On Saturday, the rapper Killer Mike—one half of the hip-hop duo Run the Jewels and a known comrade of Senator Bernie Sanders—appeared in a nearly seven-minute video for NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s frenzied and bombastic television channel. The host and activist Colion Noir introduced him as somebody who “knows how guns can solve the problems society faces.” The timing of the video was particularly goading, circulating, as it did, while hundreds of thousands of students marched to demand more stringent gun-control laws. (Mike has said that it was filmed a week earlier, and that he had nothing to do with the timing of its release.) He admitted to Noir—who recently mocked the Parkland survivors, also on NRATV, telling them “no one would know your names” had their teachers and classmates not been massacred—that he had forbidden his own children from participating in any actions associated with the #NeverAgain movement: “I told my kids on the school walkout, I love you, if you walk out that school, walk out my house. It’s that simple. We are a gun-owning family.”

Killer Mike, who was born Michael Render, in 1975, in Atlanta, has consistently expressed distrust of any American institution infected by systemic racism. The game, he suggests, is too rigged. “I don’t trust the church or the government, a Democrat, Republican, a pope, a bishop or those other men,” he said in 2015, while introducing Sanders at a campaign rally in Georgia. Mike has self-identified, politically, simply as “a capitalist,” but he liked Sanders, he said, because of his promise to restore the Voting Rights Act, prioritize education, and “end this illegal war on drugs that disproportionately targets minorities and the poor.” (During Sanders’s campaign, he and Mike openly disagreed about an assault-weapons ban, which Sanders has long supported.)

The pro-gun argument that Mike presents to Noir centers, essentially, on the idea that black Americans can’t trust law enforcement to protect them, and that all citizens should be prepared to retaliate against inevitable violence. (He does not give much credence to the optimistic idea that violence itself could be eradicated—or at least slowed—by removing weapons from the streets.) He also decried the imbalance of attention, acknowledged and addressed at the March for Our Lives, allotted to young black victims, alluding, in a sympathetic way, to the N.R.A. spokesperson Dana Loesch’s seething remarks that “crying white mothers are ratings gold.”

Mike has rapped about most of these things before. He has a rubbery, blustery voice—melodious and playful, but trenchant. On “Lie, Cheat, Steal,” from 2014’s “Run the Jewels 2,” he suggests that violence can be an effective corrective to violence:

And I love Dr. King but violence might be necessary

Cause when you live on M.L.K. and it gets very scary

You might have to pull your A.K., send one to the cemetery

Still, for a rapper who has steadfastly refused to align himself with organizations that he deems problematic to now brazenly stump for the N.R.A.—while wearing an “End Racism” shirt—feels both perplexing and deeply hypocritical. The N.R.A. has never been particularly supportive of black Americans’ right to bear arms; in fact, some see the organization’s continued success as a reaction to it. In 1967, when armed members of the Black Panther Party gathered inside the California State Assembly chamber to protest the Mulford Act, a bill that would ultimately ban the open carrying of firearms in California, the N.R.A. instead backed the governor, Ronald Reagan, who eventually signed the bill into law; decades later, the N.R.A. also conspicuously failed to speak out about the death of Philando Castile, the thirty-two-year-old licensed gun owner who was murdered by a panicked police officer. (The N.R.A. said that it refused to advocate on Castille’s behalf because of his recreational marijuana use.) In 2016, following Trump’s Inauguration, Chuck Holton, who co-hosts a show on NRATV called “Frontlines,” tweeted, “Okay! Party’s over. Let’s get busy scrubbing Obama’s mocacchino stain off of America!”

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the March for Our Lives.

Killer Mike’s dismissiveness of the #NeverAgain protests also feels inconsistent. In 2014, on the night that a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mike delivered a powerful statement in support of protest. “I would like to give all thoughts and prayers to the people who are out there peacefully protesting,” he said. “I also give thoughts and prayers for the people who could not hold their anger in because riots are only the language of the unheard.” He was quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s 1968 speech, “The Other America,” in which King describes how the routinely disenfranchised might “feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.” But nonviolence, King insisted, remains “the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view.”

On Sunday night, in a two-part video, Mike apologized—sort of—for NRATV’s decision to release the video when it did. “I am your ally, young people,” he said. “I love and respect you all.” Whether or not black Americans can be reasonably expected to trust or rely on police officers is an issue the nation needs to grapple with, and urgently: last Sunday, in Sacramento, Stephon Clark, an unarmed twenty-two-year-old, was shot to death by cops who thought that the cell phone in his hands was a gun. But surely the question would be better addressed via an outlet not sponsored by the N.R.A., an organization that every American has endless reasons to be wary of.