Black women who once hated guns are embracing them as violence rises

While research shows that possessing a gun raises the risk of violent death, some Black women are desperate for a way to feel safer

… there was a place where she felt safe, and that was here, at a remote property amid thick woods an hour’s drive south of her home in District Heights, Md. And there was no time the 52-year-old felt safer than when holding a weapon like the one her friend Mark “Choppa” Manley now handed her: a 9mm pistol similar to those that regularly ring out in neighborhoods experiencing the worst of the region’s bloody summer.

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