The South River Gun Club sits in Covington, about 33 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta. On Sept. 26, roughly fifteen Black trainees stood at bay 14 and fired handguns at fluorescent orange sporting clays fixed to poster boards 15 to 18 feet away. Most of them missed, even at that distance. The spent brass piled up in the gravel. Chauncey Alcorn reported for Capital B Atlanta that theirs was the only Black group on the range that day.
Their instructor, a veteran marksman named Kevin Beck, timed each shooter. Then he made it harder. They had to shoot one-handed, first with the right hand and then the left, in case an arm is ever hurt or they have to fire from cover.
“It’s not like the movies. If you own a gun and you’re not practicing with it regularly, your skills can diminish. You can be just as much a danger to everyone around you as the bad guy you’re trying to shoot.”
The trainees belonged to the Bass Reeves Gun Club, a pro-Second Amendment group of Black gun owners and the founding chapter of the National African American Gun Association. A few hundred yards away, about six of the club’s experienced shooters practiced in a separate bay. At bay 14 the beginners were working on iron sights, finding their dominant eye, and pressing a trigger rather than pulling it.
A fear with dates attached
Shante Stewart, 41, owns a nail salon and comes from Douglasville. She says she first wanted a gun on Jan. 6, 2021, while watching right-wing rioters storm the U.S. Capitol. She didn’t buy one until Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term last year. Her husband, Donnie, had his felony record expunged and could legally buy firearms again, and the couple bought their first gun. The family, now living in College Park, owns eight: handguns, shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. She has also taken up Muay Thai.
She says she was moved by growing hostility between Democrats and Republicans and by what she describes as a recent rise in anti-Black hate crimes. “It seems unstable,” she said. “The hate feeling. Like, it’s ramping up … feeling like there’s going to be some anarchy going on.” Then, more plainly: “The country doesn’t feel as safe to me as it used to.”
Her account follows the calendar of national politics: a riot, an inauguration, a rearmed household. Some citizens arm themselves out of ideology. Others do it because the news has become a weather report and they expect a storm. Stewart sounds like the second kind. Her pessimism is common among Black women; a recent poll found Black women gloomy about the country’s future.
The industry finds a customer
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade group, says gun sales to Black Americans have been rising for years. Capital B cites a 2024 analysis in which Black Americans were the largest share of new target shooters, at 32%. The foundation’s Faces of Firearms campaign uses the same figure for people who took up shooting in the past five years, but the page does not name the study behind it. The trade group has also produced a communications toolkit with partners including NAAGA to help marketers reach Black gun owners. The gun-control group Violence Policy Center argues that the industry sees communities of color as an “untapped market”.
Atlanta’s clubs say interest dropped off after the pandemic and has climbed again since 2024, especially among Black women. Gun ownership has always been mostly male. Larry Brown, president of Bass Reeves, says a disproportionate share of his new members are Black women. One of them is Leanne Vermitt, 34, an operations specialist in Atlanta who joined a little over a year ago. “I kept seeing on my TikTok feed a lot of women getting into guns, and I was like, ‘You know what? I should learn how to protect myself,’” she said. Influencers such as Yoki Sturrup and Mrs. Red Phoenix have drawn millions of views on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube by firing and reviewing weapons on camera.
Daphne Enmon, 54, runs the Atlanta chapter of A Girl & A Gun, which calls itself the country’s largest women’s shooting club. The national club is multiracial. Her chapter is mostly Black, and she says it has tripled in size in two years. “We are currently close to 200 members,” she said. “Women join every week, predominantly Black women.” They are learning, she said, that “before they buy one, they need to know how to use it.”
Kia Glenn, NAAGA’s director of social media and marketing, leads an affiliated women’s group called Queens of Defense. Her members are preparing for more than self-defense. They pack survival bags, and she plans a class, probably in the fourth quarter, on growing food indoors and outdoors. She was leaving to go deer hunting with eight other women. “As a woman, we need to make sure there is food for our family,” she said. “We can’t rely on our husbands for everything.”
A law signed in Douglasville
Gov. Brian Kemp signed Georgia’s permitless carry law, Senate Bill 319, on April 12, 2022, at a gun store in Douglasville, Stewart’s hometown. CNN reported that Georgia was the 25th state to adopt some form of permitless carry. Capital B now counts 29. At the time, Black civil rights advocates feared the law would encourage vigilante violence against Black people, like the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Gun group leaders say the law did something else as well: it led more Black Georgians to buy and carry guns of their own. Whatever the legislature intended, Black Georgians drew their own conclusion. If anyone could now carry a gun without a permit, they would carry one too.
Georgia is still among the leading states for human trafficking and for missing Black women. Club leaders say women who have been victims of violent crime, or who fear becoming victims, come to them to learn which gun to buy and how to carry it within the law.
Deaths that go unexplained
NAAGA gained national prominence during Trump’s first rise to power. Its leaders say membership jumped again in 2020, when the pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd left many Black Georgians afraid that society was coming apart. Over the past year a similar unease has returned. Part of the reason is a series of hanging deaths and accidental deaths of Black people, including Nolan Wells, Kyle Bassinga and Demetrius Fleming.
Investigators ruled that most of those victims took their own lives. In August, NAAGA President Philip Smith said he doubted those findings, and he and other members have called the deaths a “soft genocide.” “You’ve heard people getting hung so many times, women disappearing so much, you don’t even think about it,” Smith said in a clip posted on Facebook. “Crying is not going to solve the issue.” His answer was a personal safety plan for every Black person in the country.
Brown puts Bass Reeves at about 700 active members. Its Facebook group had 200 to 300 people when he joined in 2017 and has roughly 1,400 now. He says growth picked up last year but would not give a number. “As more people get into wanting to own a firearm, they are looking for groups that look like them,” he said. “We’re here to make sure we’re building competent gun owners.”
At bay 14 that afternoon, most of the clays were still whole. For many of the trainees, competence was still some way off.