Despite its criticism of government overreach, the NRA has not rallied to the cause of black Americans claiming systematic abuse by the police

As the details of Philando Castile’s shooting by a Minnesota police officer emerged this week, many people asked the same question: where was the National Rifle Association?

NRA comments on Philando Castile shooting without using his name Read more

Many liberals, conservatives and police reform advocates alike pressed the nation’s most powerful gun rights organization to condemn the shooting of a law-abiding black gun owner. But the circumstances of Castile’s killing, including the suggestion by Minnesota’s governor that it would not have happened were he white, puts the NRA’s allegiance to police in direct conflict with its gun rights mission.

Despite its fierce criticism of government overreach, the NRA is largely a pro-police organization: many of its more than five million members, who are predominantly white and conservative, are current or former law enforcement officials, the group’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre, noted Friday. The group also hosts an annual “police shooting championship” and it has an entire law enforcement firearms division, which specializes in training police instructors.

If the NRA chooses to take up Castile’s cause – and some gun owners are arguing that the organization must do this, unless the facts of the case change dramatically – it could open up a new, conservative front in the effort to change American policing.

On an NRA News talkshow Thursday, the host, Cam Edwards, said that if black gun owners were reluctant to carry their guns because they were afraid of being targeted by the police, that was a “huge issue”.

“Self-defense is a human right,” he said. “Our right to keep and bear arms is not based on the color of our skin.”

His guest on the show, John Cardillo, a former New York police department officer, agreed that the idea that African American gun owners might be “more afraid of the police than the bad guys” was a “serious, serious problem”.

“I don’t want to see any American put their constitutional rights aside because they’re afraid of government,” Cardillo said. “If that problem exists, we need to fix it immediately.”

Self-defense is a human right. Our right to keep and bear arms is not based on the color of our skin Cam Edwards

The NRA had waited four days before breaking its silence on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and nearly two months before commenting, very elliptically, on the killing of Trayvon Martin.

Criticism of the NRA about its lack of comment about Castile only grew sharper after the group released an almost immediate statement Friday morning in support of the law enforcement officers shot to death in Dallas.

Hours after the NRA hailed the bravery of Dallas law enforcement officers, the group finally released an extremely cautious statement referring to “troubling” reports from Minnesota.

It said it would not comment further “while the investigation is ongoing” and did not use Castile’s name.

In the statement, the NRA called itself the nation’s “largest and oldest civil rights organization” and pledged that it “proudly supports the right of law-abiding Americans to carry firearms for defense of themselves and others regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation”.

Close observers of the organization said that it did not typically comment on police shootings of white gun owners, either. Bob Owens, the editor of the gun news site Bearing Arms, said he could not recall any other instance before Friday in which the NRA had made any public statement about an officer-involved shooting.

“I think so many people wanted them to respond in some way that they felt compelled to do it,” Owens said.

The NRA declined to answer questions about the Castile case, its previous responses to officer-involved shootings, or about its history of supporting the second amendment rights of black Americans.

‘A victim of state-sponsored persecution’

The organization has championed law-abiding black gun owners before. In 2013, Shaneen Allen, a black woman from Philadelphia, was arrested after she told a New Jersey officer at a traffic stop that she was carrying a gun. Allen had wrongly thought her Pennsylvania concealed-carry permit was valid in New Jersey, the NRA said, and she reportedly spent 40 days in jail and faced a potential five-year prison charge. The NRA spotlighted her case, suggesting she was “a victim of state-sponsored persecution”. The New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, eventually pardoned her.

The NRA also funded a successful lawsuit to overturn a ban on gun ownership for residents of public housing in Wilmington, Delaware. One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, a black woman and public housing resident named Josephine Byrd, has been repeatedly honored by the NRA at annual meetings as a civil rights hero.

The uncomfortable truth about gun rights supporters – sometimes they are right Read more

Owens said he was skeptical of the idea that there was any conflict of interest in the NRA addressing police incidents.

“Any profession there’s going to be bad eggs, and that includes law enforcement. Every NRA member I know – black, white, Asian, Hispanic – and law enforcement officers – wants to get rid of bad cops,” he said.

