The from gun rights supporters in the wake of mass shootings or other gun violence is that the best response to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Yet in recent weeks, we have seen two Black men, a group already disproportionately victimized by police use of lethal force, shot and killed by police while protecting those around them with guns they were legally allowed to carry.
It turns out that not only are unarmed African-Americans more likely to be shot, but those who seek to follow the and others to arm themselves may only make themselves more vulnerable. It is especially troubling that gun rights proponents have largely been silent when police kill Black people for lawfully using their guns.
For example, the NRA and President Trump — despite their embrace of the social media bullhorn — have not condemned the police for killing unarmed Black people. Moreover, they have yet to denounce police officers who kill Black people for possessing guns they’re legally entitled to carry.
The police killings of legally armed Black citizens, and the refusal of leading gun-rights proponents to sincerely defend the victims, raises the same troubling question that both and the Black Panther Party also confronted when they tried to exercise their rights to bear arms: In practice, do Second Amendment rights protect only white gun owners?
The most recent example is Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford, Jr., a former Army recruit and a licensed firearm owner in Alabama, an open-carry state. The police department has yet to release the video of the incident, but we now know that Bradford was carrying his gun at a mall on Thanksgiving night when someone else began shooting — the kind of situation where gun proponents often claim that .
Bradford responded by drawing his gun and “,” reported The New York Times. But when the police arrived, witnesses say they shot him “within milliseconds.” The police department initially that Bradford was the mall shooter and lauded his killer as a hero.
But it was wrong.
The department has since this statement was “not totally accurate” in at least two ways. First, the officer shot the wrong man, and the mall shooter was actually still at large. Next, police admitted that Bradford had not “brandished” the gun but simply had it in his hand when officers approached. An independent autopsy that Bradford was shot three times from behind.
President Trump has had nothing to say about this tragedy. The most to come from the NRA is spokesperson Dana Loesch that the police have refused to release the bodycam footage. But even that statement took more than a week. As Black Alabamans and racial justice allies protested in the days following Bradford’s death, the organization said nothing about the reality of race in America or about how Black men are denied the right to bear arms that others enjoy.
Instead of acknowledging Bradford, a real-life good guy with a gun, it a quote from its executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre: “To preserve our values and protect our freedom, America needs the good guys to step up like never before.”
And Bradford’s death isn’t even an isolated incident.
Just two weeks prior, police officers killed Jemel Roberson, a Black security guard and registered gun owner, who responded when several men began shooting at the Illinois nightclub where he worked. When the police arrived, Roberson was doing his job: He legally had his gun out and had subdued one of the men with his knee in the man’s back.
It didn’t matter.
The officers shot and killed Roberson, even as witnesses warned them he was a security guard. Roberson has widely been lauded as a hero, and even the police department later Roberson was “a brave man who was doing his best to end an active shooter situation.”
But again, gun rights proponents have been quiet.
When Philando Castile was killed in 2016 after the police officer who stopped his car that he had a gun and a license to carry one — the recommended for announcing the presence of a gun to an officer — gun rights advocates were again silent. The NRA said nothing about Castile’s case for more than a year.
When Loesch finally did offer a , she stopped short of criticizing the police officer, cryptically saying that “… there were a lot of things that I wish would have been done differently.” She suggested that an NRA Carry Guard card could have prevented his killing. But the officer shot Mr. Castile while he was reaching for his driver’s license and registration, so it’s not clear how having an NRA card in his wallet could have possibly helped.
This equivocation is unprincipled. Whatever one’s view of the appropriate scope of the Second Amendment, it ought to extend to all equally, without regard to race.
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Racial Justice
ACLU Statement on House AI Task Force ReportACLU Statement on House AI Task Force Report
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News & CommentaryDec 2024
Racial Justice
Human Rights
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Press ReleaseOct 2024
National Security
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WASHINGTON — The Biden-Harris administration today released its National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence (AI), establishing guidelines for how the U.S. government uses AI in national security programs, such as counterterrorism, intelligence, homeland security, and defense. The use of AI to automate and expand national security activities poses some of the greatest dangers to people’s lives and civil liberties. Agencies are increasingly exploring the use of AI in decisions about who to surveil, who to stop and search at the airport, who to add to government watchlists, and even who is a military target. While the government’s policy includes some important steps forward — such as requiring national security agencies to better track and assess their AI systems for risks and prohibiting a subset of dangerous AI uses — it falls far short in other critical areas, leaving glaring gaps with respect to independent oversight, transparency, notice, and redress. The policy imposes few substantive safeguards on a wide range of AI-driven activities, by and large allowing agencies to decide for themselves how to mitigate the risks posed by national security systems that have immense consequences for people’s lives and rights. As we have repeatedly seen before, this is a recipe for dangerous technologies to proliferate in secret. “Despite acknowledging the considerable risks of AI, this policy does not go nearly far enough to protect us from dangerous and unaccountable AI systems. National security agencies must not be left to police themselves as they increasingly subject people in the United States to powerful new technologies,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “If developing national security AI systems is an urgent priority for the country, then adopting critical rights and privacy safeguards is just as urgent. Without transparency, independent oversight, and built-in mechanisms for individuals to obtain accountability when AI systems err or fail, the policy’s safeguards are inadequate and place our civil rights and civil liberties at risk.” For years, the American Civil Liberties Union has been urging far stronger safeguards and transparency about the AI tools that national security agencies are deploying, the rules constraining their use, and the dangers these systems pose to fairness, privacy, and due process. -
Press ReleaseOct 2024
Racial Justice
ACLU Comment on the Department of Labor’s AI Guidelines for Employers and VendorsACLU Comment on the Department of Labor’s AI Guidelines for Employers and Vendors
WASHINGTON — Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) released a roadmap for artificial intelligence (AI) best practices, designed to ensure that emerging technologies such as AI enhance job quality, benefit workers, and comply with existing employment laws when they are used in the workplace. The best practices, pursuant to President Biden’s executive order on the development and use of AI, include recommendations for AI system developers and employers that prioritize workers’ experiences and empowerment throughout the entire AI lifecycle – from design to use and oversight. These practices also call on employers and developers to create standards and processes to identify and mitigate risks from AI systems, such as threats to health and safety, civil rights, privacy, fair labor rights, and labor organizing prior to a developer marketing them or an employer deploying them, and recommend turning to different systems when sufficient mitigation is not possible. “We applaud DOL for issuing best practices for use of AI that center workers’ empowerment, civil rights, privacy, and safety protections and call on developers and employers to adopt critical guardrails in developing, procuring and using AI systems. Employers and developers should take note, as many have been burying their heads in the sand on their risk of legal liability with respect to AI tools,” said Olga Akselrod, senior staff attorney of the ACLU Racial Justice Program. “Following these best practices for AI can help employers and developers ensure that they do not violate existing civil rights and other employment laws that protect workers.” The best practices also recommend transparency measures through conducting and publishing impact assessments, notice and recourse for impacted workers, and measures to minimize worker displacement. The DOL also stated that employers should minimize electronic monitoring and avoid unnecessary collection or retention of worker data.