Speaker 1: Hey, Latino USA listener. So this is a sobering reality.
Speaker 2: We know it.
Speaker 1: All too many lives are lost to guns across the
Speaker 1: United States every single day. Mass shootings have devastated entire
Speaker 1: communities in El Paso, in Uvaldi, both of where I
Speaker 1: have been tragedies that have broken our collective hearts and
Speaker 1: that we've covered here at Latino USA. And the first
Speaker 1: question we usually ask is why why did this happen?
Speaker 1: But a new podcast called The Gun Machine from our
Speaker 1: colleagues at WBUR and The Trace, seeks to remind us
Speaker 1: what we usually forget, that in this country there are
Speaker 1: centuries of history of violence that got us here. Hosted
Speaker 1: by reporter Alan Stevens, The Gun Machine looks into the
Speaker 1: past to understand where we are now. For example, how
Speaker 1: early partnerships between mad scientists, gunsmiths, and a fledgling US
Speaker 1: gouvern that actually created the gun industry in the Northeast,
Speaker 1: and a look at how that industry has been partners
Speaker 1: with the government well ever since today. We share with
Speaker 1: you episode two where Alan talks to a historian about
Speaker 1: the racist roots of the Second Amendment and he travels
Speaker 1: down to Florida where he talks to black gun owners
Speaker 1: about why they carry looking at the link between our
Speaker 1: nation's fraud history and why it's so easy to sell
Speaker 1: us guns today. And a warning to our listeners. This
Speaker 1: episode includes some explicit language, so be prepared. Here's episode
Speaker 1: two of the Gun Machine.
Speaker 2: If there's one thing to know about America, it's that
Speaker 2: it's a land of revolution, and no one would know
Speaker 2: that better than a Virginia blacksmith with a plan, Gabriel Prosser.
Speaker 3: He and his brother had in fact created swords as
Speaker 3: part of their weapons in order to fight this rebellion,
Speaker 3: but they knew the swords.
Speaker 2: Gabriel and other early American arrivals had grown tired of
Speaker 2: working under the boot heel of an institution they had
Speaker 2: no stake in creating, no rights, a world where your
Speaker 2: life and livelihood were dictated by born status, not merit.
Speaker 2: So he spread the word to nearly a thousand like
Speaker 2: minded men with a promise.
Speaker 3: He said that all of those who believed in liberty
Speaker 3: would be able to be in this incredible space, would
Speaker 3: be able to enjoy this vibrant democracy.
Speaker 2: Gabriel's enemies are better armed, organized, and already suspicious of sedition.
Speaker 2: If he and his men were planning on getting out alive.
Speaker 2: His operation would have to be executed sharply, swiftly, perfectly.
Speaker 3: The plan was to have basically three divisions. One division
Speaker 3: would set a warehouse on fire as a diversionary tactic.
Speaker 3: The other division would go to the treasury and get
Speaker 3: the money in order to be able to pay for
Speaker 3: the insurgents. And the other division would go to the
Speaker 3: armory and get the guns and the ammunition that they
Speaker 3: needed in order to fight for their liberty.
Speaker 2: You see, Gabriel Prosser and his conspirators were some of
Speaker 2: America's first patriots, but you never know it because they
Speaker 2: were black. An enemy they were fighting was the United States,
Speaker 2: to be specific, the plantation. The gun machine looks a
Speaker 2: number of slave people accounted for nearly forty percent. Sure
Speaker 2: you episode two where Alan talks to Historian and his
Speaker 2: followers needed guns to take on the government. Gabe's rebellion
Speaker 2: would ultimately be dashed a freak storm on the even
Speaker 2: the attack shook the resolve of the men one more
Speaker 2: than the others. In particular, a conspirator named Pharaoh.
Speaker 3: He's sitting out there and the rain and the thunder
Speaker 3: is hitting and every time there was a crack of lightning,
Speaker 3: every time there was a burst of thunder. His nerves
Speaker 3: were shattering, and so he was like, Okay, we're gonna die.
Speaker 2: We're just gonna die.
Speaker 3: He's like, I'm going to be free, but I'm going
Speaker 3: to be free by telling my master about this plot.
Speaker 2: Altogether, some seventy men would be arrested, Gabriel his brother,
Speaker 2: and twenty three others would be made examples of and hanged.
Speaker 2: A few others would be sold to plantations out of state,
Speaker 2: and two would be granted freedom for being informants to
Speaker 2: the government. Many Americans may have heard of the Nat
Speaker 2: Turner Rebellion in Virginia or the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina.
