CNN has a good piece today on “America’s new gun owners,” who, the network suggests, “aren’t who you’d think”:
Several times a week you can hear gunfire echoing from Brandi Joseph’s scenic Southern California property. A licensed firearms instructor and dealer, Joseph decided to open Fortune Firearms in December to serve a growing and rapidly changing clientele.
“There is a huge uptick in female owners,” Joseph said. “Women are getting trained; women are carrying… liberal and conservative.”
Proof of that change pulled up Joseph’s long, dusty driveway in the San Jacinto Valley just before 10 a.m. for a Saturday social, of sorts. A group of seven African American women stepped out of their cars seemingly eager to start their first firearms training session.
Some of these people, CNN notes, have been criticized by their friends for having chosen to exercise their rights:
Nguyen says his clients are mostly liberal and from all backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations. He prides himself on creating an inclusive student base.
“The more I educate those who are formally anti-gun the more they actually realize that there’s more nuance to it,” he said.
Both Mendez and Regalado now have their own guns and are working toward getting their concealed carry permits. But they avoid talking about their guns with friends, who they say are firmly anti-gun.
“They’re really not open to understanding,” Mendez said. Adding that she feels more comfortable discussing her same-sex relationship with friends than her guns. “I definitely am more closeted being a gun owner, for fear of retaliation.”
. . . but not, apparently, by right-leaning gun owners:
Both Mendez and Regalado at first worried about the type of people they encounter at the gun range, many of whom, they say, advertise their conservative politics in what they’re wearing or listening to.
“It’s mostly all men, mostly all white men, older men like 70s, 80s,” Mendez said. “Seeing people looking at us, and kind of just staring… It always makes us more uncomfortable. Because we’re like, ‘oh my God are they going to come and tell us, like, get out of here… you don’t belong here.’”
Instead, they’ve gotten a different reaction.
“They’re like, ‘Hey, you’re doing well, but can I show you something that might help you more?,” Mendez said.
Mendez says not only has it changed her impression of those individuals, but she also believes it’s given some a different perception of people like her.
“When I (came) back the next day, (one of the men) was like, ‘Hey! I saw your wife out there – she looks nice. Tell her I said ‘hi’.”
This has long been my experience. Since I moved to America, I’ve shot at ranges in twenty or so states, and everyone at each has always got on fine. The idea that non-white Americans are only just getting into shooting is a little bit of an overstatement — when I lived in Connecticut, I was a minority at the range at which I used to practice — but it is undoubtedly true that gun ownership has grown increasingly racially diverse, and that anti-gun progressives are annoyed by this. For years, gun-control activists have suggested that all it would take for them to get the strict regulations they covet is for “blacks/Muslims/Hispanics” to “start buying guns.” And, for years, this has been nothing more than projection. As CNN’s story illustrates, it’s not Second Amendment advocates who have an issue with non-whites owning guns; it’s the people who claim most loudly to champion diversity, but balk the minute that diversity leads to a political or ideological outcome that they personally happen to dislike.