Trends point to an interesting change in American gun ownership.
According to reports from NYMag’s The Cut, Black women are the fastest-growing group of gun owners in the country. The reason behind it is different than you prototypical gun owner is for self-defense.
“It makes me feel more secure,” Onnie Brown, 43, of Phoenix, Arizona, told The Cut.
The rise in gun ownership is complicated to add into hard numbers, but Black women do make up the majority of the 40,000 members of the National African American Gun Association.
Last September, The Philadelphia Tribune took their own look at the issue by digging into the numbers. Gun sales among Black men and women increased by 58 percent in the first six months of 2020, according to data compiled by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
The Tribune noted that crime is the prime mover of this growing trend in their piece, also fueled by the financial and emotional stress of the coronavirus. Also, the rising death toll when police brutality and violent white supremacists are constant concerns, interested gun owners are taking stock of measures to protect themselves and others.
“We’ve seen such an increase in white nationalist violence,” added Webster, who is also director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy.
A nationally representative survey conducted by a public health researcher at Harvard University also cited that Black women make up a minority of total gun ownership.
Ten percent of all gun owners were Black, and 37 percent were women, according to The Cut. But of the survey’s respondents who said they purchased a firearm for the first time between Jan. 2019 and Apr. 2021, 21 percent were Black and 48 percent were women.