Speaker 2: As a black journalist covering the history of American violence,
Speaker 2: I discovered that there were nearly three hundred slave revolts
Speaker 2: throughout the course of American history, most of which have
Speaker 2: been purposely erased. And the erasure of those stories is
Speaker 2: connected to the gun I'm Alan Stevens, and you're listening
Speaker 2: to The Gun Machine How America Was Forged by the
Speaker 2: Gun Industry, a podcast by WBR and The Trace. On
Speaker 2: the last episode of The Gun Machine we explain how
Speaker 2: America built its early gun industry. In this episode, we
Speaker 2: have to go back to the actual beginning and ask
Speaker 2: the why, what type of the sign necessitate the need
Speaker 2: for not just militaries to be armed but everyone all
Speaker 2: the time? Today we talk about America's foundation a fear
Speaker 2: and how the gun industry was built on top of it.
Speaker 2: Chapter two, Why we Carry It's the sixteen hundreds. In
Speaker 2: Central Europe, two things are about to happen that will
Speaker 2: change the world forever. The first is the invention of
Speaker 2: the flintlock musket. Before that, the systems that sparked the
Speaker 2: gunpowder and guns were finicky and wet or humid conditions.
Speaker 2: But the flintluck musket was reliable, battle tested and therefore
Speaker 2: primed to be exported outside of the mild European temperatures.
Speaker 2: And secondly, the Protestant Reformation had swept through Europe. The
Speaker 2: Catholic Church had long banned the sales of European guns
Speaker 2: to non Catholic nations, but Protestant churches didn't care the
Speaker 2: Catholics to abandon their policy, sparking a mass selloff. Europeans
Speaker 2: dumping guns into new countries, and it was in Africa
Speaker 2: where Europeans will find the closest and most worthwhile commodity
Speaker 2: for trade, human cargo. And just like that, the Triangle
Speaker 2: slave trade was born. The guns for bodies trade was
Speaker 2: so high that by the eighteenth century, records show gunpowder
Speaker 2: accounted for nearly forty percent of European imports to Africa.
Speaker 2: But the firearm wasn't just the lubricant of the slave
Speaker 2: trade abroad, it was also its guarantee right here in America.
Speaker 2: The invention of the firearm was a force multiplier. It
Speaker 2: was the gun that made colonial slavery even possible u
Speaker 2: see Berkeley history professor Brian Delay says the firearm now
Speaker 2: gave regular working colonists the ability to control those in bondage,
Speaker 2: even if they were outnumbered.
Speaker 4: Slavery was a fact in every single colony, and of
Speaker 4: course it was concentrated in the southern colonies. And slavery
Speaker 4: doesn't work without a weapons gap.
Speaker 2: By seventeen seventy five, before we were the United States
Speaker 2: of anything, twenty percent of America's colonial population was enslaved Africans,
Speaker 2: most of them living in the South, all of whom
Speaker 2: posed a potential security risk to established order.
Speaker 4: This required the able bodied, adult male population of white
Speaker 4: colonists to be armed at a far higher rate than, say,
Speaker 4: was the case among average working people in Great Britain
Speaker 4: at the time.
Speaker 2: So, if I was a black person living, say in
Speaker 2: seventeenth century America, how would I go about getting my
Speaker 2: hands on a gun? And what opportunities could that make
Speaker 2: for me?
Speaker 3: You would have the opportunity to be whipped thirty nine lash,
Speaker 3: that's the opportunity that you had.
Speaker 2: This is Carol Anderson, a professor of African American history
Speaker 2: at Emmer University, who has been investigating something you probably
Speaker 2: haven't heard about in school, the link between the Second
Speaker 2: Amendment an America's long history of slavery and racism. Let
Speaker 2: me go ahead and burst that bubble and hurt your
Speaker 2: feelings right now, most Americans subscribe to certain myths about
Speaker 2: the foundation of our country. We hold these truths to
Speaker 2: be self evident, that all men are created equal, But
Speaker 2: that was never the case. The South had gone all
Speaker 2: in on plantation slavery from the start, which brings me
Speaker 2: to the next myth that plantation slavery as a system
Speaker 2: just somehow worked, when in fact, the slave economy was
Speaker 2: a dangerous economy, large scale slave rebellions continuously rocked country,
Speaker 2: not to mention many other individual acts of defiance and
Speaker 2: violence in the face of enslavement, enslave people fighting back
Speaker 2: against their enslaver. I'm talking about stabbings, beheading shootings, real
Speaker 2: heavy metal shit. But it also meant that plantation societies
Speaker 2: had to function like prison societies. So if you had
Speaker 2: to imagine the South, imagine a network of omnipresent slave
Speaker 2: patrols on the horizons, contraband and shakedowns, and the constant
Speaker 2: looming suspicion that at any given time these plantation owners
Speaker 2: could all get their little slaving heads cut off. In
Speaker 2: sixteen eighty, Virginia prohibits black people from using a gun
Speaker 2: in self defense against white attackers, even if they are free.
Speaker 2: In sixteen eighty one, the Colony of New York bans
Speaker 2: black people from having any sort of weapons. Seventeen forty one,
Speaker 2: North Carolina's legislature implements state paid bounties for slaves and
Speaker 2: the right for patrollers to keep any guns and other
Speaker 2: contraband plus off the enslaved as personal rewards during shakedowns.
