RAAFA: Training New Gun Owners and Overcoming the Stigma of Black Gun Ownership

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[Jasmine] Barksdale said fear kept her away from guns for most of her life, but joined RAAFA after learning about it from a friend. Now, she does community outreach for the group, dubbing herself a “2A person” — a “Second Amendment person.”

“Like basically most Black women,” Barksdale said, “I wasn’t raised in a home that was firearm-savvy.”

Barksdale said she was motivated to pick up a gun by a different kind of fear: Being a single mom of an 8-year-old daughter.

“I have a child in my home, and I want to be able to protect her,” Barksdale said. “I don’t want to have to wait for someone else to come and advocate for me or be able to protect my home. I need to be able to do that myself.”

Phillip Smith, founder of the 40,000-member National African American Gun Association, said Barksdale’s sentiment is common, particularly in light of the volatility of the last year.

“The big elephant in the room is the pandemic,” Smith said. “The pandemic was a game-changer because that made people that are even anti-gun give me a call and ask, ‘What gun do I need to buy? Because I think there might be mob violence. There might be a shortage of food. There might be a shortage of resources. I don’t know if people will want to come to our neighborhood, we will have lawlessness in our community.’”

Citing the long history of gun control laws in the United States that impinged the rights of African Americans to own guns, Smith said that Black people are still maligned for wanting access to firearms.

— James Brown in Black, Armed, and Aware 

23 COMMENTS

  1. Seeing Fascist antifa/SS terrorists burning and looting small businesses, many minority owned, scared a large segment of the POC community and they’ve tooled up as a result.

    The only comment miner49er ever made on ttag that I agree with is that fascism cannot be tolerated in a free nation. The antifa/SS and their corporate billionaire masters need to be removed from a civil society.

    • Agree.
      It won’t happen until Soros, his blood money, AND his band of satanic globalists get kicked to the curb.

      We have the best far left politicians that Soros $s can buy. 🤔

      • To squash your total ignorance about this very great humanitarian (something the greed monger far right are insanely jealous of). Tell me now how much money have greed monger Republicans ever given to such worthy causes? Answer: Of course zero.

        Wealth and philanthropy
        Further information on George Soros’s philanthropy: List of projects supported by George Soros

        George Soros speaks to the LSE alumni society in Malaysia.
        As of March 2020, Forbes magazine listed Soros as the 162nd richest person in the world, with a net worth of $8.3 billion.[276] He has also donated 64% of his original fortune, making him the most generous giver (when measured as a percentage of net worth), and distributed more than $15 billion through his Open Society Foundations (an international grantmaking network that supports advancing justice, education, public health and independent media).[13]

        Soros has been active as a philanthropist since the 1970s, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa,[117] and began funding dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain.

        Soros’s philanthropic funding includes efforts to promote non-violent democratization in the post-Soviet states. These efforts, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, occur primarily through the Open Society Foundations (originally Open Society Institute or OSI) and national Soros Foundations, which sometimes go under other names (such as the Stefan Batory Foundation in Poland). As of 2003, PBS estimated that he had given away a total of $4 billion.[83] The OSI says it has spent about $500 million annually in recent years.

        In 2003, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker wrote in the foreword of Soros’s book The Alchemy of Finance:

        George Soros has made his mark as an enormously successful speculator, wise enough to largely withdraw when still way ahead of the game. The bulk of his enormous winnings is now devoted to encouraging transitional and emerging nations to become “open societies”, open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce but—more important—tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behavior.[277]

        Time magazine in 2007 cited two specific projects—$100 million toward Internet infrastructure for regional Russian universities, and $50 million for the Millennium Promise to eradicate extreme poverty in Africa—noting that Soros had given $742 million to projects in the U.S., and given away a total of more than $7 billion.[278]

        Other notable projects have included aid to scientists and universities throughout central and eastern Europe, help to civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, and Transparency International. Soros also pledged an endowment of €420 million to the Central European University (CEU).

