Trevor Noah: “The Second Amendment Is Not Intended for Black People”

Luke Darby
Updated
The double standard was obvious even before the police killing of Emantic Bradford Jr., who was trying to stop a mass shooting in an Alabama mall.

On Black Friday, police responded to a shooting at an Alabama mall. They reported that they had shot and killed the shooter, an armed black man, before anyone else was hurt. Not long after, they had to correct themselves: The man officers had killed was Emantic Bradford Jr., a veteran, who was trying to stop the shooting himself. The real shooter is still at large.

On Tuesday night, Trevor Noah addressed Bradford's killing with more gravitas than usual for the Daily Show host. Even if Bradford had been the shooter, he explained, the police response was "shoot first and figure things out much later." At the Aurora theater shooting, police talked down the shooter and took him alive. The same in Charleston, with Dylann Roof. And Noah points out that when white shooters die instead of going into custody, it's by their own hand, like in Las Vegas or, more recently, the Thousand Oaks shooting.

"By the looks of it," he said, "it sounds like this guy was a good guy with a gun. That's what they always say, right? The good guy with a gun stops the crime. But then if the good guy with a gun turns out to be a black good guy with a gun, they don't get any of the benefits."

This has long been an argument of gun-control opponents: The only way to stop a shooter is to have a crowd peppered with people who will shoot back. But black people with toy guns get shot by police in states where carrying a gun in public isn't even illegal, which is what happened to 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Ohio. Even in the Alabama shooting, Noah explains that multiple people besides just Bradford had drawn guns in self-defense. Only Bradford was shot. Which gets him to his main concern:

"At this point you start to realize that, really, the Second Amendment is not intended for black people. It's an uncomfortable thing to say, but it's the truth. People will be like, 'the right to bear arms.' Yes, the right to bear arms, but not if you're a black man. If you're a black man, you have no business bearing arms at all."