Speaker 2: And this was all before the Revolutionary War. Even took place.
Speaker 2: By the time the colonies began drafting the Constitution, there
Speaker 2: was no standing military, and the creation of one would
Speaker 2: be highly regulated. But at the same time, a number
Speaker 2: of Southern colonies were concerned with the more internal threat
Speaker 2: to their peculiar institution, so they demanded the Constitution include
Speaker 2: a security backstop to their enterprise, give us the ability
Speaker 2: to carry guns, quation surgencies, and support the web of
Speaker 2: slave patrols that had already been established.
Speaker 3: The bad history that we have had about the Second Amendment,
Speaker 3: how it gets cloaked in this nobility of the militia
Speaker 3: fighting off domestic tyranny and fighting off a foreign invasion,
Speaker 3: when in fact the militia really wasn't really good at
Speaker 3: I of those. What it was effective at was putting
Speaker 3: down slave revolts.
Speaker 2: Without the Second Amendment, many southern colonial forefathers refused to
Speaker 2: ratify the Constitution at all.
Speaker 3: The Second Amendment was the bribe to the South to
Speaker 3: not scuttle the Constitution of the United States and to
Speaker 3: therefore not scuttle the nation itself. And it was George
Speaker 3: Mason talking about, we will be left defenseless if this
Speaker 3: militia is put under the control of the Feds. We
Speaker 3: cannot trust the federal government to protect us from these
Speaker 3: black people.
Speaker 2: Now, I know what you're thinking, why don't I know
Speaker 2: about all this? And that is actually by design. First
Speaker 2: and foremost Americans still struggled to talk about the national
Speaker 2: embarrassment that was slavery. We don't like to think of
Speaker 2: our society as violent, and after the writing of the Constitution,
Speaker 2: it just gets more violent. Like I said earlier, there
Speaker 2: were nearly three hundreds slave uprisings from the country's inception
Speaker 2: to the end of the Civil War. And if you
Speaker 2: read abolitionist newspaper clippings from the Antebellum era, you hear
Speaker 2: of countless other tales of violence and threat escaped slaves
Speaker 2: using contraband revolvers to shoot it out with captors, enslave
Speaker 2: women bludgeting to debt their white assaulters, apparent killing their
Speaker 2: own child rather than return them to the horrors of servitude.
Speaker 2: But there is another reason we don't know about it,
Speaker 2: and that is a strategic one. Back in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: insurrection was bad for business. In the eighteen sixties, the
Speaker 2: economic value of the enslaved was worth four billion dollars
Speaker 2: and today's money that comes out closer to forty two trillion.
Speaker 2: That was more than all the banks, factories, and railroads
Speaker 2: in the US were worth at the time. Stories and
Speaker 2: plans of rebellion were inspired to black people, and the
Speaker 2: US government was aware of this and acutely aware of
Speaker 2: similar things going on international with successful slaver votes in
Speaker 2: places like Haiti. So there was a desire to keep
Speaker 2: these stories out of public view.
Speaker 3: The Haitian Revolution, I've got to say up front, scared
Speaker 3: the bejeebers out of the founding fathers. When you look
Speaker 3: at their correspondence, they're like, oh, my god, did you
Speaker 3: see what just happened in zent domain. Oh if those
Speaker 3: ideas come here, we are going to be in trouble.
Speaker 3: If black people believe that they can be free, that
Speaker 3: these ideas about liberty and justice apply to them, we
Speaker 3: are doomed.
Speaker 2: So these stories were erased from American history, But that
Speaker 2: fear of black people and the need to defend oneself
Speaker 2: from black people didn't go away after the end of
Speaker 2: slavery with the Civil War. In fact, in many regards,
Speaker 2: those fears got worse.
Speaker 5: When thinking about what makes America unique, you know, it's
Speaker 5: really not that much of a skip and jump to see, well,
Speaker 5: is there anything to do with our history of enslavement,
Speaker 5: our history of civil war in the ways that we've
Speaker 5: thought about who is safe and who is dangerous in
Speaker 5: our country.
Speaker 2: Nicholas Buttrick is a professor of social psychology at the
Speaker 2: University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has spent the last
Speaker 2: couple of years researching how and why America formed its
Speaker 2: current gun culture. What he found was a great deal
Speaker 2: of how we view the need to carry guns today
Speaker 2: stems from the attitudes formed in the wake of reconstruction.
Speaker 5: You have emancipation, and with emancipation comes the rise of
Speaker 5: black political power, and for the white Antebellum elite, it
Speaker 5: seems as if this is something that cannot stand West.
Speaker 1: You're wrong.
Speaker 6: I do want to escape too.
Speaker 7: I'm so very tired of it all. I've struggled for
Speaker 7: food and for money, the.
Speaker 8: Weed and holden piccottontil I can stand in another minute.
