Update #3
Our apologies for being a bit quiet this past month. Most organizers have been busy with the holiday season, and I personally have just recovered from what was, luckily, a mild case of COVID-19. That does not mean work on this project has paused. Our working groups have been meeting (virtually) every week, and we will soon have some big announcements regarding the various moving parts required of a project this big. Thank you all for helping us reach over $25,000 raised so far!
One of the most important aspects of this fundraiser is interacting with our communities and seeing the best ways we can continue to serve them. In doing so, we have begun to gather more testimonials and hope to start publishing one each week. If you have a story about your interactions with the SRA, your journey with firearm safety, or anything else you think other people should hear, please send it to testimonials@comraderange.org or get in contact with a member. Privacy is our utmost priority when it comes to something like this so be sure to include how we can refer to you if we post your testimonial. A story can be as emotional / funny / happy / angry as you choose it to be. Our goal is to show that there are real people and real results behind everything we do.
This week’s testimonial is from an anonymous anti-racist tenant organizer in Boston, MA.
I grew up in the Boston area, where it’s pretty taboo to want to know anything about guns. Sometimes on family trips to NH, we’d shoot rifles with my uncle who lived there, but I haven’t done that since moving to the city proper [for college]. With the political climate how it is, I kept thinking it would be good to know a little more about firearms, but I never took steps towards, y’know, actually doing it. Honestly, I was afraid of talking to regular gun people because so many are right-wing. I know as a white guy I could blend in by just keeping my mouth shut, but the idea of “blending in” with fascists is really off-putting to me; the thought gave me a lot of anxiety. It reminded me of times in my life when someone assumed because I looked like them, I wanted to hear a racist joke. If that happened while I was in a typical gun store, what would I do? Being anti-racist is important to who I am today. I don’t trust that I could hold my tongue in a situation like that as I would have in the past.
A friend took a class at a local gun outlet where the teacher was a former cop, and talked incessantly about his time on the force in [redacted], which is pretty notorious for over-policing their communities of color. One of my neighbors is a Black man who grew up in that town, and I’ve seen the scars on his head and body from the police in the 80s. Stories that for me ending with being dropped off at my parents’ house or a slap on the wrist, ended with him being brutalized. I kept thinking, “What’s the likelihood this teacher was responsible for nearly killing my neighbor?” I couldn’t get over it - the idea of handing money to someone who had been responsible for hurting my community member.
I had known about the SRA for some months, but it just didn’t occur to me before the Summer to reach out (I had a lot of downtime because of the pandemic). I was happy to learn they had instructors and I was able to get a group of friends together to take the firearms safety course who otherwise probably would never do something like that. Though we didn’t talk politics with our instructor, it was awesome to be able to take a firearms safety course with someone who understood why I was there. It was good to be mostly comfortable when talking about firearms, which still make me uncomfortable but less now.