“Well, there was this car with like, four… um, youth guys,” a woman named Ruth added. “They weren’t white, Caucasian, they were… darker skinned, I guess. Dressed in really baggy [clothes]… I wish we had a gun with us.” For Stroud, examples of white people who carried guns to protect against racial others were particularly important because most of the racialized altercations never actually happened. Rather, white gun owners imagined these encounters based on anxieties about persons of color. In such stories, gun ownership became a defense of internalized notions of racial order as well as an
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