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Corine Mack is the President of the Charlotte, North Carolina NAACP. Ms. Mack recently made statements that should be music to Second Amendment supporters’ ears. On CNN, the NAACP prez said that the mere fact that someone has a gun should not be enough to allow police to shoot them.

From CNN:

MACK: At the end of the day, you know, a video may show a different perspective depending on the angle. And so if we don’t have many different angles, you may not get the full picture. I think the most important part is the contrast in him having a book versus a gun. But in my mind and in most of the community’s mind, it really doesn’t matter if he had a gun.

At the end of the day, we have the right, under the Second Amendment, to carry here in North Carolina. And their responsibility was to engage him in a more de-escalated way, to find out if he had a permit for his gun and allow him to go on his merry way and he would still be living today.

That’s not what happened. And so I don’t want anyone to walk away from this conversation today thinking that a video showing he had a gun in any way says that he’s guilty of anything.

Mack went on to say that police give white people who have guns different treatment than black people. That’s a common misperception. While it’s statistically true that black people commit violent crimes at higher percentages than white people, police are more likely to shoot white people who resist arrest than black people who resist arrest.

From an analysis at wattsupwiththat.com:

Since the common thread in the killings is that the person was resisting arrest, we need to compare how often people of each race get killed by police, with how often people of the same race get arrested by police. But clearly, we’re not interested in arrests for jaywalking and the like. Since 97% of these deaths are occurring in the context of people violently resisting arrest, they are best compared to the corresponding number of arrests for violent crimes.
Here are the results of that comparison for 2015.

– For every 10,000 white people arrested for a violent crime, 38 white people were killed by police (± 2).

– For every 10,000 hispanic people arrested for a violent crime, 21 hispanic people were killed by police (± 3).

– For every 10,000 black people arrested for a violent crime, 21 black people were killed by police (± 2).

Go figure … I was as surprised as you, so I’ve triple checked the numbers, and it’s true—the odds of a given arrest going bad and ending up in a death are much greater for white men than for black or hispanic men.

That doesn’t surprise me much.

Police know that there are no white groups that are likely to riot in the streets if a white criminal is killed during an arrest. Police know they are much more likely to be criticized for a black person killed during a arrest than a white person. Police know that culturally, white people are more willing to give the police a pass on their behavior, especially if the individual involved has a criminal record.

There are no big city mayors who are going to condemn police for “racist” acts against white people. The President doesn’t won’t publicly state that white people “have a legitimate grievance”.

This doesn’t mean that the police consciously decide to shoot and kill a higher percentage of white criminals. It could easily be a sub-conscious, lower level of care when dealing with white criminals.

I applaud Corine Mack for her support of the Second Amendment. But the problem isn’t police racism. The problem is the higher level of black criminality, and its causes. I suspect those causes are primarily a lack of trust in the rule of law in black urban centers. All around the world a lack of trust in the rule of law is associated with high levels of criminality.

The constant, knee-jerk cries of “racism” reinforce the lack of trust in the police. Enforce the law equally and effectively in the black urban cores. Encourage a strong family structure. That will encourage a trust in the rule of law. As trust in the rule of law increases, black crime rates will drop.

©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.

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30 COMMENTS

    • Nah, she’ll be alright. It’s ok for liberals to wrap themselves in the Constitution whenever it provides a convenient excuse for bad behavior.

  2. I hate to generalize and make assumptions about what other people think. That being said, I guess I’m about to do both.

    They wanted cops to start filming all interactions like this. From what I’ve read there is body cam footage (what everyone wanted police to start wearing). Now that there is footage, oh well that doesn’t show every angle so we can’t be sure. While certainly true, do they want every perp to be surrounded by cops with a chopper in the air before anyone ever shoots?

    Now to make my assumption: the NAACP has been against CC/OC for a while, so this kind of makes me think that she is just using the 2A and OC law selectively in this circumstance.

    That being said, I applaud the comments at their face value. If she truly believes in the right to OC, then I sincerely hope the black community reflects on the benefits of lawful gun ownership, CC and OC. Unless proven otherwise, I like what she says in theory- that people should not face police harassment or violence simply for OC’ing. That being said, the above questions did enter my mind.

  3. Don’t give her too much credit. I suspect she is just using pro-gun language to deflect attention away from the convicted felon with a gun. The reason the the police react like certain areas are a war zone is that for all practical purpose certain parts of American cities are war zones. There really isn’t much difference between the South and West sides of Chicago and Somalia.

  4. True, possession of a gun is not (and should not be) justification for deadly force in a police encounter.

    However, when you have someone (particularly someone suspected of a crime or committing a crime) not just possessing but handling a gun, that’s a different ballgame.

    • That’s one of the things at issue in this particular case, though.

      Things that have been claimed/reported:

      (1) The cops were there to serve a warrant, but NOT on Scott. He was not the one named on the warrant.

      (2) When the cops arrived, he was sitting in his car…supposedly waiting for his child to get home from school.

      (3) He exited the vehicle and moved toward the cops.

      Let’s take these at face value for the purposes of discussion.

      Nothing in that set of facts suggests “deadly force.” But several questions are raised, such as:

      (a) Did he have a gun in his hand when he exited the vehicle? Actually IN HAND, or holsters open carry? If so, was he ordered to drop it and did not comply?

      (b) Did the cops act aggressively toward him initially mistakenly thinking he was the person named on the warrant?

      (c) Were his movements at any time aggressive as determined by the ‘objective reasonableness’ test?

