PA Bill Number: HB2311
Title: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program.
Description: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program. ...
Last Action: Laid on the table
Last Action Date: Sep 23, 2024
PA: Under the Gun: Advocacy group aims to train blacks :: 10/27/2016
The corner of 16th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue is a busy one on a early fall Monday as Temple students crowd the area, some out for a quick jog around campus, some biking toward Center City, a true cornucopia of color and race showcasing a collective display of young promise.
Along this same stretch, stands the crumbling concrete facade of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, adorned with its recognizable Pan-African colors of red, black and green.
On this night, the space is being used to talk about guns. Not the familiar anti-violence, gun buyback gospel you’re apt to hear from many of the same social do-gooders moving about just outside these doors. No, tonight the organizer of this presentation is preaching the need for African-Americans to arm and defend themselves—from both criminals and police.
This is Black Guns Matter, a young, provocative movement whose founder is quickly emerging as a powerful—if not confounding—voice on behalf of the Second Amendment. His organization’s stated goal is to encourage responsible gun ownership among African-Americans. In pushing that message, he’s stepped deeply into the mire of guns and race.
For now though, its leader, North Philly’s Maj Toure, is unarmed. Fifteen minutes before his weapons training workshop is to begin, Toure, 31, is patiently waiting for attendees to take seats. Stacks of Black Guns Matter t-shirts and hoodies are arranged for sale. When asked by a photographer to pose brandishing a weapon, he strongly objects.
It’s a unique contradiction for a man whose ideologies don’t readily match his persona. After a summer of repeated police shootings of unarmed black men, Toure found himself on NPR and Fox News, teetering a weird line between woke advocate and and that most unusual of species, a conservative black man. On one hand, he represents the struggles of the black community, fearful and angry over the violence inflicted upon minorities by law enforcement. On the other, he’s the approachable black guy who many otherwise racially antagonistic whites can relate to by virtue of his dutiful fight for gun ownership rights. He’s Malcolm X meets Ben Carson.
“I’d rather get wounded than murdered,” Toure says. “To a certain extent, people like me have to be willing to put themselves on the line to the point of death so my children don’t have the same fucking conversation 20 years from now, you know what I mean? Having a firearm does not make you a bad guy.”
However his message isn’t entirely welcomed by neighborhood anti-violence groups trying to rid the streets of guns.
“The answer to gun violence isn’t more guns,” says Brendan Kelly, who spoke on behalf of both the Brady Campaign and the Center to End Gun Violence. “In fact, an irrefutable fact is that owning a gun greatly increases the chances you or someone you love will be shot. [Frankly], to insinuate otherwise is inaccurate and irresponsible.”
Shira Goodman, the executive director of CeaseFirePA, a statewide group focused on ending gun violence and getting illegal guns off the street, is not only familiar with BGM, she’s met with Toure. And while she also says that more guns don’t make a community any safer, she isn’t necessary opposed to Toure’s activism.
“The idea of legal gun ownership isn’t what we object to,” Goodman says. “Training on being responsible, legal and storing guns safely is a good idea. For us, it’s always been about expanded background checks and more efforts made to get illegal guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t own them.”
Toure doesn’t trouble himself with pro gun-control claims like Kelly’s. He’s seen the spate of police shootings and observes that being unarmed didn’t make victims any safer.
But beyond its political message, Black Guns Matter is at heart a firearms training program. Backed with crowd-sourcing dollars, it runs workshops at local ranges and community centers. This stop at UNIA is just one several on a national tour scheduled this fall. Its mission statement, says Toure, is “to inform, train, and defend all hoods across America.”
Most likely to be murdered
It’s 15 minutes after the scheduled start, but so far the meeting has attracted just five people scattered throughout the room. Unconcerned about eventual turnout, Toure casually announces that the meeting will be delayed to give a few more an opportunity to show.
Fifteen minutes later, the room is filled to capacity with over 25 people, a few standing in the back and along the sides because there aren’t chairs left.
Toure has brought in firearms salesman Alex Ballard to lead the instruction. Dressed in field pants, heavy boots and a t-shirt that reads “Armed Black Movement,” Ballard is an NRA-certified instructor who owns Everyday People Tactile in Bear, Del.
Standing in front of the group, Ballard scrolls through his laptop’s PowerPoint while Toure sits in the background, occasionally interjecting but hardly making himself the center of attention. Ballard addresses the predominantly black crowd about gun ownership.
“Black people are the least likely to [legally] own a gun and the most likely to be murdered,” he says before veering off to the Bundy Ranch standoff. “They [the government] were trying to extort [the rancher],” he says, drawing a parallel with the police shooting of unarmed men.
It’s this odd touch of libertarian equality that makes BGM so intriguing. This is a group that believes the Democratic party hasn’t done what’s needed for the black community; meanwhile, like white libertarians, the group is ready to handle things itself.
A big part of the problem, BGM says, is law enforcement in the hood.
