Video of Amir Locke just before he was shot by Minneapolis police, under a blanket on a sofa and with a gun in his hand, is seen by many observers — including Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison — as evidence enough that a Minneapolis police officer, under current law, was in their right to use deadly force.
The sight of Locke holding his gun was seen as an immediate threat. It resulted in a Minneapolis police officer shooting and killing Locke. As state law stands today, due to the presence of the gun in Locke’s hand, police had the right to take deadly force. Because of current law, Freeman and Ellison came to the conclusion that it’d be nearly impossible to make a case that, beyond a reasonable doubt, the officer who shot Locke was acting without reasonable cause — and thus, there would be no point to charge the officer with a crime.
To other observers, namely licensed Black gun owners, Locke may have fallen prey to the perception that a Black man with a gun is an immediate threat. Minneapolis police were executing an early morning, no-knock search warrant on Feb. 2 when they encountered Locke. Locke was legally in possession of the gun and was not the subject of the warrant.
A white man with a gun doesn’t always elicit a sense of imminent danger, said Devon Gilchrist, a Black gun owner who teaches a gun safety course in Minneapolis.
“We talk about what you can do, what you could do and what you should do. There are some things that I can legally do but I will not do because of the potential for a negative outcome to occur. Minnesota is an open-carry state. I can legally walk with my gun in my hand down the street. I’m not threatening anybody, I’m open-carrying. But I know if I do that, there will be ramifications for my actions. I know it will be viewed differently.”
During Gilchrist’s course — Black Diamond Firearms Training, which holds training, classes and organizes trips to gun ranges — he said he advises participants to find their personal comfort level. If Black people want to build the comfort to open-carry, it’s their choice.
“I choose not to open-carry, for obvious reasons,” said Gilchrist.
Gilchrist first came across guns while attending St. Thomas Academy High School, which he said had a gun range in the school. Since becoming a gun owner, Gilchrist keeps a gun at home and sometimes carries one with him. But mainly Gilchrist uses his gun for sporting activities like sharpshooting at a range.
His courses are for everyone, but he said Black people single him out for his specific expertise in owning a gun while Black. Like in the instance when a Black gun owner is pulled over while legally carrying a firearm.
Philando Castile was in this precise circumstance and was shot multiple times and later died. Castile was killed July 6, 2016, during a traffic stop when he alerted police that he was in legal possession of a firearm. In an attempt to show police his permit to carry, Castile was shot seven times.
“Some training places will tell people, ‘Well, just tell the police that you have a permit to carry,’” said Gilchrist. “Now, that can end very poorly. We’ve seen it happen. And it’s not right. We should be afforded the same rights (as white gun owners).”
Richard Robinson Jr., another Black gun instructor in the Twin Cities — he’s the CEO of Strong Arm Protection —said he also refuses to open carry in order to avoid someone seeing him as a threat and calling the police or taking action themselves.
But, when it comes to basic human rights — even though the right to bear arms is protected by the Constitution — he does not see gun ownership as one of them.
“I don’t think it’s a right,” said Robinson. “It’s a privilege. You often hear people saying, ‘This is my God-given right,’ and I’m like, ‘No, it is not, I’m sorry, sir.’”
He likens a gun permit to a driver’s license — it’s not a right to be able to use the potentially fatal machinery, he surmises, but a privilege that ought to be bestowed upon those who show the proper care and responsibility.
Robinson didn’t grow up around guns or a gun culture like hunting. When he pursued gun ownership, he said he first took the time to learn gun safety.
The reason Robinson Jr. does carry is for his protection. He always carries a gun with a round loaded in the chamber. He also keeps a firearm by his bedside, and said, like Locke, had he been awoken from his slumber to find people in his home, heading toward him, he would also reach for his gun for protection.
In a press conference announcing their decision against charging the police officer who killed Locke, both Freeman and Ellison said that law needs to be changed so that police don’t have the right to engage with deadly force when they simply see someone with a gun.
Robinson adds that it would help if police and non-law enforcement civilians alike stopped viewing the mere sight of a Black person with a gun as grounds to attack — and that people are more aware of how such perceptions impact and threaten Black people’s lives.
“I think about it all the time,” said Robinson Jr. “I have to.”
Good article. I liked both perspectives.
Just to be clear:
“I can legally walk with my gun in my hand down the street.” Actually, that would be brandishing and the police would likely tell you to put your gun down.
“In an attempt to show police his permit to carry, Castille was shot seven times.” Actually, Castille’s weapon was in his lap. He may have been reaching for his wallet but the officer only saw the gun within easy reach there and admittedly panicked.
“He likens a gun permit to a driver’s license – it’s not a right to be able to use the potentially fatal machinery, he surmises, but a privilege” Sorry, owning a gun is protected by the 2nd Amendment. Owning a drivers license isn’t a constitutional right.
“When it comes to basic human rights … he does not see gun ownership as one of them.” The Supreme Court has ruled that the 2nd Amendment is tied to the right to self defense which is a basic human right.
“He always carries a gun with a round loaded in the chamber.” Bad idea. Semi-automatic pistols are notorious for acccidental discharges. Revolvers, not so much.