Speaker 7: I tell you asked that the South is dead. It's dead.
Speaker 5: The Yanks in the common din't gotten.
Speaker 9: There's nothing left for us.
Speaker 2: This line from Gone with the Wind may seem melodramatic
Speaker 2: to us, but for Scarlet o' hear and crew, it
Speaker 2: was an understatement. The American South during reconstruction was a hellhole.
Speaker 2: Akin to any modern post war occupational environment you'd see today.
Speaker 2: Law and order was nearly abandoned. Basic commodities were scarce.
Speaker 2: The only thing and ready supply where the newly free
Speaker 2: black Americans beginning to cement their burgeoning political power, and
Speaker 2: an avalanche of post war guns. White Americans in the
Speaker 2: South lose their goddamn minds at the new status quo.
Speaker 5: A lot of the speeches that these redeemers were using
Speaker 5: is that they seem to anchor a lot of sort
Speaker 5: of southernness, Southern masculinity, ways of restoring a Southern way
Speaker 5: of life in firearms specifically, and I think this makes
Speaker 5: a lot of sense that the South, while destroyed physically,
Speaker 5: was just totally a wash in firearms.
Speaker 2: Homicide rates were eighteen times higher in the South than
Speaker 2: they were in the North, and these guns were different.
Speaker 2: The Civil War was one of the first conflicts with
Speaker 2: mechanized production of guns. Soldiers return home with high quality
Speaker 2: weapons and lots of them.
Speaker 5: And you also have a really dangerous society. You have
Speaker 5: murder rates that are completely out of control and so
Speaker 5: you have a dangerous world with a lot of weapons,
Speaker 5: and it maybe makes sense that rich white Southerners might
Speaker 5: look to different sorts of ways of picking out how
Speaker 5: to suppress black power into rally white power. And one
Speaker 5: of the items we think that was really super salient
Speaker 5: were all these guns.
Speaker 2: White Southerners formed hundreds of so called rifle clubs, claiming
Speaker 2: they needed to defend themselves against black people, even though
Speaker 2: most of the murders at the time were white on white.
Speaker 2: The clubs were actually armed white supremacist groups meant to
Speaker 2: intimidate voters and diminish black political power. This started forming
Speaker 2: a modern gun identity and set forth ideas in people
Speaker 2: about what the government could and couldn't do. In the
Speaker 2: reconstruction South, state constitutions were being rewritten for the first
Speaker 2: time black people had political power. Many white Southerners didn't
Speaker 2: trust the government to represent their interest, to protect them
Speaker 2: and their sense of order, so they felt they had
Speaker 2: to take matters into their own hands, and guns were
Speaker 2: an important symbol. Buttrick's research makes one thing abundantly clear.
Speaker 2: The counties with the highest rates of enslavement before the
Speaker 2: Civil War are the places where today we see the
Speaker 2: highest rates of gun ownership and by following social media connections.
Speaker 2: Buttrick also found that as those same Americans have migrated
Speaker 2: around the country, so have those ideas about guns. The
Speaker 2: communities with the deepest social and cultural ties to slaveholding
Speaker 2: counties carry similar feelings about gun ownership in the present day.
Speaker 2: His research also suggests that while people think of guns
Speaker 2: as a defense against physical threats, they're also using them
Speaker 2: as a defense against psychological threats.
Speaker 5: Guns become a sort of a totem or a charm
Speaker 5: that help gun owners to feel their lives are more meaningful,
Speaker 5: that they have or control, and that they feel safer.
Speaker 2: It's also an identity that has fueled gun companies and
Speaker 2: gun sales.
Speaker 5: And so I think that the Civil War and its
Speaker 5: aftermaths set a template, but the template that we've then
Speaker 5: been building on as a society for quite a while.
Speaker 5: And so it's not just that these things happened once
Speaker 5: and ended. You know that there is quite a lot
Speaker 5: of advertising, quite a lot of marketing which is sort
Speaker 5: of reinforcing these beliefs that we've had about how guns work.
Speaker 2: And for one hundred years, white people become ingrained with
Speaker 2: the notion that firearms in this country equals autonomy, identity,
Speaker 2: and most of all power. And that's all fine and
Speaker 2: dandy until black people start getting guns too.
Speaker 10: The Black Panthers first made national news just a year
Speaker 10: ago when they entered the state.
Speaker 3: Capitol and Sacramento armed with rifles and pistols.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty seven, when the Panthers march on the
Speaker 2: Capitol legally carrying guns to protest a newly proposed gun
Speaker 2: control bill. Then Governor Ronald Reagan would respond by signing
Speaker 2: it into law, banning public carry without a permit. The
Speaker 2: NRA would approve it, would become the state's first major
Speaker 2: piece of legislation restricting the right to carry a gun,
Speaker 2: and would lead to a slew of gun control laws
Speaker 2: targeting black people nationwide. Then the following year, we'd really
Speaker 2: melt down.