        According to National Review Online[279] the Open Society Institute gave $20,000 in September 2002 to the Defense Committee of Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who has defended controversial, poor, and often unpopular defendants in court and was sentenced to 2 1/3 years in prison for “providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy” via a press conference for a client. An OSI spokeswoman said “it appeared to us at that time that there was a right-to-counsel issue worthy of our support” but claimed later requests for support were declined.[citation needed]

        In September 2006, Soros pledged $50 million to the Millennium Promise, led by economist Jeffrey Sachs to provide educational, agricultural, and medical aid to help villages in Africa enduring poverty. The New York Times termed this endeavor a “departure” for Soros whose philanthropic focus had been on fostering democracy and good government, but Soros noted that most poverty resulted from bad governance.[280]

        Soros played a role in the peaceful transition from communism to democracy in Hungary (1984–89)[23] and provided a substantial endowment to Central European University in Budapest.[281] The Open Society Foundations has active programs in more than 60 countries around the world with total expenditures currently averaging approximately $600 million a year.[3][282]

        On October 17, 2017, it was announced that Soros had transferred $18 billion to the Open Society Foundations.[283]

        In October 2018, Soros donated $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation via the Wikimedia Endowment program.[284]

        In July 2020, Soros’s Foundations announced plans to give $220 million in grants for racial justice groups, criminal justice reform and civic engagement.[285]

        • TLDR. Were you paid by the word? No doubt portraying your patron in a positive light.

          You have even outdone your previous efforts at sesquipedalian loquaciousness.

        • In an old interview G Soros did for 60 minutes he openly admitted to tipping off the 3rd Reich to the locations of Jooz. Claimed if he didn’t do it, someone else would have. Easy to amass wealth when you’re trusted in a community, yet tipping off those exterminating the citizens of said community.
          He went so far as to state it was the HAPPIEST time of his life.
          No surprise you’re a Soros fan lil’d. 🤪

        • JC. dacian has praised hitler for his courage in past comments.

          He is a dedicated fascist pretending to be a socialist.

    • Exactly. Which is why the normal decent people that make up every minority and every majority should practice the rights given by the Constitution to protect the welfare of our families and our country.

  2. For those who are not familiar with the organization, RAAFA is the Rochester (NY) African American Firearms Association. I wish the author of this article had included the name somewhere in the article.

  3. Citing the long history of gun control laws in the United States that impinged the rights of African Americans to own guns, Smith said that Black people are still maligned for wanting access to firearms.

    The same long history of gun control laws that NY cites as positive reasons to enact even more control. Almost as if NY is run by a bunch of racists.

  4. There’s no stigma where I live. NW Indiana & Cook county has a myriad of legal gun owner’s who are “colored”…went shooting at Point Blank and there were black women shooting. Including my wife. Her mother always had a gun.
    Guess who helped get handguns & CC in Cook & ILL? I guess who have to print something…

  5. All sorts of colors criminally misuse firearms, bricks, bats, knives, vehicles, etc. That is a given and it is a given law abiding citizens have the means to defend themselves and use those means according to the law. That generally means to use deadly force with a firearm you’ll need to be cornered by violence and the only way out is to shoot your way out, etc. On the other hand the one and only rule a criminal has to play by is fear of getting caught. And the more determined ones do not fear that.

    Black Americans have been subjected to Gun Control throughout US History and it came primarily via the hands of the democRat Party in the North, South, East and West. Even common sense says Blacks escaping slavery were not handed a gun by the democRat Party when they reached NYC.

    • Just saw on the news fentanyl kills *90,000* a year and climbing, why don’t these fools try outlawing that, instead of guns?

  6. Any minority that wants a gun and decent gun training to go with it should be praised and encouraged by all races. Being able to responsibly handle a gun for defense of loved ones and country makes you a CITIZEN with rights, not a SERF to be pounded into the ground like an animal.

    • The group I shoot with always welcomes good people to come out and shoot with us.

      That is the ONLY requirement, being a GOOD person. We even supply the firearms and ammo for those who consider themselves “firearm curious”. Even a BBQ cookout afterwards on several occasions.

      All races, sexes, colors, political leanings, geographic origins………are ALL welcome.

  7. attention honorable black gun owners… the proof is in the pudding… work very hard to clean up the ghettos and And clean up your own communities… then the stigma will die on the vine…Then stop voting for A party that hates guns And blames a certain color of skin for all the worlds problems monolithically…There is more in the voting booth than the damn D lever…

  8. The video is great. It validates modern sporting rifles as legitimate self-defense tools. Ms. Barksdale gets it: “I don’t want to have to wait for someone to protect me or advocate for me. I need to do that for myself.” That’s the real power of gun ownership that terrifies the statists.

  9. She, and the thousands and thousands of other new, black gun owners, will continue to vote for anti-Second Amendment politicians.

  10. Whatever you believe, and whatever the candidate you vote for says, if you vote Democrat, you vote for the total ban on private held firearms. Period. This is what the Party wants, regardless of what the votes and the candidates say.

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