The internet lit up after Vice President Kamala Harris announced to the country that she is a gun owner during last week’s presidential debate. It came as a surprise to some supporters and detractors alike, even though she also noted that fact when she ran for the White House in 2020.
But for some Chicago women of color, it would have been surprise if she wasn’t.
“Any woman that may be in a compromising situation should be a gun owner,” said Bronzeville resident Joanne Glenn, who is 74 and has owned a gun for years.
Javondlyn Dunagan, a retired federal parole officer, agrees. She has been teaching fellow Black women how to use and store guns for the last eight years after founding JMD Defense in 2016.
“I don’t think it was a big deal, but it was a surprise to some people,” said Dunagan, noting that Harris used to be the district attorney in San Francisco. “She was in a position like [Cook County State’s Attorney] Kim Foxx and there’s a risk that comes with that job.”
For Dunagan and her students, most of whom live in Chicago, having a gun for protection is just common sense.
Glenn has two adult daughters and four grandchildren.
“Because I’m a single woman alone in Chicago, I wanted to have the safety of ‘[just] in case,'” she said.
Glenn, a nurse who owns a home healthcare agency, took a concealed carry class at JMD three years ago and regularly attends practice sessions as part of Dunagan’s Ladies of Steel Gun Club, held twice a month at a gun range in Mount Greenwood.
Gun ownership spiked during the pandemic, especially among people of color. According to the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, 69% of new gun owners between the years of 2020 and 2022 were people of color. JMD saw a spike in business in 2020 that paralleled the spike in carjackings, Dunagan said. She said today much of her current business is due to the normalization of hateful rhetoric and the feeling that the police cannot prevent all the crime, especially in Black neighborhoods.
“I think we all know that there are not enough officers on the police force,” Dunagan said. “People are afraid to go out at night and that’s caused some of the spike as well.”
JMD offers classes on concealed carry and how to clean and properly store a weapon. While they are open to anyone, they are mostly attended by women, who range in age from 29 to 85, she said.
Regardless of class demographic, Dunagan said her message is the same, that one should use a gun as a last resort and only use it if one’s life is in danger.
Dunagan said unlike some instructors who focus on different, often extremely rare scenarios, she focuses on teaching students “how to use their brains.”
“I want people to … assess what’s going on in every situation. No one should know you have a gun and if you can get out of the situation without pulling your gun, that’s the best thing.”
Dunagan also teaches a situational awareness class for people without firearms, like the home healthcare employees who work for Glenn and cannot bring a gun into a patient’s home.
“She’s taught safety classes for my 297 employees because they go into homes of strangers in the community,” Glenn said. “To have an expert tell you things that you don’t think about like making sure the door is locked, making sure there’s no barrier blocking your exit. She’s saving a whole lot of lives.”
Dunagan said she’s probably taught more than 3,000 students about gun safety over the last 8 years and to date, is not aware of one of them having to shoot anyone. She also doesn’t dispute research that shows carrying a gun may actually increase a victim’s risk of injury — and knows that research has also found that people successfully defend themselves with guns in less than 1% of crimes.
But she chalks that up to people who have no training or bad training.
“There are times when people are negligent,” she said. “I use the word negligent because nothing is accidental, a gun doesn’t just go off. Owner operator errors and negligence cause a lot of gun shooting situations.”
Whether or not the recent attention on Harris being a gun owner causes a spike in business is yet to be seen, but regardless, Dunagan said she will continue to teach students to try their avoid situations where they have to pull a gun and if that cannot be avoided, it’s essential to know how use it correctly.
“When you learn the proper way, you can’t unlearn it,” she said.