https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/16/asian-americans-gun-ownership
The Pandemic years have produced some significant changes to the American Sociopolitical landscape, and not all of them good. So when one sees another story about how X is changing, Y is new and scary, or those got-dang Millennials are killing yet another industry, it’s easy to click away and sigh about the state of the media. But here we have some relative good news brought on by the chaos of the last few years: 5,000,000 new gun owners were minted in that same time frame, and a significant portion of them were Asian Americans. Being one of the least well represented demographics in the gun owning public, any change would seem large, but the number went up by a whopping 43%.
Asian Americans have been reporting a significant increase in race-motivated violence, and threats of violence since early 2020. It’s an unfortunate reason to see such an awakening to the value of armed self defense, but reality isn’t often fond of wearing kid-gloves, and boy is it making a comeback recently. Whether it’s caused by fraying social and political norms, poverty and homelessness, or the generally more negative tone of… well… everything lately, it’s what the Asian community in the US is experiencing, and they seem to be of a mind to do something about it.
Chris Cheng, noted Top Shot winner and gun rights activist recently started the Asian Pacific American Gun Owners Association to help train, educate, and in many cases introduce his community to firearms for the first time. As mentioned above, as a demographic, the AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) community is poorly represented among gun owners, for complicated social and cultural reasons, but APAGOA is working hard to change that. While the cause of this change is unfortunate, the outcome is positive and we hope that our fellow Americans of all stripes continue to join us in our pro-rights attitude and activism.
