The fastest-growing population of gun buyers in America is African-Americans. Daunted by life in neighborhoods their politicians won’t keep safe, many blacks have decided to take their protection into their own hands. Jason Riley writes in The Wall Street Journal:
It’s well known that gun sales have surged in recent years, but less well known is that blacks have led the trend. Retailers in an online survey conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group, reported that they sold 58% more guns to black customers in the first half of 2020 than a year earlier, the highest increase for any ethnic group. Personal safety tops the list of why people decide to buy a firearm. In a 2021 Gallup survey, 88% of respondents said they own a gun “for protection against crime,” which is up from 67% in 2005.
Social conditions have convinced more Americans that they need a gun, yet the political left has spent little time reassessing woke policies that lead to such thinking. Violent crime has been rising. Homicides in major cities have reached levels not seen in three decades. Meanwhile, liberal policy makers treat criminals like victims and police officers like criminals. Antigun police units tasked with keeping illegal weapons off the streets have been disbanded. Felonies have been downgraded to misdemeanors, and misdemeanors go unpunished, which only emboldens miscreants. Low-income minorities feel the brunt of these so-called reforms because they are by far the most likely crime targets.
The same “defund the police” progressives who have spent most of the past decade undermining the ability of law enforcement to combat crime are now using sensational but statistically rare mass-shooting tragedies as a pretense for curtailing the ability of people in vulnerable communities to defend themselves. The president wants to ban “assault weapons,” raise the purchase age to 21, and expand background checks. There’s no evidence that any of this will address the day-in-day-out gun violence that has driven so many Americans to become first-time gun owners.
The question is whether more restrictions on ordinary Americans in a nation that already has more guns than people will reduce the number of lives lost. Most mass shooters in recent decades have been over 21. The assailants in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, passed background checks and purchased their weapons legally. And from 1994 to 2004, we had a federal assault-weapons ban in place. The reality is that most gun crimes don’t involve such weapons, and a RAND Corp. assessment of these efforts found “inconclusive evidence for the effect of assault weapon bans on mass shootings.”
The source of the problem is the failure or inability of the government to protect us. Common sense dictates that we do what is necessary to protect ourselves in the meantime. Only a fool or an ideologue could believe that the best response to people who commit crimes with guns is launching a holy war against people who respect gun laws.
Action Line: Democrats want to take law-abiding Americans’ guns away at the very same time one of their most dependable voting blocs is ramping up its gun ownership. There’s no way that will go over well. Prepare yourself and your family for survival, click here to sign up for my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, and get the head start on the preparedness you deserve.
