The first lesson Gerald Vernon shared with his conceal-and-carry class is, to him, the most fundamental: “The only thing that stops bad people with guns is good people with guns.”
“Over the last 20 years, I’ve been places I don’t think a lot of other black people have been,” he told the class. “I’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money traveling the country and getting this training so I could bring it back to the community.”
Vernon is also a member of the NRA, mostly because the organization offers top-notch training and certification courses used by federal law enforcement agencies. But he admits to some mixed feelings. “The only thing we agreed on was guns,” he says of the NRA. On the issue of gun-ownership rights, “I’m on the same side as a lot of people who are very conservative and certainly would be considered right of center.”
Vernon describes himself as a child of the civil rights and black power eras, which left him with a lifelong interest in social justice movements and history. He recalls being taken aback by images of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists being attacked by angry mobs in Chicago in 1966. “I was like, ‘Mama, mama, what are they doing?’ She said, ‘They’re fighting for our freedom.’ But I said, ‘They ain’t fighting—they’re letting the white people beat them up.’ And she said, ‘It’s not right to fight.’ And I said, ‘But you told me if I don’t fight the boys back at school you’d give me a whupping.’ ‘Boy, go to bed!’”
He never discloses how many guns he owns. “I’ll put it this way: would you trust a plumber who only has one wrench?”
Still, other studies have found no clear correlations, and a recent analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded that gun owners are actually more likely to be murdered or to commit suicide.
