Shante Stewart is 41 and owns a nail salon. She was asked why she started training with a firearm.
“It seems unstable. The hate feeling. Like, it’s ramping up,” she said, “feeling like there’s going to be some anarchy.”
That is the answer running through reporting published October 6 on Black women and firearms training groups in Atlanta. Not fear of a burglary. Not a hobby. A read on the country.
Daphne Enmon, who is 54 and leads the Atlanta chapter of A Girl & A Gun, says her chapter has tripled in size over two years, to close to 200 members. Kia Glenn, who leads a group called Queens of Defense, says the work is widening past the range itself into survival skills and hunting. The Bass Reeves Gun Club, which is named for the first Black deputy U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi, has grown from a few hundred members to roughly 1,400 on its Facebook group since 2017.
Leanne Vermitt, 34, who works as an operations specialist, gave a different route in. “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.'”
One figure in the reporting puts the local picture in a national frame. Black Americans made up 32 percent of new target shooters in 2024.
What is worth noticing is who is talking and who is not. These are women with names, ages and jobs, on the record, about a decision most people would rather make quietly. A nail salon owner. A retired principal. An operations specialist. A chapter leader counting her membership out loud.
None of them said they feel safer. They said they are preparing. Those are different sentences, and the difference is the story.
