Roxane Gay on Owning a Gun and Standing Her Ground

Feminist scholar Roxane Gay has no fondness for guns, no interest in gun culture and rarely thinks about guns unless, as she says, “the news cycle demands it.”  But she’s a gun owner, having bought one after she and her family became targets of online death threats. “When I aim and pull the trigger and absorb the recoil,” Gay writes in a new essay, “I try to shoot straight and true. I revel in how capable I feel, what a welcome departure it is to be an active participant in my life instead of passively seething at all the things I cannot control.” We talk to Gay about feminism, race and gun ownership, and why more Black women are buying guns. Her new essay is called “Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem.”