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On Tamir Rice and America’s Racist Gun Culture

When we talk about the death of Tamir Rice, (the 12 year old boy who is one of the most recent additions to America’s record of fatalities at the hands of the police), what America are we really discussing? The land of the free? Or the country built on the idea that only some residents were actually human enough to count? Perhaps the most startling part of the discussions surrounding Tamir Rice’s death is the refusal by some to acknowledge the role that race played in the police decision to shoot him. Pundits on the left and the right have blamed him for being at the park playing with a BB gun, blamed his parents for letting him have one at all, and even asserted that (despite video evidence to the contrary) he must have pointed the BB gun at the officers in order for the decision to have been made to shoot him.

American gun culture is such that a nine year-old white girl practicing with an Uzi can accidentally kill her instructor and that’s rightfully seen as a tragedy, but Tamir is blamed for having a gun at all, much less one sans the orange safety tip, though it was apparently in his waistband when he was shot by police. The story of Tamir’s death is still unfolding, the original police narratives rapidly falling apart because of video evidence and damning personnel files. But the individual cases are just symptoms of a larger problem with American gun culture. Even if you’re someone who like guns, enjoys owning them, you have to ask yourself how this culture reconciles itself with the idea of a right to bear arms for all in theory, being a right to bear arms for some in reality.

Arguments against gun control usually point to the idea of home safety, of mysterious armed criminals with bigger better weaponry than the average homeowner or police can manage to have on hand. The face of those mythical criminals is invariably a non-white one. Gang violence is imagined to be largely the province of Black, Latino, and Asian men in pop culture. When the face of that kind of violence is white it is romanticized in America from a fascination with drug dealers (Weeds, Breaking Bad) to mobsters (Sopranos, Untouchables, etc) to motorcycle gangs (Sons of Anarchy) being enfranchised in our entertainment. Those gun wielding criminals are writ large and very human, the guns in their hands placed there for reasons that audiences quickly learn to understand and even respect.

So why wouldn’t Tamir want a gun like every other red blooded American? Particularly with movies like A Christmas Story that air every year complete with depictions of young kids dreaming of their first BB gun. It’s easy to argue that he should not have had the gun in the park (or at all) if you ignore the cultural cachet of guns in American culture. If all Americans have the right to bear arms, then why are only some Americans being shot for having a facsimile of a real weapon? After all, when Joseph Houseman was waving an actual gun around threateningly, police opted to talk to him for 40 minutes and gave him back his gun the next day. When Zach Conley carried a rifle into a Colorado Walmart, police had a chat with him about not scaring the neighborhood and sent him on his way, with his rifle.

Discussions of gun control in America tend to center on crime, with very little attention given to why so many Americans like guns. Or to the cultural messages that have made guns such an integral part of our society. In a country that has a long standing love affair with weapons, there can be no clearer indication that race plays a huge role in how police respond to reports that someone is in public with a gun. Tamir Rice had a BB gun in his waist band. He was playing with it in the park as kids do. Tamir Rice is dead now. Killed by a police officer with a questionable work history. John Crawford III had a BB gun in his hand in a Walmart. He picked it up from the shelf where it was for sale and was carrying it. As people do when they are shopping and thinking of purchasing an item. John Crawford III is dead now. Killed by a police officer. In both cases they were in Ohio, a state that is Open Carry and Concealed Carry. Neither was holding an actual gun, but even if they were the mere possession of a gun in public in Ohio isn’t illegal or cause for the police to shoot. Although Open Carry activists have staged more demonstrations since the killing of John Crawford III, the proverbial elephant in the room is that despite America’s fondness for touting the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, that right often comes with a color code. The problem here isn’t the BB guns, it’s the perceptions of police officers that make it possible to shoot Black men for having them in their hands.

Photo by Mitch Barrie, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

2 thoughts on “On Tamir Rice and America’s Racist Gun Culture

  1. This is a great observation. White people and non bpoc will jump through a million hoops to not acknowledge racism against black americans even though its so obvious, its just sad at this point.

  2. It’s so blatantly obvious that it’s sickening to see them shaking their heads and denying that it had nothing to do with race. If it wasn’t race, what was it? What do we question? Their morality? Ethics? Being human and humane? This post rightly points out the crystal clear inequality among races and how unbelievably terrible it is that people meant to serve and protect are so quick to kill.

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