by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) launched an important new educational program at the recent Gun Rights Policy Conference in Phoenix, reaching out to youth and adults in urban communities across the country.
The object of this bold, non-partisan initiative is to develop, establish and expand a long-term relationship with minority populations in urban centers across the nation by linking the Second Amendment friendship and residents of those communities through a beneficial program that educates and mentors residents for the personal benefit of individual participants and the betterment of their communities.
It would attract teens and adults by providing free hands-on learning experiences taught by qualified volunteers with ties to to the same target communities.
It would build a beneficial, long term alliance with urban communities and their leaders in local government, law enforcement and education as well as local religious leaders.
Graduates of the program will be recruited to help sustain the program within their communities in the future, as well as provide continuing feedback in helping to guide the curriculum.
The announcement received immediate approval from the mostly white, middle class audience of some 500 attendees from across the nation, a vast majority of whom were veteran firearms civil rights activists.
Just three weeks after the GRPC, the first meeting of interested stakeholders attended the first start-up meeting which was held at a Cleveland, OH, hotel. The majority were people of color and veteran firearms instructors, pastors, a state lawmaker and others who had been conducting their own educational activities previously.
The meeting approved a general curriculum, a name for the new urban outreach program, and moved toward a permanent structure.
Henceforth, the program will be known as the Community Initiative for Safety and Education (CISE).
It will be sustained as a project of the tax-exempt Second Amendment Foundation, and it will be managed by a separate Advisory Board.
CISE will primarily be funded by tax-exempt donations from individuals, foundations and corporations as well as by local fund-raising events to sustain local volunteer activity.
The firearms friendship, which includes national, state and local organizations as well as most legally organized rifle and pistol clubs, has long been characterized as a predominately white, well-to-do, mostly partisan and “closed” community. But that picture is far from accurate.
Gun ownership in America cuts across all color, ethnic, political and economic lines. It is based on personal circumstances and decisions.
While participation in the varied firearms sports has always cut across racial, ethnic, educational and economic lines, recreational shooting has been growing steadily in the past 20 years or so. But growing even faster is concern for safety and guns for personal and community defense. The public’s decision to keep and bear arms is based on a thoughtful awareness that crime is a serious national problem, especially in many urban communities.
In addition, public concerns about natural disasters or terrorist attacks have driven firearms sales upward.
Other fears involve the rapidly changing demographics, customs and mores of our cities and countryside brought about by a surge of immigration from all over the globe, as people from every continent seek participation in the American dream. Urban areas that had once been populated by African-American and Latino minorities are now home to a number of smaller but no less significant numbers from the Philippines, the Asian-Pacific nations and the Middle East.
These minority segments of the American family also have an interest in self-defense and many wish to legally acquire firearms.
Thus there is a greater need than ever for education in the safe and responsible ownership and use of firearms, which CISE would bring to their communities.
In doing so, CISE would draw upon and coordinate the experience and talents already resident in those communities and already available through other diverse organizations, from the NRA and various shooting groups devoted to specific disciplines, to the Civilian Marksmanship Program and 4H, schools with riflery programs, and even the firearms industry.
Playing a leading role in this community safety and education program will be African-American firearms instructors and military veterans whose centuries-old struggle for equal rights has also given them a long tradition of firearms ownership that has not previously been recognized, but which helped provide protection for even the non-violent freedom marchers of the 1960s.
As a nation, we have needed a pro-gun urban initiative for many years. Now CISE can help make it a reality.
CISE plans to provide everyone a free and entertaining hands-on learning experience in firearms safety, responsibility, firearms and civil rights history, marksmanship fundamentals, outdoor sports and civics, taught by volunteers in the target cities.
As part of the original announcement panel at the GRPC, Rashad Gray, a Navy veteran and CEO of the Urban Sports Unlimited training company, and co-director Ohio chapter of the National African American Gunowners Association, urged his fellow members of the Second Amendment Foundation “to take this very seriously.”
“Over 80 percent of the US population lives in urban cores,” Gray said. “We need all the help we can get.”
Gray spoke of “a large constituency” of African-American gunowners in inner cities that few know about because “they never talk about it.”
“A lot of this has to do with the understanding in the community that the laws don’t work for them,” he claimed. “Policy was designed with a history going back through Jim Crow to take away their rights and their firearm ownership.”
Gray, who can trace his family’s gun ownership back generations, said his uncle, a gunsmith, took him shooting for the first time when he was six years old. “I fired a .22 down a city alleyway with a bunch of kids from the neighborhood,” he recalled. “Those were the days, you know? When they let you fire a gun in the city and not get arrested.”
More important than the lesson in marksmanship, Gray said, were the words of wisdom he says his uncle imparted: “‘Being a black man and being a gun owner, it’s your birthright.’”
Now there is CISE.
