Minn. police shooting reignites debate over Second Amendment, race
A black Minnesota man fatally shot by police Wednesday during a stop for a broken tail light was a licensed gun owner, prompting some observers to suggest that the debate over gun control and the Second Amendment has racial undertones.
When police in Falcon Heights, Minn., stopped the car in which Philando Castile, 37, was riding on Wednesday night, Castile attempted to give them his license and registration, as requested. He also told them he was a licensed weapon owner, according to the Facebook Live video posted by Diamond "Lavish" Reynolds, who identified herself as Castile's fiancée.
As Castile put his hands up, police fired into his arm four times, according to the video. He was pronounced dead later at a hospital.
"I'm waiting to hear the human outcry from Second Amendment defenders over (this incident)," NAACP president and CEO Cornell William Brooks told USA TODAY Thursday.
Brooks was preparing to travel to Minnesota to get up to speed on the Castile case after a trip to Baton Rouge, La., to get details on the police-involved shooting of another black man earlier this week.
"When it comes to an African American with a license to carry a firearm, it appears that his pigmentation, his degree of pigmentation, is more important than the permit or license to carry a firearm," Brooks said. "One would hope and pray that's not true."
Tweeted author and TV commentator Keith Boykin: "Does the Second Amendment only apply to White People?"
Amanda Zantal-Wiener, tweeted about the National Rifle Association, perhaps the most powerful of the national organizations supporting the Second Amendment, saying: "Hey, NRA, I'm sure you're just moments away from defending Philando Castile's second amendment rights. Right? Any minute now, right?"
The NRA did not immediately respond to a request for an interview. The organization has been publicly silent regarding the Minnesota shooting.
But at least two organizations, the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, both based in Bellevue, Wash., expressed concern over the case and called for an investigation by state-level entities, perhaps even from a state outside of Minnesota.
"Wednesday night’s shooting of Philando Castile is very troubling, especially to the firearms community, because he was a legally-armed private citizen who may have done nothing more than reach for his identification and carry permit," Allan Gottleib, founder and executive vice president of the foundation, and chair of the Citizens Committee, said in a statement Thursday.
"We are cognizant of the racial overtones arising from Mr. Castile’s death," Gottlieb said. "The concerns of our members, and honest gun owners everywhere, go even deeper. Exercising our right to bear arms should not translate to a death sentence over something so trivial as a traffic stop for a broken tail light, and we are going to watch this case with a magnifying glass."
Survey data show that white Americans and black Americans appear to have two different and distinct relationships with firearms.
Data released in 2014 by the Pew Research Center showed that blacks are less likely than whites to have a firearm at home. According to the study, 41% of whites said they had a gun at home compared to 19% of blacks.
But there has been much research to show that black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be gun homicide victims.
In 2010, blacks were 55% of shooting homicide victims but 13% of the U.S. population, according to a Pew review of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By contrast, in the same year, whites were 25% of gun homicide victims but 65% of the population, according to the same data.
In the early days of the Second Amendment, blacks were prohibited from possessing firearms, according to the National Constitution Center, a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia. The measure was intended to protect Americans' right to bear arms, and designated states as the entities who would manage this.
Gerald Horne, an historian at the University of Houston, said during a recent interview with the Real News Network that there was a race and class bias inherent in the amendment's provisions.
"The Second Amendment certainly did not apply to enslaved Africans," Horne said. "All measures were taken to keep arms out of their hands. The Second Amendment did not apply to indigenous people because the European settlers were at war with the indigenous people to take their land. And providing arms to them was considered somewhat akin to a capital offense. So the Second Amendment was mostly applicable to the settler class."
Horne says that many of the battles during reconstruction were about keeping arms out of the hands of black Americans — he says one of the key reasons the Ku Klux Klan was formed in the post-Civil War era was to keep arms out of the hands of blacks.
Said Brooks, "I would just simply note that in a state like Texas, where we have thousands upon thousands of people with concealed weapons permits, a permit is sufficient proof to vote while a college ID is not. Think about that."
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