WASHINGTON – One man told an officer during a Minnesota traffic stop that he was a licensed gun owner, and that he was reaching for his wallet, a witness said. The other was on the ground with police officers on top of him in Louisiana when someone shouted “He has a gun!”
Police in each circumstance thought the black man carrying a gun was dangerous and immediately shot him dead. Activists say black gun owners are often treated differently than white gun owners to a sometimes fatal degree.
The perception of an armed black person has not changed much since the days of slave rebellions, said the Rev. Kenn Blanchard, a former firearms instructor who runs BlackManWithAGun.com.
“If you have a firearm or you scare the wrong people, you’re going to get shot. You’re going to get killed. The perception of the scary black man still exists. The threat of the slave going rogue, it’s still there. The bad gangbanger,” Blanchard said.
It can be dangerous for black men and women to own guns in this policing environment, and it shouldn’t be, considering that gun ownership is a constitutional right, said Philip Smith, president and founder of National African American Gun Association.
Sterling was a convicted felon, which would have barred him from legally carrying a gun, according to court records. It was not immediately known whether the gun held by Castile was legal.
That information might not have mattered during their confrontations with police, Smith said.
“They’re not getting any kind of the benefit of the doubt. There’s no conversation. If there is a conversation, it’s a one-way conversation where the African-American male is being yelled at, pretty much, ‘Sit down and be quiet or you’re going to get shot,’ “ Smith said.
The first gun-control laws were passed to keep weapons out of the hands of black slaves and freedmen in colonial days, said Nicholas J. Johnson, a Fordham University law professor and author of Negroes and The Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms. During the post-Civil War period and the times of slavery, Southern states imposed strict gun laws against blacks that lasted through the civil rights movement.
Police have an outsized fear of armed blacks, activists said. The majority of blacks are not armed and the majority of killers of police officers are white. The FBI said 199 law enforcement officers were killed between 2011 and 2014. Of their killers, 133 were white and 70 were black.
Blacks also are only about half as likely as whites to have a firearm in their home – 41 percent vs. 19 percent – according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey.
But another Pew survey showed more and more blacks becoming comfortable with owning guns, with 54 percent saying in 2014 that gun ownership does more to protect people than endanger personal safety, nearly double the 29 percent from December 2012.
“Historically, African-Americans have viewed guns kind of like the boogeyman – ‘The master told you not to look at the gun and we shouldn’t touch a gun,”’ Smith said. “But that mindset is changing very, very quickly.”
