I don't have any sort of data on hand at the moment, but I can definitely speak to what it feels like participating in these discussions on the left, and why at times they can feel really dismissive and incredibly patronizing to Black people.
I think, as with a lot of the things, when it comes to guns the right has benefitted from being so consistently terrible for so long, that people on the left have become desensitized to it, and even think their behavior is normal.
Sure, we acknowledge the right's cartoonish love of guns. We ridicule them for it. We make "that AR15 won't make your dick bigger!" jokes about it all the time. But, unless there's a mass shooting or insurrection at the top of the news cycle,
it does feel like even folks on the Left - from liberal to progressive - can't hold it in their heads for 5 minutes how really, truly
horrific it is that the right has such a fetishistic love of assault weaponry and are stockpiling it at time when they're more radicalized to violence than ever.
At a time when white supremacist organizations/militias exist in all 50 states and have infiltrated the police force in a lot of those states. At a time when the Department of Homeland Security labeled white supremacist violence as the biggest concern to national security.
But here's the thing: Black people
never lose sight of this. We can't. Because we have historically been on the receiving end of this violence. Just talk to regular schmegular Black folks and they'll tell you: it feels like Trump poured gasoline on something that was already there and building, and now we're one spark away from something truly terrible to the collective safety of Black people and minorities in this country. The purchasing of these guns is
fear-based. This is not a power fantasy. This isn't dick waving. This is America: those people
already have guns.
And so it can be incredibly frustrating when it feels like the left overlook and/or accepts the right's relationship to guns as a known quality, but the tut-tutting and pulling of stats comes out when Black people legally arm themselves against what feels like a growing tidal wave of white supremacist violence aimed square at us. It feels like you're asking Black people to willingly be sitting ducks. To be defenseless for the sake of your academic argument; for the sake of your unsupported belief that the worst won't come to pass.
And this is exactly why my stance has so far been, "I'm Black and I don't yet feel the urge to own a gun. But I'm not going to be the person chiding a Black person who feels the need to arm themselves, like I don't have eyes to see and ears to hear the bullshit."