Speaker 7: Martin Luther Kingey twenty minutes ago die.
Speaker 2: In the wake of King's death, There'd be over one
Speaker 2: hundred uprisings, and Congress would renew a once stalled effort
Speaker 2: to limit access to guns. They passed the nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: eight Gun Control Act, which lay the groundwork for modern
Speaker 2: laws around who is allowed to buy and sell firearms.
Speaker 2: But more importantly, just look at the here and now.
Speaker 2: As demographics change, we fragment. The Obama administration sparked record
Speaker 2: gun sales for the time, but it wouldn't hold a
Speaker 2: candle to twenty twenty. If COVID had us locked. The
Speaker 2: murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed would
Speaker 2: get us absolutely loaded.
Speaker 7: These are not acts full protests.
Speaker 10: These are acts of domestic durrah arresting. One person shot
Speaker 10: and killed at a Black Lives Matter protest an Austin Tech.
Speaker 4: When the Proud Boys group showed up, a confrontation caused
Speaker 4: a violent street fight to break out. Police ordered the
Speaker 4: crowds to disperse, and they also did.
Speaker 2: Americans would buy over forty million guns and twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: that's more guns than the entire population of Canada. Five
Speaker 2: million of those Americans would be grabbing a piece for
Speaker 2: the first time, and it would pour billions into the
Speaker 2: pockets of the gun industry. I would watch in real
Speaker 2: time as my beat as a gun reporter went from
Speaker 2: niche specialty to sitting front row to the largest wave
Speaker 2: of gun buying and recorded American history. How's that for
Speaker 2: job security? And it's not like it's an undercurrent that
Speaker 2: gun culture hasn't been afraid to tap into. Make them protest,
Speaker 2: make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia,
Speaker 2: to smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and areas.
Speaker 2: In that ad, the NRA calls racial justice protests madness
Speaker 2: and calls on Americans to fight them with what they
Speaker 2: call a clinched fist of truth. Rifle producer Daniel Defense
Speaker 2: ended up in Congress last year where lawmakers grilled them
Speaker 2: on using extremist iconography in their ads.
Speaker 5: That's a fall knot, and it's a symbol that has
Speaker 5: been increasingly embraced by white supremacists, But.
Speaker 2: It doesn't have to be that explicit. I've always been
Speaker 2: a gun nerd and growing up I'd cringe at the
Speaker 2: number of times I'd come across Confederate flags, Nazi war gear,
Speaker 2: end or straight up disdain of anything not quite American.
Speaker 2: It's this shadow that no matter how far I go
Speaker 2: into the community, is still always there. And don't get
Speaker 2: me wrong, I'm not trying to say that everyone who
Speaker 2: is buying a gun is doing so because they are racist.
Speaker 2: More so that when your country is founded on a
Speaker 2: fundamental fear of the person next door. Carrying a gun
Speaker 2: is a lot more palatable than not carrying one. But
Speaker 2: if gun ownership and the gun industry was built on whiteness,
Speaker 2: what does it mean to be a black gun owner?
Speaker 2: Now we'll find out in a minute.
Speaker 9: Have you heard that?
Speaker 11: Yeah, that was a gator?
Speaker 6: Did not hear that?
Speaker 2: That's pretty grace tatter. And this is the Bunker Club.
Speaker 2: It's a field in Claremont, Florida where hundreds of gun
Speaker 2: enthusiasts as symbol in the swamp like humidity to do
Speaker 2: one thing, play with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth
Speaker 2: of high powered weaponry. And we're gonna play two. It's
Speaker 2: asking me, am, I currently on probation. No, have ever
Speaker 2: been ampudicated as a mentally defective or committed and meant
Speaker 2: to a mental institution. No under influenced.
Speaker 11: Alcohol or drugs or anything negative issued or restraining order,
Speaker 11: Domestic Violence Act, borrowing. Now, have you ever handled a handgun?
Speaker 2: This is pew Party two.
Speaker 11: Yes, you ever handled a rifle or shotgun?
Speaker 2: Yes? Click here to sign. It's a black led shooting
Speaker 2: event and it's the second time it's being held in
Speaker 2: as many years. It's a playground of burns, tires, and targets.
Speaker 9: Have I ever handled a handgun? No, rifler shotgun? No,
Speaker 9: I think I'm the only person here. You can probably answer
Speaker 9: notableth those questions.
Speaker 2: P Party two is an event created by j Jenkins
Speaker 2: Akaj the Shooter, a self described gun tuber, a firearms
Speaker 2: social media influencer.
Speaker 8: Do you Sementein has consistently lost? So I'm gonna get
Speaker 8: a block seventeen A here start, I'm gonna let a
Speaker 8: few rounds off.
