If you want to help Black communities, empower them to defend themselves.

Some believe that the government needs to disarm Black people for their own good and the good of society because they can’t be trusted. 

Recently, after the dean of culture and dean of restorative justice at East High School were shot by a student with a ghost gun, a new mom group, Here4theKids, formed.  According to their website, they’re made up of White women who appropriate strategies of the Black civil rights movement to peacefully force the banning of guns because they “recognize that the Second Amendment was enacted for white supremacy, is anti-Black and needs to be abolished.”

Nothing says “democracy” like woke, White women suppressing Black gun rights.

This past legislative session Denver Democratic state Rep. Elisabeth Epps, a Black woman, attempted to usurp natural law by introducing the assault weapons ban bill HB23-1230. The bill prohibited a person from manufacturing, importing, purchasing, selling, offering to sell, or transferring ownership of assault weapons. 

During Epps’ opening comments she was emotional, crying while advocating for unconstitutional infringement on the right to bear arms and parroted historically bigoted rhetoric in order to impact public policy.  “It’s the guns, it’s the guns,” Epps repeatedly insisted as the reason for mass shootings and that Black communities would be safer unarmed.

I’m also a Black woman; the descendent of enslaved Africans. When we look back in history, we see how gun laws have routinely and systematically been used to deny Blacks armed protection. 

Gun ownership isn’t racist; it’s a reminder of equal rights. Gun laws were systemically racist by design and adversely targeted Black people even though America ratified the Second Amendment.  

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Perpetrators of gun violence typically have mental health issues and use handguns. A broad assault weapons ban wouldn’t stop perpetrators but simply would strip law-abiding gun owners of their right to bear arms.

“The best available evidence suggests that a small number of serial offenders commit the majority of violent crimes” said Amy Swearer, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, adding that “many of these serial offenders are already legally prohibited from possessing the firearms they use to perpetrate their crimes.” 

Before the Civil War ended, state “Slave Codes” prohibited slaves from owning guns. After the Emancipation and 13th Amendment, the government still prohibited Black gun ownership on the basis that Blacks were not citizens, and therefore didn’t have the same rights to bear arms.

Near the end of the 1800s, while Blacks were starting to become citizens, “Saturday Night Specials,” a colloquial term, restricted the purchase of expensive, military-grade firearms, mostly already owned by Whites, and refused to sell to Black people who could afford them. 

In the early 1900s, states started passing total bans on handgun sales, except to police officers and sheriffs, many of whom were members of the KKK. 

The 1911 Sullivan Law required prospective gun owners to obtain a permit from the local police, giving the officers final say in who could own a gun.

In 1956, after Martin Luther King Jr’s home was bombed, he petitioned the sheriff’s office for a conceal-carry permit but was denied because he was deemed “unsuitable.”

HB23-1230 was a replica of the systemically racist bills of the Mississippi and Louisiana Statutes of 1865, under which Blacks needed police approval to own guns unless in the military. They prohibited blacks, not in the military “and not licensed to do so by the board of police of his or her county” from keeping or carrying “fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition.”  

Modern gun laws may appear facially neutral, unlike explicitly racist Jim Crow laws, but they’ve been enforced in ways that disproportionately criminalize people of color.

What would the implications have been if HB23-1230 passed? It would have made me a criminal overnight; set a precedent for more gun laws resulting in racially disproportionate outcomes; perpetuated the unfair stigma that Black gun-owners are thugs and gang bangers, and prevented people from keeping a moral check on the tyrannical power of rulers.

Gun control has always been a means for Black suppression, even as far back as the antebellum period. But, gun ownership is not an anglo-American right. Any threat to equal freedom disproportionately threatens Black people’s peace of mind and pursuit of happiness. 

If politicians seek to end gun violence, denying the rights of Black citizens won’t do it.  Rather, they must tackle the root causes of all violence and hold criminals accountable while protecting freedoms and equal rights for all. 

Priscilla Rahn is the vice chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, an educator, small business entrepreneur and Douglas County planning commissioner.