On August 5, a man named John Crawford was playing with a toy rifle in an Ohio Wal-Mart. Someone called 911, and police showed up and shot him in the chest. He died.
On August 9, a man named Michael Brown was walking in the street in Ferguson, Missouri, when a police officer stopped him. According to the friend that was with him, Brown put his hands up to show that he was unarmed. The officer shot him in the back. Brown’s body was left in the street for hours before being removed.
Since then, the incident in Ferguson has overshadowed the Ohio Wal-Mart shooting. Protesters have been gathering, and demanding answers from the police, who have become increasingly skittish and violent. Journalists are being told to turn off their cameras, local residents are getting tear gassed.
Nobody knows exactly what happened, but whatever the facts may be, things certainly look bad now. To most Americans, this is the stuff of horror films: A sleepy rural town being terrorised by an advanced military.
All of this then, begs the question: Where is the National Rifle Association (NRA), and where is the Tea Party?
Ohio, after all, is an open-carry state, which means that people are allowed to carry guns wherever they choose. This is a right flaunted often by white gun activists, who like to take assault rifles to shopping malls. So why isn’t the NRA making noise about John Crawford?
And police firing into crowds of protestors, blocking media access, and enforcing a 9 pm curfew in a residential area: Isn’t this the big-government tyranny that the Tea Party has been talking about since its inception? Why aren’t they sending a militia to Ferguson?
The answer to these questions is simple, of course: Both John Crawford and Michael Brown were black.
We know the Tea Party isn’t afraid to “patrol” dangerous areas. We know the NRA has money. One would think that the two groups would join forces and drive out to Ferguson with a few trucks full of guns, street soldiers, and good cheer. They could ensure that liberty was being maintained. This would be a great PR move - they could finally prove that when it’s time to make a stand, they’re willing to do it.
That is, if they cared about minorities, at all.
But the Tea Party, the NRA, and their ilk have been almost completely silent on the issue. Their sites instead are sending out the usual reports on illegal immigration and (white) citizens’ rights to carry assault rifles in public. The Libertarians had nothing to say until August 14.
So, perhaps we should now be allowed to say out loud what we’ve known all along: That these organisations are not interested in liberty, but instead are focused on white supremacy at all costs.