Black Communities Succeed When They Have a Purpose in Life, Not Welfare: Gun Rights Activist

Maj Tour, founder of Black Guns Matter, is interviewed on EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program on July 14, 2022. Screenshot/Epoch TV

To truly help people in black communities to succeed in life is to teach them how to find purpose in life and to defend that purpose, said Maj Toure, founder of the 2nd Amendment organization Black Guns Matter.

Toure teaches people at the Solutionary Center in Philadelphia how they can defend themselves, but he argues that it is not enough just to teach this alone. A person may not have any value in life, or they may feel depressed because they don’t see the purpose in life, he argues.

The holistic approach to help black communities succeed is to show them how to find their purpose and vocation in life, how to build “the equity of their property value,” and to empower them by teaching them how to defend their bodies and their highest property—their lives—Toure explained in a recent interview for EpochTV’s “Crossroads“ program.

That’s what he and the other instructors at the Solutionary Center aim to do, he said.

“This is what urban America has been missing, not because we don’t want to, not because we’re not capable, [but] because leftist propagandist media—as well as leftist propaganda policies and legislation—has been a constant thorn in urban demographics’ side to consistently lean them toward slavery over independence,” he said.

“We have to change that by that holistic approach, and it cannot just be firearms.”

A customer shops for a pistol at Freddie Bear Sports sporting goods store in Tinley Park, Ill., on Dec. 17, 2012. Scott Olson/Getty Images

Toure said that teaching people how to defend themselves does not add to gun violence, noting that more than half of recorded gun violence in America is attributed to suicides.

Pew Research Center reported that suicides accounted for 54 percent of all gun deaths in the United States in 2020, based on data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Welfare Creates Dependency on Government

During the 1960s, the federal government launched a welfare program with the intention to help black communities, Toure said, but welfare was intended for single-parent families, so those who had a stable family life didn’t qualify for the benefits.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment” and then launched the Great Society domestic programs that reinforced the welfare state, raised taxes, and expanded the government and its authority.

Those programs increased dependence on welfare, discouraged people from working, and damaged the family structure, Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economy scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in 2014.

Welfare policies favored single-parent families, thus encouraging divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing, Eberstadt said. He cited statistics showing that the rate of out-of-wedlock births in 1940 was 3.8 percent; by 1965, this figure had increased to 7.7 percent. In 1990, 25 years after the Great Society reforms took effect, the figure was at 28 percent and subsequently rose to 40 percent by 2012.

In 2019 to 2020, the rate remained at about 40 percent, according to the CDC.

Fatherlessness

The media often portrays fatherlessness as a black problem, Toure said, but that’s not the case.

Black nonmarital birthrates are higher than other racial groups, but “a much more dangerous trend is also evident: all ethnic groups have shown increases,” Ramon P. DeGennaro, a banking and finance professor at the University of Tennessee, wrote for the Online Library of Liberty, referring to data from 1940 to 2010.

The percentage of children raised in single-parent families continued to remain high in all racial and ethnic groups from 2010 to 2019, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Educating Against Government Overreach

“People need to be very clear on what government is,” Toure said. “The founders wanted very limited government,” the basic functions of which are protecting the nation and its borders, promoting commerce, and building and maintaining the roads and hospitals, he said.

The government instead creates a problem and pretends that it has a solution to this problem, Toure said. Then it will charge people for giving them their rights back. “That’s what overreaching government [does].”

The leftist Democrat approach is that people do not need a means to defend themselves and should just wait on the government to do it, Toure said.

“The government owes you something. Ignore what the government has already done for the last 50 years in your community. Keep your head down. Take $1,400 of your own money that the Fed printed up. Don’t worry about the inflation, hyperinflation, or stagflation. Just, it’s okay. The Big Daddy government got you,” he said.

“That’s the leftist propaganda. It’s not going to work. It’s not sustainable,” Toure said. Money has to be created by enterprise unless the dollar will be devalued forever and people agree to the bare minimum, a universal basic income of $1,400, he added.

Toure said it’s important to inform the people to push against this agenda.

“There needs to be a reeducation process,” Toure said. “Because civics and these things have been snatched from these schools, we as the people have to do it. That’s what this Solutionary Center is all about.”

Toure said when the community is informed and makes its decision outside of government meddling, it creates a more substantial, powerful, and empowered community.

To help black communities, Toure proposes a three-step formula which he summarized in three words: empathy, facts, and solutions.

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Empathy

He stresses the importance of empathy because “feelings matter,” Toure told the audience at FreedomFest in July.

“When you’re engaging someone in a community that has historically been told that you’re racist, and they don’t care about you, and you’re actually trying to spread your message, you have to understand that they don’t have a reason to listen to you,” he told the crowd.

“So in order to develop that rapport, you’ve got to listen: What are the struggles that this community or this individual is dealing with? ... You’re now developing a rapport with that individual,” he said, “and you’re creating a force multiplier.”

“Create liaisons. If you’ve got 5 to 10 guys,” Toure continued, “and whatever demographic—my city is Philadelphia—that are going to listen to the messaging, that force multiplier becomes stronger.”

Only then can the facts of the matter be explained to those people, Toure said.

Facts

In his speech at FreedomFest, Toure said many of the “facts” that are thrown around in these conversations are just not true.

“They’re myths that have genuinely been debunked, and we keep saying them and repeating them as if it’s going to work,” he said.

One example of such a myth is the idea that black fathers are overwhelmingly absent fathers, he said.

“Black fathers are among some of the most active fathers,” Toure said.

Black fathers, even if they do not live with their children, are more actively involved in their kids’ lives than fathers of other races, according to a report published by the CDC in 2013 (pdf).

Black fathers living with their children were most likely to have bathed, dressed, diapered, or helped children use the toilet daily (70 percent) compared with white fathers (60 percent) and Hispanic fathers (45 percent), the report said, while black fathers who live outside the home are also the most likely to be involved in the physical care of their children when compared to other races.

A larger percentage of black fathers than those of other races had helped their children with homework every day, and this applies to both categories: fathers who live with their children and those who do not live with them.

Solution

The third step of Toure’s three-step approach is solutions. The Solutionary Center educates people about gun safety and also offers conflict resolution classes and firearms training. Toure said he believes that increased gun ownership contributes to the reduction of violent crime.

The center is also open for other classes such as yoga, phlebotomy, Spanish language, sewing, trades, plumbing, and others, all funded by voluntary donations, Toure said.

“We are targeting the black community because that’s where the problem primarily is because of leftist government intervention,” Toure said. “We have to address this issue here where it is. Extreme disease, extreme treatment, and the leftist ideology and propaganda is an extreme disease.”

The approach is identifying local community problems and working to fix them regardless of that community’s racial makeup, Toure said.

“We’ve got to make sure that we’re careful and balanced on that approach, and if we continue to cultivate that, we can push back against this leftist agenda.”