Blacks' views on concealed handgun permits in Illinois

Mick Dumke with the Chicago Reader describes a class of ten African-Americans in Illinois who are taking a class to get there concealed handgun permits.  With the views of Detroit's Police Chief James Craig and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, I think that there is starting to be a sea change on blacks views on guns.

. . . State senator Kwame Raoul, who helped write the new legislation, says he isn't worried. "Particularly in northern Illinois, there's a sense that the sky is falling," says Raoul, who represents a liberal district stretching from downtown Chicago to the southeast side. "But people who've traveled the country probably haven't thought about the fact that the places they visited had conceal and carry. In fact, in a lot of the places they traveled to, they probably felt safer." 

Raoul stresses that he's never been a gun-ownership advocate. "But it can't be as simple as, if you're a true fighter against gun violence you're for everything on this side of the line, and if you're a proponent of gun ownership rights, you're somehow for gun violence." . . .  

Most of the participants in the class were wary of giving their names or talking to me on the record about their interest in guns. But afterward I received an e-mail from Karl Hubert, a 63-year-old attorney. "If the 2nd Amendment had actually been available to African American citizens in the past, all over our country, then past atrocities committed against Black citizens, such as lynching, rapes, tortures, and many other horrible atrocities, would not have been visited upon our African American mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, children and friends," he wrote, "as these citizens would have had the ability to protect themselves, and not be at the mercy of societal bullies." 

Vernon has the same view. But, he says, that's not the ideal. "In theory, it would be good if we didn't need guns at all. It would really be good if the world could be at peace and people could treat other people with respect and dignity. That's the world I want to live in. But that world don't exist. Not on this planet. So I have to prepare myself to live in the world that exists."

I would have said much of what is written here word for word if I had been asked.