The West’s Asian Americans arm up for self-defense
Once denied their Second Amendment rights, Asian Americans are heading to gun shops in droves.
Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
On a Friday evening in late March, in southeast Portland’s Jade District, about a thousand people gathered to mourn the most recent mass shooting. The previous week, a man shot and killed eight people — including six Asian women — in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia. The tragedy enraged the Asian community, which has faced an escalation in harassment ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began. People at the rally held signs that said “hate is a virus” and “not your model minority.” Snow, a 20-something Vietnamese American who preferred not to give their real name, citing possible retaliation, was among them, wearing a Glock 19 handgun on their hip.
“Some people were uncomfortable at first” about seeing the weapon at the rally, Snow said. “But it was a decision (I) made to ensure the safety of our people.” Snow purchased the gun online last October in response to recent attacks on Asian people in America.
Tens of thousands of Asian Americans, motivated by self-defense, bought their first guns over the past year, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade association. A survey by the organization, which tracks background checks and gun purchases through retailers, estimated a 43% jump in sales to Asians nationwide in the first half of 2020. (Few surveys track Asian American gun ownership; on forms and in databases they are often relegated to an “other” category.) Recently, High Country News contacted 20 gun shops in the West to hear their perspective on this trend. Of those that replied, nine confirmed that they’d seen an uptick in sales to customers of East and Southeast Asian descent.
HISTORICALLY, ASIAN AMERICANS have rarely been able to buy guns in the West. In 1923, despite decades of violence against Chinese immigrants in San Francisco’s Chinatown, California passed a law prohibiting non-citizens from possessing concealable firearms. As a result, many Chinese people, barred from citizenship by the Chinese Exclusion Act, could not own firearms. The bill also allowed police officials to determine who could receive a concealed weapon permit. In a San Francisco Chronicle article published at the time, the law’s proponents argued that the ban would help disarm Latino and Chinese residents, whom they depicted as criminals, using racist stereotypes. “Where the officials have the discretion in terms of gun licensing, there’s a very clear historic pattern of discrimination,” said Robert Cottrol, a legal history and civil rights professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, however, made it harder for police to discriminate, undermining the 1923 statute.
Second Amendment rights would come into play 28 years later during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, after police officers were acquitted of charges stemming from the beating of a Black motorist named Rodney King. Redlining had forced low-income Korean immigrants, African Americans and Latinos to live in the same neighborhoods for decades. Interracial tensions boiled over during the riots, and thousands of Korean-owned businesses were destroyed. A small number of mom-and-pop shops survived because armed Korean residents stood on their roofs to deter rioters. That became a pivotal moment for the Asian American community, inspiring more people to practice their Second Amendment rights.
Read more: https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.6/south-guns-the-wests-asian-americans-arm-up-for-self-defense
