370 SHARES Share Tweet

A group of Black gun rights activists advocates for the right to open carry on Ohio State University and defend their right to defend themselves with firearms.

In November 2016 a Somali-born Ohio State University student Abdul Razak Ali Artan used his car to run over his fellow students, then exited the car to slash people with a knife. Artan was fatally shot by campus police before 13 students and staff were injured in the attack.

SEE ALSO: Seattle court judges will overturn misdemeanor marijuana convictions prosecuted between 1996 and 2010

This incident sparked a group of white students organized an open-carry gun walk on campus to promote students’ rights to self-defense by firearm. After the rally according to The Free Thought Project, ten OSU faculty members wrote a letter of condemnation to the campus newspaper’s editor and suggested the group was racist and should not have been protected by campus police.

SEE ALSO: Black woman’s photo shoot interrupted by white man who asks for permit

Black Ohio State University students challenge the notion of the faculty and engage other students last week in a debate about their rights to defend themselves with firearms.

Kendall Arroyo a student who helped organize the event said, “if you want to know the God-honest truth, we read the letter [to the editor] and we noticed that they basically said, ‘We don’t think a bunch of black people could be able to get away with something like this’…This is not supposed to be a racial thing. We’re talking about second amendment rights for every law-abiding American citizen. Our race should not have to be a factor at all, and society says that we’re either supposed to be gunned down or incarcerated right now. And we’re here to show that that’s not the case, and now I invite them to figure out their next excuse.”

Arroyo went on to say, “unfortunately, college campuses are an environment where a lot of assaults, robberies, sexual harassment and things like that take place, and current [rules] state that students and faculty are not allowed to carry…If that were to change, we might actually see a decrease in those kind of crimes.”

Both groups of student gun rights activists want to be able to carry concealed firearms on campus for the protection of students.

Copyright ©2018 The Black Detour All Rights Reserved.