The sporadic “pop!” of gunfire pierced the cool autumn air for hours at the South River Gun Club in Covington on Sept. 26 as Shante Stewart and her classmates took aim.
Gold bullet casings decorated the gravel beneath their feet as the students lined up their shots. The targets were fluorescent orange sporting clays set up on poster boards roughly 15 to 18 feet away.
The group of about 15 Black trainees took turns firing different handguns while their instructor, a veteran marksman named Kevin Beck, timed them. Most struggled to hit the clays, even at that relatively close range.
The difficulty increased when Beck asked them to do it one-handed, first with their right and then their left hand, in case one of their arms ever becomes injured or they have to shoot from cover.
“It’s not like the movies,” Beck explained. “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.”
Stewart’s troop was the only Black group at the outdoor range — located about 33 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta — that day. All were members of the Bass Reeves Gun Club, a pro-Second Amendment group of Black gun owners that hosts regular firearm training sessions and bimonthly informative meetings in addition to participating in marksman competitions.
About six people in the group were veteran marksmen practicing at a separate shooting bay less than a quarter mile away. But most at bay 14 were novices like Stewart learning the mechanics of iron sights, dominant eyes, and the delicate art of “pressing” a trigger without pulling their shot.
The 41-year-old nail salon owner from Douglasville says she first felt the urge to buy a gun after watching right-wing rioters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But she didn’t act on the impulse until after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term last year.
After her husband, Donnie, got his felony record expunged and could legally buy firearms of his own, the Stewarts acquired their first gun. The College Park-based family now has a “collection” of eight firearms — an assortment of handguns, shotguns, and semiautomatic rifles.
Stewart said the nation’s current political climate, including escalating tensions between Democrats and Republicans and a recent rise in anti-Black hate crimes, is what motivated her to exercise her constitutional right to bear arms. She said she’s also been working on her hand-to-hand combat skills by practicing Muay Thai.
“It seems unstable,” Stewart said of the current political climate. “The hate feeling. Like, it’s ramping up … feeling like there’s going to be some anarchy going on. For me, it doesn’t feel like it used to feel years ago. The country doesn’t feel as safe to me as it used to.”
Seeking safety and security
Gun sales to Black Americans have been on the rise for years, according to data collected by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms trade group. Black Americans comprised the largest share of new target shooters (32%), according to a 2024 analysis.
In Atlanta, multiple groups say their ranks and interest in their services has increased since 2024 after a post-pandemic lull — especially among Black women.
Traditionally, gun ownership has been overwhelmingly male, but Brown said a disproportionate share of his group’s new members are Black women like Stewart and Leanne Vermitt.
Vermitt, 34, is an Atlanta resident and an operations specialist who joined Bass Reeves a little more than 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,’” Vermitt told Capital B Atlanta on Saturday. “The more I came to the range, the more I liked it, and I wanted to have my own firearm if I wanted to continue doing this.”
Georgia remains one of the top states for human trafficking and missing Black women. News stories of disappearances and recoveries keep many Black women and their loved ones on high alert.
Gun group leaders say women who have been victims of violent crime or worry they will be seek out groups like the metro Atlanta-based National African American Gun Association to learn more about which firearms to buy, how to use them, and how to do so without breaking the law.
The cultural fear many law-abiding Black citizens once had of firearms has faded over the past decade as more seek out guns for recreation or personal protection. There’s an entire subsection of the internet dedicated to Black women gun owners. Influencers like Yoki Sturrup and Mrs. Red Phoenix have gained millions of views and developed huge followings on sites like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Stirrup and Phoenix’s channels feature footage of them firing a variety of firearms, large and small, while providing consumer review feedback.
In 2022, Georgia became one of 29 states that allow lawful gun owners to carry concealed firearms without a permit, a practice known as constitutional carry. Black civil rights advocates worried at the time that the new law would lead to more vigilante violence against Black people like in the case of Ahmaud Arbery. Gun group leaders say the constitutional carry law also motivated more Black Georgians to purchase and carry firearms of their own for personal protection.
Atlanta native Daphne Enmon, 54, is the leader of A Girl & A Gun’s Atlanta chapter. The self-proclaimed largest women’s shooting club in the nation is multiracial, but Enmon said her chapter is majority Black and has “tripled in size” in over the past two years.
“We are currently close to 200 members,” she said. “Women join every week, predominantly Black women. … Women are now more than ever realizing with the climate we are in, they need to buy a gun. But before they buy one, they need to know how to use it.”
Kia Glenn is the director of social media and marketing for National African American Gun Association. She also leads Queens of Defense, a NAAGA-affiliated women’s gun group. She said there’s also growing interest among Black women gun owners to learn to hunt and live off the land in addition to personal protection.
“We teach you how to prepare your [survival] bags. We have started delving into growing food. We’re going to have a class probably in Q4 on how to grow food indoors and outdoors,” Glenn told Capital B Atlanta on Thursday.
“Tomorrow I leave to go deer hunting. I have eight other women going to learn with me,” she said. “As a woman, we need to make sure there is food for our family. We can’t rely on our husbands for everything.”
Fears of suspicious deaths
NAAGA’s rise to national prominence coincided with President Donald Trump’s initial rise to political power.
As violent clashes and overt displays of white supremacy became more commonplace, many Black Americans were motivated to acquire and learn to use firearms for self-defense.
“As more people get into wanting to own a firearm, they are looking for groups that look like them,” Larry Brown, president of the Bass Reeves Gun Club, told Capital B Atlanta. “We’re here to educate. We’re here to talk about gun safety. We’re here to make sure we’re building competent gun owners.”
Bass Reeves Gun Club is the founding chapter of the National African American Gun Association. The national group’s leaders say their membership surged again in 2020 after social unrest stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd caused Black Georgians to worry society was collapsing.
A similar unease emerged over the past year, further fueled by a string of suspicious hanging suicides and accidental deaths involving Black victims, like Nolan Wells, Kyle Bassinga, and Demetrius Fleming.
Investigators have determined most of those victims took their own lives, rulings NAAGA President Philip Smith expressed doubt about in August, echoing sentiments felt by Black Americans across the country.
He and other NAAGA members have referred to the suspected killings as 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 shared on Facebook. “Crying is not going to solve the issue. … What is going to solve the issue is that we put together a personal safety plan for each Black person in this country that they can utilize.”
Brown said Bass Reeves has about 700 active members, but membership on Facebook has grown from about 200 to 300 people when he first joined in 2017 to roughly 1,400 people with varying levels of activity. He said the group has seen an increase that started last year, but wouldn’t specify exactly how many people it was.
“On any given day I’m seeing about five to six emails of new members that are coming in,” Brown said. “I think it’s just the political climate. Uncertainty with where the country is going. As more people get into wanting to own a firearm, they are looking for groups that look like them.”
NAAGA member Sana Sims, now in her 70s, is a retired principal from Mableton. She bought her first gun and joined NAAGA four years ago after her son, Thorne Wilson, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Baltimore.
She said lack of trust in police to protect her has grown stronger since recent stories about Black suspected lynchings began circulating online. She now owns nine guns, trains to use them bimonthly, and carries a firearm with her at all times, including a “foldable” AR-15 that she carries in her purse.
“I wanted to make sure that I was fully trained and rightfully trained in the area of protection because of unknown circumstances, “she said. “I have no idea about who I’m living around and with and who walks among us. That makes me very intentional about making sure I am armed at all times.”
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