TEASER: 148 - Guns: an American story (4.9.2021)

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After another mass shooting--this one in South Carolina, claiming the lives of five people, including two children under 10--the Biden administration is tightening restrictions on guns nationwide. Some of the new regulations seem like common sense to most Americans, but is there more to consider here?  

Gun ownership has risen sharply in the communities of color since the rise of the Trump administration. Circumventing the racist National Rifle Association, Black folks are starting their own organizations, most notably the National African American Gun Association, which was founded in Atlanta in 2015, boasts a membership of over 34,000 and is 60 percent women.   

This is especially notable when considered in tandem with the NRA’s waning membership and influence ever since the Las Vegas shooting that killed 60 people and wounded another 400. The NRA has a history of outsized influence in American politics, but is also pretty choosy about whose gun rights they are willing to champion.   

This is illustrated plainly in the story of when the Black Panthers entered the California Capitol in 1967 with guns of their own, legally (at the time). Race, unsurprisingly, is inextricably linked to the Second Amendment and the way Americans think about gun control.  

Finally, we touch on Santa Rosa, where a tent city with about 70 structures, showers, bathrooms and hand-washing stations set up in May of 2020 in an affluent park sparked lots of ire from neighbors when the idea was first proposed. But unlike some of our local leaders at the outset of the pandemic, the Santa Rosa City Council didn't flinch, opting to act and then educate angry/wealthy residents, rather than allow them to crush a good idea that would save lives.