Speaker 2: Jay's a businessman, one of the few black people in
Speaker 2: the country who carries a coveted FFL sought three, a
Speaker 2: federal license that allows him to develop and sell things
Speaker 2: like suppressors and automatic weapons. These events are about building
Speaker 2: his brand, where he invites regular people, particularly black people,
Speaker 2: so they can do two things, meet face to face
Speaker 2: with the cutting edge companies in the gun industry. Plus
Speaker 2: they get a chance to handle some iconic and advanced weaponry.
Speaker 2: Oh god, that was tight. That was a P ninety
Speaker 2: over there, so look at it. It's it's kind of
Speaker 2: like a sci fi looking gun, has this crazy magazine
Speaker 2: it fits on top, but a pretty much fast rate
Speaker 2: of fire. So you know, again, these are all you know,
Speaker 2: movie guns, things that like high level militant like you know,
Speaker 2: things that are in catalogs that most people will never
Speaker 2: be able to touch. Are you over my shoulder? Get this?
Speaker 2: When we run out, it's gonna make this awesome sound.
Speaker 2: And that was the sound. Did you go if you
Speaker 2: can't tell? I actually love guns, and I always have.
Speaker 2: I'm black, but more specifically, I'm biracial. I was introduced
Speaker 2: to guns at a young age by my dad, a
Speaker 2: white man from Appalachia, and I remember the stairs I
Speaker 2: get growing up going to gun shows down south in Texas,
Speaker 2: the state and offish gunshop owners, the range masters, who
Speaker 2: with the sheer glance would remind me that no matter
Speaker 2: who I was or how trained I was, I was
Speaker 2: there as a guest. So for me, Pew Party is different.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 2: It's an eccentric assortment of the familiar but the unfamiliar.
Speaker 2: It's the most black people I've ever seen at a
Speaker 2: shooting event, and therefore probably the most comfortable I've ever
Speaker 2: been in such a space. I mean, like you hear
Speaker 2: the hammer drop on this thing. There are things you'd
Speaker 2: never see at a gun range, like a DJ and
Speaker 2: a Caribbean food truck and all day, a few three
Speaker 2: lines became very clear. First, almost every black person we
Speaker 2: spoke with clearly understood what it means to be black
Speaker 2: and all the pitfalls that accompany it. And their response
Speaker 2: to that reality was name that their life was in
Speaker 2: their own hands.
Speaker 12: One as a black person in this country, as well
Speaker 12: as a woman in this country, it's very important that
Speaker 12: we be able to protect ourselves with the best tools
Speaker 12: Ted horere available.
Speaker 6: My self protection is serious.
Speaker 13: How about take advantage of your second Amendment right and
Speaker 13: do what you need to do to protect you and
Speaker 13: your family.
Speaker 2: I want to protect me in mind. Secondly, that crazy
Speaker 2: year of twenty twenty where there was open white supremacy,
Speaker 2: government failure in COVID nineteen and the fallout of George Floyd, Well,
Speaker 2: black people saw it too, and we flocked to guns.
Speaker 2: Here's Thomas Lyles, a Navy vet and firearms instructor.
Speaker 6: When Trump was in office, that's when we saw the
Speaker 6: largest spike of black gun ownership, and so a lot
Speaker 6: of black people during that time they felt as if
Speaker 6: the government, the police, nobody was going to help us
Speaker 6: or protect us, and so it was on us we
Speaker 6: had to protect ourselves.
Speaker 2: When he talks to us, he is wearing a military
Speaker 2: chest ring adorned with bits of African can Take prey,
Speaker 2: and it's carrying thousands of dollars of military great hardware.
Speaker 2: This is my first time meeting him in person, but
Speaker 2: I'm familiar with his social media. One finger puts this
Speaker 2: live right, so I like that. So I think it
Speaker 2: might be a good recommendation for female shooters. This training
Speaker 2: isn't to put holes in paper, but winning gunfights.
Speaker 6: And some of my family members I talked to the
Speaker 6: CCW class because during that time, when Kobe was happening,
Speaker 6: we had all the protests going on, the country seemed
Speaker 6: very unbalanced, right, It's very uncertain, And so even selling
Speaker 6: my family years before that, like I don't need a gun.
Speaker 6: I've been alive forty years and nothing's ever happened. But
Speaker 6: during those that time and no alson, I was getting
Speaker 6: these phone calls, Hey, cousin, nephew, when can you come
Speaker 6: over and teach me a class? And now they're in
Speaker 6: the guns. My uncle's in the guns, my cousin's in
Speaker 6: the guns. He's buying rifles, building rifles, buying pistols.
Speaker 2: In fact, according to the National Opinion Research Center at
Speaker 2: the University of Chicago. Sixty nine percent of people who
Speaker 2: bought their first gun during the pandemic were people of color.
Speaker 2: And if you looked at America through a thousand foot lens,
Speaker 2: it kind of makes sense. Black people are some of
Speaker 2: those most victimized in the country and always have been.