Gun rights supporters often highlight the racist history of gun control laws in America. Depriving African Americans of the right to own guns was a cornerstone of white supremacist policy; in 1967, the Black Panthers were America’s open-carry activists, and carried guns in their confrontations with police and into the California state capitol. In response, the then governor, Ronald Reagan, signed a sweeping gun control law and argued there was “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons”.

But the NRA has not yet rallied to the broader cause of the black Americans claiming systematic targeting and violence from law enforcement.

“There is, I’m afraid, some truth in the charge that conservatives are skeptical of government up until the point that the police or the army are involved,” Charles CW Cooke, an editor at the conservative National Review, wrote in an article about Castile.

Every NRA member I know – black, white, Asian, Hispanic – and law enforcement officers – wants to get rid of bad cops Bob Owens

Many leading gun rights commenters are vehement critics of Black Lives Matter advocates and blame them for inspiring violence against police. The targeted execution of white police officers in Dallas by a black veteran who said he was “upset about Black Lives Matter” has intensified this partisan feud.

In high-profile killings of black Americans over the past two years, such as the killings of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, gun rights advocates have often sided with the police or the shooter.

In many videos of officer-involved shootings, the people involved “are not complying with very straightforward instructions”, said Philip Van Cleave, the president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League. “Let me see your hands; keep your hands still. A lot of them are ignoring that, waving their hands around, putting their hands into their pockets.”

Critics see these views as steeped in reflexive anti-black racism. Gun rights advocates argue their views are founded in the details of each case. From the perspective of some gun rights advocates, video of a Louisiana man, Alton Sterling, being tackled and shot dead by police was not cause for protests and condemnation.

Sterling “was a felon fighting for control of a weapon”, Owens tweeted last week, alluding to early reports that he had a criminal record. He “apparently has a rap sheet”, said Larry Pratt, the executive director emeritus of Gun Owners of America. He argued a record was pertinent because “it might suggest the kind of person that the police were dealing with”.

Do black people have second amendment rights? | Zach Stafford Read more

Castile’s death was different. He was a beloved school employee, a legal gun owner with a record of only minor traffic violations, and he neither struggled nor opposed officers in any way. He was sitting in the car, following instructions.

“I am #PhilandoCastile,” Colion Noir, a black gun rights activist and the star of an NRA web series, tweeted on Thursday. “My closest friends are Cops and I know how hard their job is.”

He wrote that he was trying to reserve judgment. “The Young [black] Gun Owner in me wants to scream bloody murder!! The lawyer in me keeps saying, wait for all the facts,” he said.

“If he was a licensed CCL holder. And cops continue to do this. They’re going to make enemies out of everybody. No matter what color they are,” a commenter on Noir’s Facebook post wrote.

When the NRA posted its restrained statement on Castile’s death on its Facebook page on Friday, some commenters thanked the NRA. Others said that they were still concerned, and that the NRA’s statement did not go far enough.

“You must respond to this terrible crime and support all people’s rights to gun ownership and punish those who ignore this right,” a commenter named Bruce Johnston wrote. “Your silence is causing NRA members such as myself to question/wonder what exactly you do and don’t stand for. Your response to the terrible Dallas shootings came very quickly.”

The Second Amendment Foundation, a small but influential not-for-profit group that handles gun rights litigation, had taken an immediate and more more forceful stand on Castile’s death. It released a statement on Thursday afternoon pushing for an “independent investigation” of the “fatal shooting of a legally armed citizen” and had noted “the racial overtones arising from Mr. Castile’s death.”

“If you’re a minority member, you might be put in that situation more rapidly than the average gun owner. We’re very concerned about that,” founder Alan Gottlieb said.

For some in the gun rights world, talking about racial disparities at all is still seen as inappropriate “race-baiting”. Asked if Gun Owners of America, which bills itself as a “no-compromise” gun rights organization, had ever publicly condemned an inappropriate police shooting, Pratt said he was not sure.

“I know that we’re not reluctant to take a position when the police are wrong,” he said.

But when asked if the group had ever specifically condemned a police shooting or police mistreatment of a black American, Pratt said it was “a racist question”.

“We don’t speak out for black America nor white America or any other kinds of racial position. That is an obnoxious question. Keep asking questions like that and you’re going to get hung up on, like right now,” he said, then disconnected the line.