“If someone has broken into your home, you have three to five minutes after you dial 9-1-1, even in the best response time. What do you do during that time?” Ballard asks. He quotes statistics that police hit their intended target only three out of 10 times because. He says they don’t work enough on their firearms skills. “I train at least once a week, maybe twice if I can,” he said. “It’s a diminishable skill, it’s not like riding a bike. If you don’t keep up with your practicing, your reflexes are going to become slower and your aim is going to be compromised. It is a body/brain skill that requires continual practice. They [the police] don’t have that type of training.”
Toure, from the back, chimes: “And who knows what police officer is going to respond to your call, and what frame of mind they’ll be in?”
Says Ballard: “We have a fire department, but you can still own a fire extinguisher, right?
Maj Toure’s mystique
Toure himself is a bit of an enigma. For starters, “Maj Toure” isn’t even his legal birth name. When pressed, he cites religious reasons for refusing to provide it. However, he then later followed up saying that he’s actually “spiritual rather than religious.”
He does admit to having done time, but in the same breath qualifies that his stint isn’t comparable to convicts who have served “double digits.” Toure’s roots are in North Philly, but he says that, with a stepdad in the Navy, he spent a good part of his adolescent years moving from state to state. It was an upbringing that he says has given him a unique worldview. He’s also a Star Wars aficionado, claims he reads the Constitution for fun and is a practicing yogi.
When Philadelphia Weekly first profiled him 10 years ago, he was a musician selling his hip hop CDs on the Broad Street Subway. Music is a passion the high school dropout still pursues, with his latest release entitled, Solutionary, Vol. 3.
Today, he exhibits the same kind of earnest hustle, sharing his unique gun rights message everywhere Ebony magazine to Breitbart.com.
With all his hats, Toure hasn’t sold himself internally that preaching firearm safety and rights is his life’s calling. In fact it’s quite the opposite.
“The word career indicates I want to make money off of it,” said Toure. I just want to show people from the hood that a gun is just a gun.” [In a perfect world], I’d be around hot women and ride off in the sunset, it’ll be me and [reality star and South Philly native] Amber Rose. I’d be in Hawaii and everything would be right with the world. Once this [gun rights] thing’ is fixed, [my goal would] be to just hang out with beautiful women and have some good coffee. Oh, and own a cannabis shop.”
A history of hatred
Gun laws in this country have longed been linked to the struggle for civil rights. Black slaves were prohibited from owning guns and the first gun laws came about in Southern states as a response to Emancipation. Further national regulations were enacted in the 1960s, in the wake of race riots and the empowerment movement of the Black Panthers.
Fast forward to our current racial climate, when the news of police shootings of black males has been ever present.
Black Lives Matter was born out of the police violence which has become all too familiar on news headlines. For its part, Black Lives Matter is supportive of BGM.
Josiah Green, organizer of BLM’s Philadelphia chapter, says that both groups have similar goals. “The objective is doing whatever is needed for the community in a way that’s challenging the system and the conditions we’ve been put in.”
Green is no stranger to BGM. He’s met Toure and says there are activists that participate in both groups. Green not only thinks that guns laws have racial overtones, but that guns are being used as a way to incarcerate more black males. “It’s not black people bringing illegal guns to the black community,” he says. “If politicians really wanted to stop it they could.”
And in the case of police? Toure suggests many of them are scared to do their jobs.
It’s fear,” he says. “You can’t think and assume that because someone has a firearm that they’re the bad guy. Period. And if you’re afraid, you shouldn’t be in law enforcement because then what happens when you run into the real scumbag? If you’re afraid of the citizens, what happens when you run into the actual bad guy? You’re a pussy.”
Toure would like nothing more than to see reformation start at home. He believes that the Philadelphia Police Department can become the gold standard for other cities and towns to follow.
To do that, he says, police officers should be required to live in the communities that they patrol, just as students are made to attend their neighborhood schools. He’s also an advocate for harsher penalties—including immediate termination—for police officers found using excessive force on citizens. And he wants officers to take a more proactive role in weeding out colleagues who display bad behavior.
“You can’t keep oppressing the people and saying, ‘Oh it’s not every cop.’ There needs to be more officers that step out against the corruptness,” Toure says. “If the majority of officers are doing the right thing, they need to step up and call those other guys out.”
Green agrees and wants to see the black community given the chance to control the police department itself. “These systems in place have been forced upon us,” he says. “We need a new system that’s controlled and directed by the community.” He thinks such a revolution would result in a rapid reduction in not only excessive force by police but intercommunity violence as well.
But the call for better policing does not lessen BGM’s primary message: to arm African-Americans.
“Black people owning guns should not be controversial,” says Green. “The Black Panthers called for self defense so that anyone with the intent to harm would know we could defend ourselves. It’s a similar message.” Noting the 2015 massacre of black church members in Charleston, S.C., Green says there is good reason out there for wanting to have firearms for protection. “We don’t support gun violence, it’s a problem in the community. But that is different than having the right to defend yourself.”
Like Panther founder Bobby Seale, who famously called guns an “equalizer” in dealing with police, Maj Toure provocatively declares, “We all want peace, but I’m prepared for war. And I gotta be prepared for war to maintain that peace.”