Speaker 2: We have police systems that hurt more than help, where
Speaker 2: black people are five times more likely to be arrested
Speaker 2: than whites and three times is likely to be killed
Speaker 2: during a police encounter. And with this long pattern of
Speaker 2: isolation and victimization, is it really a surprise that more
Speaker 2: black people are buying guns too? And how does the
Speaker 2: industry react to this backwards af As quick as the
Speaker 2: NRA is to savage Black Lives Matter protests to rally
Speaker 2: their base and defense of the gun industry, they're also
Speaker 2: quick to point out that often laws controlling gun ownership
Speaker 2: have been racist. Some of the messaging in recent years
Speaker 2: has been come on over, black customers, We're happy to
Speaker 2: have you. But that same organization collectively shrugs at the
Speaker 2: death of legal gun owners, like when police outside Saint
Speaker 2: Paul killed Filando Castile during a traffic stop. It rallies
Speaker 2: for more aggressive policing and backs racist politicians. It's this
Speaker 2: worldview that contributes to the reality that many of the
Speaker 2: PEW Parties participants existing the odd looks and stares at
Speaker 2: gun ranges, the distinct feeling that everyone's not going to
Speaker 2: light them or what they represent. Every black male we
Speaker 2: interviewed was acutely aware of toxic images portrayed of black
Speaker 2: men with guns, which is why Jay the Shooter says
Speaker 2: he hosts events like these. You said one thing about
Speaker 2: you know, and I think this is crazy that I
Speaker 2: got to revisit, But you said that when it comes
Speaker 2: to firearms, that black people have really been a victim
Speaker 2: of poor marketing. Yes, what has that marketing been and
Speaker 2: who has put that marketing out there?
Speaker 8: Well, you know, be honest. Let's let's take some accountability here, right.
Speaker 8: We have to stop conducting the acts that put ourselves
Speaker 8: in a negative life. Let's start there. Let's start with
Speaker 8: first accountability. I believe in black accountability first, and then
Speaker 8: we can start working on the values and everything else
Speaker 8: that we need to do to really clean up a
Speaker 8: lot of the negative images that are being perceived and
Speaker 8: promoted and projected on us.
Speaker 9: But a lot of times. So like some of the
Speaker 9: racist anti black images, like gun companies not all. I'm
Speaker 9: not saying the industry isn't a monolith, but gun companies
Speaker 9: have made a lot of money off of off of
Speaker 9: making people.
Speaker 2: Afraid of black people.
Speaker 9: Yeah, how does that? How do you fit into how
Speaker 9: do you deal with that?
Speaker 10: Right?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 8: Look, at the end of the day, every every company
Speaker 8: has their business model. We have to see it for
Speaker 8: what it is, right and not be subject to it. Yeah,
Speaker 8: the fear mongering is there. It is there. I see it,
Speaker 8: but I choose not to look at that because my
Speaker 8: mission is not to combat that. My mission is to
Speaker 8: push legitimacy when it comes to African Americans and incubating
Speaker 8: consumers to merchants. That's my mission. I can't stop what
Speaker 8: I'm doing to go look at what they're doing. Like,
Speaker 8: we know it's there. But how do I combat that
Speaker 8: is by throwing advance and bringing more community awareness to
Speaker 8: what it is. How many times did you pass by
Speaker 8: somebody today and you saw first time shooters shooting suppress,
Speaker 8: first time shooting shooter, shoot machine gun, first time hands
Speaker 8: on with this platform from this company. That's my mission.
Speaker 8: I focus on that I can. Would I be able
Speaker 8: to combat what they're doing. No, But I'm putting good
Speaker 8: media in good press, and I'm putting my own marketing
Speaker 8: out there that I can control. So instead of send
Speaker 8: back and complaining about what they're doing with their targeted
Speaker 8: marketing when it comes to the black community, I also
Speaker 8: have to target my community and put the positive messages
Speaker 8: out there. That's how I combat what they're doing.
Speaker 2: Essentially, it's a form of exposure therapy, and Jay wasn't
Speaker 2: alone in his sentiments of trying to take the fear
Speaker 2: out of the image of a black man carrying a
Speaker 2: gun in the broader American consciousness, and things like this
Speaker 2: event and training seminars and social media were ways for
Speaker 2: them to do it. When it comes to the broader
Speaker 2: gun industry and how they market. A lot of the
Speaker 2: attitude was not too dissimilar from the modit if you
Speaker 2: can't beat them, join them, but perhaps with the caveat
Speaker 2: to change them from within. Throughout the day, though, we
Speaker 2: had plenty of conversations about self defense, about the power
Speaker 2: of black dollars, and it's easy to get lost in
Speaker 2: the money to be had in this industry. But a
Speaker 2: woman at the event named Crystal Harper reminded us of
Speaker 2: another reality that Black people are also the most victimized
Speaker 2: by firearms.
Speaker 12: There's a lot of trauma surrounding firearms within our community
Speaker 12: that just needs to be dealt with in addition to
Speaker 12: lack of knowledge, lack of history. But we don't talk
Speaker 12: about that trauma.
