Justice
Do Black Citizens Have a Right to Bear Arms?
Recent court decisions and state laws have bolstered the individual right to bear arms, but not for everyone.
When police officers in Cleveland shot and killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy who was playing with a pellet gun in a park, the officers claimed that they thought Rice was an adult, perhaps a 20-year-old man. Yet had Rice been a man, and had his gun been a real firearm and not a toy, he would have been well within his constitutional and state rights to bear it.
That shooting happened in 2014, many hundreds of police shootings ago. But Rice’s death, and the automatic objection offered up by law enforcement as to why they did not bear responsibility for the child’s death—that he appeared to be a black man holding a weapon—helps to explain two horrific deaths this week.