Do black Americas stand to lose the most with more gun control?

 Here is Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal on black americans and guns.

JR is on target.

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“The issue we face is one of conscience and common sense.” So said Joe Biden last week in a prime-time plea for more Second Amendment restrictions. The president is right on both counts, just not in the way that he and other gun-control enthusiasts imagine.

Voters have noticed that cities where shootings occur almost daily also have some of the strictest gun laws. Using common sense, they’ve concluded that more gun-control legislation probably isn’t the solution because criminals by definition don’t respect laws. Many of the same people likewise find it unconscionable that elected officials would make it more difficult for law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods to arm themselves for protection.

Someone might remind Mr. Biden that the past two landmark Supreme Court rulings on gun control were fueled by black plaintiffs who simply wanted to defend their homes and their families. Moreover, they hailed from cities controlled by liberals who have done an extraordinarily bad job of protecting low-income minorities from criminals. In a 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, the court affirmed that the right to bear arms is an individual right and that you don’t need to be part of a militia to exercise it. One of the initial plaintiffs was Shelly Parker, a black computer-software designer who decided to challenge the district’s handgun ban in court after a 7-foot-tall neighborhood drug dealer tried to break into her home one evening and threatened to kill her. “What I want is simply to be able to own a handgun in my home, in the confines of the walls of my home—nothing else,” she told National Public Radio.

Two years later, in McDonald v. Chicago, the high court expanded on Heller. The lead plaintiff was Otis McDonald, a black Chicago retiree who wanted to own a handgun for protection from the gangs that terrorized his low-income neighborhood. Ruling in his favor, the court said that the Second Amendment applies with equal force to federal, state and local governments alike. When McDonald died in 2014, the Chicago Tribune obituary described him as “the man who brought down Chicago’s gun ban.”

It’s well known that gun sales have surged in recent years, but less well known is that blacks have led the trend. Retailers in an online survey conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group, reported that they sold 58% more guns to black customers in the first half of 2020 than a year earlier, the highest increase for any ethnic group. Personal safety tops the list of why people decide to buy a firearm. In a 2021 Gallup survey, 88% of respondents said they own a gun “for protection against crime,” which is up from 67% in 2005.

Social conditions have convinced more Americans that they need a gun, yet the political left has spent little time reassessing woke policies that lead to such thinking. Violent crime has been rising. Homicides in major cities have reached levels not seen in three decades. Meanwhile, liberal policy makers treat criminals like victims and police officers like criminals. Antigun police units tasked with keeping illegal weapons off the streets have been disbanded. Felonies have been downgraded to misdemeanors, and misdemeanors go unpunished, which only emboldens miscreants. Low-income minorities feel the brunt of these so-called reforms because they are by far the most likely crime targets.

The same “defund the police” progressives who have spent most of the past decade undermining the ability of law enforcement to combat crime are now using sensational but statistically rare mass-shooting tragedies as a pretense for curtailing the ability of people in vulnerable communities to defend themselves. The president wants to ban “assault weapons,” raise the purchase age to 21, and expand background checks. There’s no evidence that any of this will address the day-in-day-out gun violence that has driven so many Americans to become first-time gun owners.

The question is whether more restrictions on ordinary Americans in a nation that already has more guns than people will reduce the number of lives lost. Most mass shooters in recent decades have been over 21. The assailants in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, passed background checks and purchased their weapons legally. And from 1994 to 2004, we had a federal assault-weapons ban in place. The reality is that most gun crimes don’t involve such weapons, and a RAND Corp. assessment of these efforts found “inconclusive evidence for the effect of assault weapon bans on mass shootings.”

The source of the problem is the failure or inability of the government to protect us. Common sense dictates that we do what is necessary to protect ourselves in the meantime. Only a fool or an ideologue could believe that the best response to people who commit crimes with guns is launching a holy war against people who respect gun laws.