"It's Our Right Too": Black American Firearm Owners and Legal Estrangement

• In Event: Exploring the Correlates of Public Opinion about Gun Control Policy

Abstract

Since 2020, Black Americans have made up a substantial and growing proportion of firearm purchasers, but most existing research situates this diverse population as either primarily victims of gun violence or as outliers in a primarily White rural gun culture. The reasons for owning a firearm vary substantially across social groups, but little is yet known about how or why differential racialization might differently shape decisions about whether and why a citizen might choose to purchase a firearm. Using Bell’s legal estrangement framework, we employed interviews and surveys to assess how experiences with injustice might uniquely shape the relationship of Black Americans to firearms- and do so distinctly across gender lines as well. We draw on more than seventy in-depth interviews and more than two thousand detailed nationally- representative survey responses to assess this pattern. Our analyses suggest that legal estrangement is a substantial force in motivating firearm ownership among Black Americans- representing a unique adaptive response to the racist failure of the US legal system. Implications for firearm and criminal justice policies are discussed.

Authors

• Tyrell Connor, Arnold Ventures

• Ryan LeCount, Hamline University