Over the weekend, nearly 40 members of Ohio Open Carry, an armed and mostly white pro-gun group, rallied outside the Walmart in Beavercreek, a suburb of Dayton. Displaying pistols and even a few assault rifles, they gathered there to protest the death of John Crawford, a 22-year-old black man who was shot and killed by police in August as he walked around the superstore with a pellet gun he had picked up in the sporting goods section.

While organizers paid some lip service to the young man’s family and made a show of solidarity, the true motivation behind their presence was something else entirely.

“The whole point of this is to be a peaceful protest and educate people that Ohio is an open-carry state,” one masked attendee told WCPO, declining to give his name. “And a man was killed while open carrying a gun inside the Walmart.”

To really hammer the point home, dozens of Ohio Open Carry members at the rally took turns posing with a printout reading, “I am John Crawford,” which included an image of the slain young man. They later posted the photographs to the group’s Facebook page and culled a montage to make a YouTube video.

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Of course, it’s hard for many to believe that had John Crawford been a white, open-carry activist—like those who regularly visit retail and fast-food chains with AK-47s—he would have faced the same fate at the hands of police. As the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and several other black men recently killed by police under questionable circumstances resonate throughout the country, Ohio Open Carry’s tone-deaf message comes across as cynically self-serving. Not only does it attempt to turn John Crawford into a martyr for a movement to which he did not belong, but it also obfuscates the issue of race that’s at the heart of Crawford’s death.

“These guys are using black bodies to spearhead their own agenda,” says Aramis Sundiata, a program coordinator with Ohio Student Association, Columbus, which has helped lead the protest movement following Crawford’s death. “This pseudo-solidarity stuff is disrespectful as hell.”

Virgil Vaduva, who founded Ohio Open Carry, insists that’s not the case. “I’ve said from the very beginning that race was a factor,” he told ThinkProgress, adding that he himself has openly brandished a firearm in that very same Walmart. “If John Crawford were white, if he did not look like he were ‘from the hood’ [as Vaduva says some have alleged], I think he would still be alive today.”

Yet there was little talk about Crawford’s race among open-carry supporters leading up to the event, which was billed primarily as a protest over the Beavercreek Police Department’s alleged past harassment of open carriers in the city.

Crawford didn’t die in a blaze of bullets fighting to defend his state-given right to walk into a Walmart with a gun. He had entered the big-box store unarmed on Aug. 5 to pick up picnic supplies before heading to a cookout in Dayton, according to reports. While shopping, he had grabbed the pellet gun, which resembles an automatic weapon, off a shelf in the store’s sporting goods section.

Police say the sight of Crawford wandering around Walmart with the weapon while he talked on his cellphone prompted some frightened customer to call 911. Two Beavercreek cops arrived on scene and confronted Crawford. Police say he was shot twice after refusing to drop the air rifle and turned to the cops in an “aggressive manner.” Surveillance video of the deadly encounter does not show Crawford resisting or struggling with the cops. Regardless, a grand jury last month decided not to file charges against the officers.

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While many groups have responded to Crawford’s death by drawing attention to what they see as an epidemic of police brutality against blacks, Ohio Open Carry continues to stick to its own narrow interpretation of the event. “[The] brutal response from police is a clear attack on Ohioans rights to open carry firearms,” the group claimed in the days leading up to its rally at Walmart. “Bring your favorite firearm with you.”

On Saturday, Open Carry’s Veduva was packing a loaded P-90 firearm during the protest. “The message [the grand jury] sent out is basically that police officers can kill innocent people with impunity and get away with it,” he told the Dayton Daily News. What Veduva didn’t mention, and what data suggests, is that police kill black people at a far higher rate than white people.

Regardless of its motives, Ohio Open Carry has received credit for its efforts among a few black activists. “They showed up for this movement,” says Jovan Webster, who works for Direct Energy in Dayton and helped organize the “John Crawford Pilgrimage” last month. “They didn’t have to, but they did.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine open-carry advocates rallying to protest the deaths of Brown in Ferguson, Darrien Hunt in Utah or Ezell Ford in Los Angeles, all of whom were black men fatally shot by police this summer, and whose deaths for many have become emblematic of a violent and pervasive racism that permeates many law enforcement agencies. It’s even harder to imagine how a single one of these armed protesters, whose skin color keeps a target off their back and whose political cause is little more than a brazen provocation, has the nerve to call themselves John Crawford.