Two Types of Gun Laws: One for Blacks and One for Whites

[YoungDemCA]

Interesting article, though unfortunately, we've known this for a looong time.

WASHINGTON -- If you are a black man in America, exercising your constitutional right to keep and bear arms can be fatal. You might think the National Rifle Association and its amen chorus would be outraged, but apparently they believe Second Amendment rights are for whites only.

In reaching that conclusion I am accepting, for the sake of argument, the account given by the Charlotte, North Carolina, police of how they came to fatally shoot Keith Lamont Scott on Tuesday. Scott's killing prompted two nights of violent protests that led Gov. Pat McCrory to declare a state of emergency. On Friday, police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shot and killed Terence Crutcher -- an unarmed black man -- and the two incidents gave tragic new impetus to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Scott's relatives claim he was unarmed as well. But let's assume that police are telling the truth and he had a handgun. What reason was there for officers to confront him?

North Carolina, after all, is an open-carry state. A citizen has the right to walk around armed if he or she chooses to do so. The mere fact that someone has a firearm is no reason for police to take action.

This is crazy, in my humble opinion. I believe that we should try to save some of the 30,000-plus lives lost each year to gun violence by enacting sensible firearms restrictions -- and that the more people who walk around packing heat like Wild West desperados, the more deaths we will inevitably have to mourn. In its wisdom, however, the state of North Carolina disagrees.

We should continue to lobby for tighter gun laws and hope that someday the voices of reason are heard. But at the same time, we should demand that current laws be enforced fairly even if we don't like them. Scott's death is the second recent police slaying to suggest that laws permitting people to carry handguns apparently do not apply to African-Americans.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/09/23/two_types_of_gun_laws_one_for_blacks_and_one_for_whites_131869.html

[exboyfil]

2. Every gun board that I have visited trying

to determine whether it is accepted common practice to carry around a gun in your hand in an urban/suburban setting indicates that it is crazy. One question was whether you could carry around a gun in a holster because it was raining (this is in a state that does not allow unlicensed concealed carry), and the conclusion was that no you could not - strap the holster around your poncho if you must but do not carry it

One conclusion I have is that North Carolina gun laws do not adequately address brandishing which is what carrying around a loaded gun around people actually is irrespective if you point it or not.

I am not sure you can find any but the craziest of the craziest that would advocate carrying the gun in your hand. Any rational person would be expect to be shot if you did not immediately comply with an order to drop a gun.