The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

Just as stand your ground was an affirmation of the Second Amendment’s right to self-defense, open carry laws were the companion piece for the right to bear arms—and proved to be equally lethal to Black Americans. The research project Mapping Police Violence has documented that between 2013 to 2019, with more than 1,900 deaths, Black Americans were killed by police “at three times the rate of white Americans … when adjusted for population.” In addition, they were more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to be unarmed when killed by law enforcement.132 Those data, coupled with the work of Stanford University researcher Jennifer Eberhardt, suggest that Black people are perceived as the universal threat.133 Her team “conducted studies where police and others, cued with an image of a black person, quickly deciphered very blurred images often associated with crime, such as a gun. White people see an African American, and they’re immediately looking for something illegal. They almost instantly see a threat.”134 As the studies on police killings of African Americans indicate, this is the case even when Blacks are unarmed. Thus, when African Americans openly carry a gun, although allowed by law, it raises exponentially the sense of danger about them and to them.