XPost: alt.politics.liberalism, alt.politics.democrats, talk.politics.guns   
   XPost: alt.journalism   
   From: ramon@conexus.net   
      
   In article    
   governor.swill@gmail.com wrote:   
   >   
   > ...I get to hunt negroes and Democrats in Maryland.   
   >   
      
   While research shows that possessing a gun raises the risk of   
   violent death, some Black women are desperate for a way to feel   
   safer   
      
   WELCOME, Md. — A 16th week had passed with no arrest in the   
   murder of Patrice Parker’s son, another week in which she had   
   struggled through grief for him and fear for herself and her   
   surviving daughters.   
      
   It wasn’t just that the person who had turned a gun on 24-year-   
   old Markelle Morrow was still at large, but that so many other   
   armed criminals were as well.   
      
   Shootings were ravaging the nation’s capital, on track for its   
   highest number of homicides in two decades. In Prince George’s   
   County, where Parker lives, carjackings had more than quadrupled   
   since 2019.   
      
   But there was a place where she felt safe, and that was here, at   
   a remote property amid thick woods an hour’s drive south of her   
   home in District Heights, Md. And there was no time the 52-year-   
   old felt safer than when holding a weapon like the one her   
   friend Mark “Choppa” Manley now handed her: a 9mm pistol similar   
   to those that regularly ring out in neighborhoods experiencing   
   the worst of the region’s bloody summer.   
      
   “I’ve got some ammo for you,” Manley said, “when you’re ready.”   
      
   There was a time when Parker never would have been ready. During   
   a long career as a nursing aide she had cared for countless   
   shooting victims. Like many Black women in Southeast Washington   
   or just across the D.C. border in Prince George’s County, she’d   
   viewed guns for most of her life as the root of the violence   
   that had wrecked countless lives in her community.   
      
   That changed, paradoxically, after her son was shot to death in   
   a parking lot not far from her home. Exasperated with the police   
   response and in despair over the sheer number of weapons on the   
   streets, Parker decided there was only one way to protect what   
   remained of her family. And that was to pick up a gun herself.   
      
   “I always felt like you needed to take the guns off the street.   
   But the way things are now ...” Parker’s voice trailed off.   
      
   “I don’t feel safe anymore,” she said. “You can’t trust nobody.”   
      
   Across America, Black women are taking up arms in unprecedented   
   numbers. Research shows that first-time gun buyers since 2019   
   have been more likely to be Black and more likely to be female   
   than gun purchasers in previous years, a finding that aligns   
   with surveys of gun sellers.   
      
   Gun sales spiked across all demographic groups during the   
   coronavirus pandemic, and remained high through the protests   
   that followed the police murder of George Floyd, the attack on   
   the U.S. Capitol and other events that many saw as signs of a   
   nation in chaos. The National Rifle Association and other gun-   
   industry lobbyists have long exploited such fears to boost sales   
   of firearms and weaken the laws that restrict their use.   
      
   But Parker and others like her are part of a new chapter in the   
   long-running story of America’s relationship with firearms.   
   Scarred — sometimes literally — by the firsthand consequences of   
   gun violence and disenchanted with decades of urban gun-control   
   policies that they regard as largely ineffective, some Black   
   women in D.C. and other cities are embracing a view long   
   espoused by Second Amendment activists: that only guns will make   
   them safer.   
      
   It is a development that could upend America’s gun-rights   
   debate, traditionally seen as pitting largely White rural and   
   suburban firearms owners against city residents, many of them   
   Black, whose elected leaders have pursued some of the nation’s   
   strictest gun-control policies.   
      
   Nearly 3 in 4 U.S. gun owners are still White, according to a   
   study published by Harvard University researchers earlier this   
   year. And while gun ownership has long been common in rural   
   Black households, the surge of interest in firearms among urban   
   Black women profoundly alarms experts on gun violence, who point   
   to a large body of research demonstrating that gun possession is   
   correlated with a greater — not lesser — risk of violent death.   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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