Speaker 2: And we don't talk about it. Gun violence and all
Speaker 2: forms has increased sharply for Black Americans in recent years.
Speaker 2: Black people now experience twelve times the gun homicides, eighteen
Speaker 2: times the amount of shooting injuries, and nearly three times
Speaker 2: the fatal police shootings of their white counterparts. The Wanda Akosua,
Speaker 2: a firearms trainer, says she sees the consequences of those statistics.
Speaker 13: It happens a lot, you know, especially in certain areas.
Speaker 13: I know, I get a nice percentage of my students
Speaker 13: that do have trauma. Actually have one girl who broke
Speaker 13: down like anxiety, full anxiety attack on the range. But
Speaker 13: it's just a matter of kind of coming at it
Speaker 13: from behind and being able to relate to them because
Speaker 13: I'm able to relate because I've also been in that situation.
Speaker 2: And many black people can relate. Our community is tight knit.
Speaker 2: Although we only account for about thirteen percent of the population,
Speaker 2: we absorb a disproportionate amount of America's gun violence. So
Speaker 2: this means that seventy one percent of Black adults know
Speaker 2: someone who's been injured or killed by gun in their lifetime.
Speaker 2: It's a violence even I've tasted myself.
Speaker 13: After you've experienced trauma, there is I think I believe
Speaker 13: there's a point in time where you have to say,
Speaker 13: I am not going to be a victim to this trauma,
Speaker 13: and I have to take measures into my own hands
Speaker 13: to be able to heal from this trauma from the
Speaker 13: inside out, going inward in healing and starting that process.
Speaker 13: But you have to be the one to start that
Speaker 13: healing process. So at the end of the day, I
Speaker 13: think you are responsible for it. In the perfect world,
Speaker 13: we don't want anyone, you know, of course the person
Speaker 13: that's given the trauma, but usually a person that's presenting trauma,
Speaker 13: they don't care about anyone at all. You know, they
Speaker 13: don't care. So when they don't care, you have to
Speaker 13: care about yourself, you know. And I think that's the
Speaker 13: ultimate goal, is being able to self love, love yourself,
Speaker 13: respect yourself enough to come out of that dark space
Speaker 13: and train.
Speaker 2: For me as a reporter and a black gun owner,
Speaker 2: I'm always driven to this space, this fundamental conflict because
Speaker 2: on one side, the gun industry and the Second Amendment
Speaker 2: community needs to diversify to survive. But on the other
Speaker 2: the only way it can do so may me facing
Speaker 2: down its racist past and a latent fear is that
Speaker 2: fuel the industry, and with all the guns in the world,
Speaker 2: that prospect is still the scariest. On the next episode
Speaker 2: of The Gun Machine, we meet the man who wrote
Speaker 2: the playbook for a successful gun company.
Speaker 10: He was somebody who I would say had enormous charisma
Speaker 10: an incredible drive, but as I say, I wouldn't trust him.
Speaker 2: So after America secured its freedom and used its weapons
Speaker 2: to secure its enslave workforce, what next, Well, it's time
Speaker 2: to expand, and with that expands The gun Machine. The
Speaker 2: gun Machine is production of WBR in partnership with The Trace.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Alon Stevens. If you want more on
Speaker 2: this or any of our other episodes, you should visit
Speaker 2: the Trace dot org Slash gun Machine or wr dot
Speaker 2: org Slash gun Machine. If you feel like we are
Speaker 2: telling an important story, review the show on your podcast
Speaker 2: app and fill out the Gun Machine survey at WR
Speaker 2: dot org slash survey. You can sign up for the
Speaker 2: Traces newsletter to find more on this reporting at the
Speaker 2: Trace dot org. Our producer who always has My six
Speaker 2: is wr's Grace Tattered. Our editing fellow from The Trace
Speaker 2: is Aja Annick. Orchestrating our bat drops is sound designer
Speaker 2: Emily Jankowski. Our production manager is Paul Viks. Our editors
Speaker 2: are Kevin Sullivan and WBR podcast executive producer Ben Brock Johnson.
Speaker 2: Additional editing from Miles Corman. Our WR Managing Producer is
Speaker 2: Samata Joshi, and our Engagement editor at The Trace is
Speaker 2: Gracey McKenzie, Audio engineering from Tim Felton, and our artwork
Speaker 2: is by Diego Maichong. Support for The Gun Machine comes
Speaker 2: from the Joyce Foundation, a nonpartisan philanthropy that invests in
Speaker 2: racial equity and economic mobility in the Great Lakes region.
Speaker 2: For more than twenty five years, Joyce has supported research, education,
Speaker 2: and policy solutions to reduce gun violence and make community safer.
Speaker 2: To learn more, go to joycefdn dot org. Additional funding
Speaker 2: provided by the Candida Fund