you do, you need to examine your own biases. You need to confront your privilege. I’d like to see every adult citizen of Baltimore City who has not been convicted of a violent felony – black or white – be encouraged to own and carry a firearm for the protection of themselves and their loved ones.
To me, gun ownership is true empowerment. If we really respect human rights, if we really distrust the police force, if we really believe that Black Lives Matter, then we should be making it as easy as possible for lawful black (and white) citizens of Baltimore to be armed.
[I wrote this as an Opinion piece for the Baltimore Sun. For some reason, they did not publish it. Racists.]
Published in General
When properly holstered, no.
I did a couple black guys with handguns tucked in the waistband of their day sweatpants, and that was a little nerve wracking. I don’t want to see someone shoot himself in the leg.
Think of it as evolution in action.
I don’t care about it happening; I just don’t want to be there when it does.
I’ve no problems with armed black men. I wrote a book about them. Back then it was the Democrats trying to keep them unarmed. Things really have not changed in 150 years.
As long as it is only them they hit, I don’t mind being there. I know first aid. You cannot learn from a mistake if you do not survive it.
“An armed society is a polite society” is every bit the cliche that “You can’t hug a child with nuclear arms” is. If having guns, all by itself, made cities orderly, then Harlem in the Seventies would have been more polite than an English tea party. It wasn’t.
Want to blame gun control? Relax, it hardly existed. I worked on Times Square. Most of the people in our movie theater came in armed, and fights often resulted in gunfire. The ushers, most of whom could have been linebackers, told me that many of them carried because otherwise they’d be held up in the streets. Grandma had a shooter, Grandpa had a shooter, little kids had them, most teenage boys did. It didn’t make for a polite society. There were a lot of dead bodies.
Polite societies are polite societies. It isn’t the guns that made them that way. I’ve seen other posts (not this one) that claim, “If only we had a way to make sure Blacks had enough guns! Think of the crime reduction they could do for themselves!” and wonder what planet they live on. I’ve seen the reality. I don’t have an answer or a solution. But I’ve seen one of the right’s most popular solutions in practice, and it doesn’t work.
How do you know this? How do you know that Castile wasn’t reaching for his gun, which I believe was the officers’ testimony?
Because that officer’s partner said Castile wasn’t.
I think you mean it was the officer’s perception, and that speaks to the comment about the officer’s preconception.
[Duplicate comment deleted]
Context matters. There are more important metrics than Black and Gun.
I think your odds of having this published in the Sun are pretty small.
I think John Lott had something to say on the subject.
As in Oath of Fealty?
Pretty much.
The question is not whether a city becomes orderly, but whether it becomes more orderly, and I don’t think there is a lot of evidence either way. The one “experiment” than I’m aware of was a small town in Georgia (I think) that passed a law that all legal adults were required to own guns. Crime dropped significantly. (But it was a small town, cause and effect, etc., so not scientific.) So we don’t really know a lot.
Kennesaw.
Depends on the situation. I shoot at the range regularly. Some are darker shades than white. I really do not think about peoples ancestry most of the time. So maybe they are American black or maybe they are from elsewhere. I am concerned with how they are dressed and how they handle their equipment.
Now the young black guy that walked into the gun shop looking for ammo on the way to a BLM rally wearing a black hoodie in a 80+ degree day and black jogging shorts with a weapon stuff down the front of them concerned me. Not sure how the elastic held the gun.
Context matters.
I keep a pistol in the console of my truck, so I always keep it locked unless it’s in our garage, or at the range we go to to shoot shotguns.
None of the RIGHT blacks in Baltimore have guns. But ALL of the WRONG ones do.
I think that your claim is false. Do you have a source for this?
Two members of our parish, both black, carry concealed pistols to Church every Sunday. One’s a Vietnam vet, the other an ex-prison guard. I am grateful to have them there.
Black or white, it’s how disciplined and orderly people behave that makes me comfortable or not.
And yes, that extends to how they dress and speak. I’d trust with a gun the black guy at the DMV getting people to sign petitions for gun rights over a certain one of my brothers.
But a guy with a pistol in his pants is not disciplined or thoughtful enough to earn my trust.
iWe, I thank you for this post. My answer is a big IF. If they are criminals carrying to not only portect themselves but to protect their honor or their turf, I would be very concerned. But if they are Americans, carrying with the intention to protect themselves from criminal assault, then I feel good about it.
Candace Owens had a man on, Maj Toure, founder of Black Guns Matter, and I would be very confident to walk side-by-side with him and any of his group. He works within the system and liaisons with the police as well.
It doesn’t when everyone has a gun, no one knows how to use them and no one is responsible. I supposed the caveats are a “legally, efficient, responsibly” (armed society is a polite society) and they’re just as important as the being armed part.
When there’s no value of life, it just becomes an all-out shootout.
OK, I’ll buy that. The three conditions you mention in your first sentence all applied in Manhattan in 1977. Legal, efficient, and responsible were the qualities that were missing. I think they’re a lot more important than the guns themselves.
My point wasn’t anti-gun; it was anti-fantasies that adding guns alone would make a positive difference.
Sure. Give a bunch of criminals weapons… you’re just gonna have more criminals with weapons.
I would have no problem. Many gun control laws were originally written for the specific purpose of keeping blacks unarmed, hence vulnerable to attack by mobs . . .
Have you ever seen second amendment “auditors” in action? In this area, they walk around, typically with a slung AR or AK (and usually in a residential area where they don’t live) in a attempt to get LEO’s to stop them. The next step is a refusal to talk to the LEO’s, sometimes involving lots of gratuitous insults and profanity. These guys are way more of a concern than someone based on their skin color (odd premise, BTW).
We had one trolling our city and county law enforcement for a couple of weeks until he realized he couldn’t get a rise out of them and went back to San Antonio. FWIW he was a scruffy looking Hispanic dude.
Do you remember the picture of the black guy sporting an AR15 at an Obama speech in Arizona, I think? The picture was cropped so you couldn’t tell he was black. Anyway, that guy being armed wouldn’t bother me in the least.