“I choose not to open-carry, for obvious reasons.” Most people who carry (like me) always carry concealed. If you’re ever in a mass shooter situation, anyone open carrying would become his first target. Keep it hidden until you able to discretely draw it to defend yourself with it.
You should have interviewed Lucky Rosenbloom, the Black weapons instructor in St. Paul who would have given you different answers because of his decades of experience.
FYI
Officer Yanez never saw the gun and did not know where it was, only that there was one per Castille’s admission.
Walking down the street holding a handgun, or a long rifle is not brandishing, merely legally carrying. Waving a gun around while on the street, that’s brandishing; there’s a difference. Just to be clear.
The grandiosity of carry holders is most entertaining however. Some of you have an over-inflated sense of self however, what with the idea no matter how old, you still have the reflexes of a 20 year old, and will save the day due to your bravery, marksmanship, and training in high stress situations should any trouble occur in your vicinity.
No, carrying a rifle on the street is subject to different laws that generally apply to hunters. You don’t have much of a choice when carrying a rifle.
See Kyle Rittenhouse case.
When a handgun is out of its holster, in your hand, the police assume its because you intend to use it. That’s “brandishing.” See Kyle Rittenhouse’s armed attacker and why Rittenhouse’s self defense claim was supported by the court.
Yea, technically, owning and carrying a gun is currently a legal Constitutional right. Most rationale people in this country (supported in pretty much every poll) don’t agree that our 18th century framers conceived of what is happening in America in 2022, nor would have approved if they had. And certainly would have clarified the language in that less than perfectly worded Amendment if they had any inkling of 2022.
The Bill of Rights does not list a number of basic human rights. It lists a number of legal powers granted either to the States or to the People. The First Amendment may be seen as basic human rights to us today, but in fact, it is a government-appointed right granted to the People. That is, it wasn’t such a basic human right that it could be intuited without being written down, like actual human needs, such as food, water, and shelter (see, the Ninth Amendment). But the First Amendment is clearly a right given to the People. That is not true of the Second Amendment. If the First and Second Amendments were equally applicable to individuals, then prisons could not restrict the right of prisoners, let alone those who are on parole, from being armed. Yet, the Supreme Court has ruled again and again that the First Amendment is a right that is protected for prisoners, while the Second is not. Thus, gun ownership is not a basic right — it is something less than that.
In fact, the Second Amendment actually refers to a State power, not a right given to the People (notably, other than the 10th Amendment, it’s the ONLY one that mentions the States). Specifically, it refers to the States’ power to draw upon its armed people to build and maintain a state militia. That is, the Second Amendment refers to the restriction of the FEDERAL government from making laws that interfere with the States’ rights to have militias that /may/ be formed from armed State citizens. That would suggest that the States actually have the power to regulate gun ownership, but that the Federal government does not (absent compelling reasons for the well-being of the country). See, the Tenth Amendment.
I had to shutter at the part of your comment where you referred to the First Amendment as containing, “government-appointed right granted to the People…the First Amendment is clearly a right given to the People.” The rights listed within the First Amendment are not something that the government gives to anyone, but are what every person has and that the government cannot take away. The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. The Constitution is there to limit government, not so that it can allow us our rights.
Rights are granted by governments (or at least it’s moot whether they’re inalienable if a government does not protect said rights, and no one lives without government unless they live isolated by themselves). There are plenty of governments that don’t protect the right of free speech, and they arrest and even kill them for saying things those governments don’t like. The Constitution established the government of the United States of America. Thus, the Constitution enumerates the powers of the federal government, and outlines the powers of the States, and the rights of the People. While it may have been taken for granted at the time that the Constitution was written that the idea of free speech SHOULD be a right inherent to the existence of a person and in fact the Constitution indicates that there are rights that the People hold that are not particularly identified therein (remember that, at the time, some people were people and others were not), there’s a reason that the Bill of Rights was promised to be added as an Amendment before some states would commit to ratify the Constitution. Like I said, it may be foreign to think of the Freedom of Speech as a government granted (or at least protected) right, since we’ve always lived with it here, but that’s exactly what it is.
By the way, many of the commenters here might enjoy following/subscribing to content by Sharon McMahon (https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/). She’s a former high school government and law teacher who now creates some really interesting non-partisan government and law content directed to adults. She’s located in Duluth, MN.
The problem with Castillo is he was not ordered to show his carry card, he was ordered to put his hands up. Small detail, but a crucial detail. You do not show your card until instructed to. Someone reaching into their pocket escalates the situation. The cop still shot panicked and shot too fast.
Why do so many people in the black community think that they need to carry a firearm for protection? Owning a firearm automatically increases your odds of getting killed in a shooting.
Why do so many people in the white community think that they need to carry a firearm for protection? Owning a firearm automatically increases your odds of getting killed in a shooting.
The people that represent them want to defund the police.
I guess I’m more interested in another facet of your question: “Why do so many white people think they need to carry a firearm for protection?”
We have hundreds of millions of guns in this country, the vast majority of them owned by whites. There are about a million actual home invasions by strangers over a calendar year, most of them simple burglaries, and the number of burglaries has fallen by about 50% over the past couple decades, according to FBI reports. Around 100 burglaries result in homicide every year in the United States – a minuscule number that hardly justifies the imminent danger to children and neighbors posed by millions of frightened homeowners keeping a loaded weapon in the nightstand. Even if you have a home defense weapon, and know how to use it, the odds are very much that it will collect dust in a closet or nightstand (by which I mean it will likely never be used for its originally-intended purpose of home defense).
I’m also curious about the ratio of gun crimes committed against whites by blacks? Of gun crimes committed against whites by other whites? Of gun crimes committed against blacks by whites? Of gun crimes committed against blacks by other blacks? Answers to these would provide some context within which to arrive at a (more) informed opinion.
Why do so many people in the white community think that they need to carry a firearm for protection? Owning a firearm automatically increases your odds of getting killed in a shooting.
Think of it as an insurance policy. People own guns for the same reason they own insurance policies. Better to have one and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Bad insurance policy! Guns increase the probability of someone in the household getting shot accidentally when they bring a gun in the environment, Looks to be ~ 7X!
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use/
So the so called insurance is actually an increase in risk, not a decrease, made things ~ 7x less safe not more safe, funny how that statistical stuff makes what seems to be common sense into nonsense.
Thanks for that, Dennis…
This is just something that illustrates that conservatives don’t actually care about gun rights. Their defense of the killings of Amir Locke, Breonna Taylor, and Philando Castile proves that the right to carry a gun really just means the right for THEM to carry a gun. The number of people who at their rallies and protests make a point to showcase ARs and other weapons show that their real intent as a movement is the same as all terrorist organizations, to use violence and the threat of violence to intimidate for political gain. The fact that California has tougher gun laws than many places is thanks to their Saint Regan who didn’t like it when blacks started exercising the same rights conservatives now pretend to care about.
It makes sense, given the primary reasons for the 2nd amendment in the first place were to ensure that slaveholders could suppress any uprising (such as they had seen in Haiti) and to allow citizens the tools they needed to expand their purposefully genocidal movement westward.
Guns seem to rule the nights in some of neighborhoods and rural areas. This extreme form of individualism seems to be of ruin. Ruin at the base and at the margins of Society. No wonder Trump won in 2016 and seems to rule even now. Make a deal even if it doesn’t involve drugs and guns seem to be present. Theft from cars and offense by guns.
There are roughly 1000 police shooting deaths a year, over half were white people. I would assume in each one of those cases the person getting shot did something to trigger a response from police. With over 10 million interactions between police and civilians a year, a shooting is very rare. If a cop shoots anyone, black, white or brown there is an investigation.
The article implies that just being black will get you shot. That is not the case. At every conceal carry class I have ever attended, the instructor tells you if you have a gun in your car or on you, do only what the cop tells you to do. Waiving a gun around during an interaction with police will not work out well for you no matter the color of your skin.
Of course, you would make that baseless assumption. Same as the system that so often allows cops to literally get away with murder. However, your excuses for bad policing don’t apply to the people who are shot and killed by cops when in their own homes during no-knock raids or in situations like the gang of cops who were hunting citizens during the days after the Chauvin riots that were, without identifying themselves, firing at random people out of an unmarked van. Luckily the guy in that last case who fired back at officers was found not guilty. Unfortunately, he was put through a trial for some reason. On the flip, conservatives can bring firearms to protests to threaten and shoot at people and cops give them a thumbs up. If a majority-black group tried to do that we know what cops and conservatives would do.
Since around 40% of cops are involved in domestic violence and only around 2% of crimes are actually solved it actually feels that cops perpetrate more crime than they prevent. The fact that cops holding each other accountable is so rare is because they don’t care about enforcing the law. They operate under the same rules as any street gang. Conservatives love bad policing because it aligns with their love of violent, unaccountable, authoritarian governance and a fundamental belief that might makes right.
Running around with a gun on your person will obviously increase the likelihood that you’ll be shot if you happen to draw an interaction with police. All one has to do is look at the scenarios of many police killings since this country’s gun insanity was ramped-up by the horrendous “conservative” movement. The police know that the society they police is awash in an ocean of high-powered weaponry (“legal” or no), and thus they are increasingly trigger-happy as a means of extreme self-protection, ala the (gun-carrying) victims Castille and Locke.
Are police “too” trigger-happy, given the increased risks of being shot that the “conservative”-funded NRA has recklessly manufactured? That’s a question akin to “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin”? I guess now we’ll explain that sometimes someone with a gun should seem less dangerous to police than others. Good luck with that “training”.
Give the ocean of guns, is it even MORE dangerous to be “carrying while Black”, to use the phrase in the article? It seems everyone quoted agrees; which makes sense given the structural racism in policing (and society) which has been addressed extensively in the wake of the Floyd killing. America’s enthusiasm for high-powered weaponry has made it a much more dangerous society, despite the nonsense arguments that “more guns make us all safer”.
So we effectively have the 19th Century Wild West overlain with a modern militarized police state. The two regimes make no sense together and are fundamentally incompatible, but what does makes “sense” in the Conservative Era?