      Specifically:

      (1) Assuming the warrant was legal and valid, the cops had a legal right to be where they were and to ‘investigate’ someone appearing to match the name on the warrant.

      (2) If he was NOT the person on the warrant, how did he act when approached/confronted by the cops doing a lawful investigation?

      That’s what the ‘good shoot/bad shoot’ question hinges on, and that specific question is being completely deflected in this whole mess.

      The issue is NOT was he guilty of something, but how did he act. I have to confess that at this point I am personally somewhat skeptical of the family’s claims that the video is ‘inconclusive,’ for one very, very important reason:

      Their story has already changed several times.

      They have stated he had a book, not a gun. Now it is pretty clear (and they have admitted it in a sideways way) that he had a gun, and the story has been changed to “he never pointed it at the cops.”

      They have also changed their story in regard to “he was sitting in his car when he was shot.” At one point, that was the claim…that the cops approached him and gunned him down.

      The “narrative” from the family and agitators has already gone through several alterations…each goalpost moving closer and closer to ‘the truth’ that the video likely shows.

      It’s important to note that they have seen the video, and they KNOW what it is there. They are trying to get their ‘interpretation’ of the video out here and in the public consciousness before the public sees the video. That’s my take, anyway. Totality of circumstances and all…

      • What the media and politicians are ignoring here (besides the overwhelming fact that there is no evidence to suggest that cops are hunting down black men) is the social pathologies affecting communities of color which lead to these sort of shootings can be laid entirely at the feet of liberal democrats.

        Those pathologies are a result of our welfare system. The system was launched in the 1930’s under FDR as a “widow’s pension” to support married women with children who’s husbands had run off or died. It was transformed in the 1960’s with a push from the Welfare Rights Organization (a group which believed that “certain people” simply couldn’t make it in society and thus needed to be supported on the tax payer dole) into a program that allowed any woman who became pregnant out of wedlock to claim increasingly generous benefits. This led to the destruction of the black family.

        As Democratic senator Daniel Moynahan warned in 1965, the loss of stable families would lead to more of the social pathologies which were plaguing the black community, not less. Today 73% of black children are born out of wedlock and 67% live in a single parent family. Research, such as that featured in Marvin Olasky’s excellent book “The Tragedy of American Compassion” show the damage absent fathers do to children.

        I’ve witnessed this personally, working with a company that does DNA testing in inner cities to allow children to attempt to determine who their biological fathers are, I met families where four or five generations of women had never had a husband or a job. I met a young woman who’s mother had born children with at least five different men, none of whom were active participants in the family.

        Add to this breakdown of the family a toxic urban culture that celebrates crime, drugs, violence and misogyny, and we get what we are reaping today. The media and liberal politician’s relentless efforts to frame every shooting as “murder of an innocent black man” before even the most rudimentary investigation has been completed are only fanning the flames.

        The only long term solution is to end the system which has produced these problems. The welfare system was created with the notion that it would help people (though some cynics argue, not unconvincingly, that it was created deliberately to make people dependent on the political class thus locking in their votes) yet has done tremendous damage to the communities it supposedly wanted to assist.

        Until it is reformed, all the problems with crime and violence in the inner cities will continue.

        • That’s what happens when a measure suitable for temporary relief of a symptom gets enshrined as a cure. As temporary relief of a societal problem, welfare was a great idea — but it was taken as a solution, and thus the real problems weren’t addressed, and so the “solution” merely made things worse.

          … kinda like the doc who kept prescribing pills for my hip pain and never bothered to have me get x-rayed — sure, I felt better, but my hip was made far worse because the actual problem was never addressed.

  5. All well and good NAACP gal. But could the dead guy legally have a gun? Has that been mentioned ANYWHERE? No? As mentioned don’t give her credit for anything worthwhile…

    • I’ll add to that the question of just what was he doing with the gun? I have heard no mention of that. Was it in his hand, and he refused to drop it? Fire away. Was it in a holster, and cops yelling at him to “drop it”? I would not even touch a gun in my holster with multiple cops yelling at me, you *KNOW* you’d be dead.

      • The prevailing word circulating is that the gun was in his hand. I have seen no account stating it was holstered.

        That’s important, because that would be the ONLY thing that makes the issue “Open Carry” (or concealed carry, for that matter) an issue. If it was in his hand at the time of the shooting, that’s not what we usually call ‘carry.’

        Initial versions:

        Sitting in the car when shot. Had a book in his hand, not a gun. Got out of car with book in his hand.

        Present version: Had a gun in his hand, but never threatened cops.

        The “in his hand” part can be inferred since they initially tried to sell the idea that it was a book. A book is unlikely to be holstered; it was in his hand.

        Also, a photo taken by a bystander has been released that shows a gun laying on the ground, not a book. If his gun was holstered, it is unlikely to have been dropped several feet from his waste band. Whatever is in that photo was much more likely in his hand at the time he was shot.

        Leaving for now the question: How was he hold the gun? Was it pointed at anyone? Was he ‘ordered’ to drop it, and if so, was he acting to comply or not comply? Was he moving aggressively?

        Just remember, too: No matter what the final story turns out to be, the family’s version of this incident has already changed at least three times.

  6. “For every 10,000 white people arrested for a violent crime, 38 white people were killed by police (± 2).”

    So when is our riot??

  7. Is there a racial disparity with enforcement of drug laws? Decrim drug use/production/distribution and lets see if rates for black criminality decrease.

  8. Pocket the win.

    You don’t have to agree with everything the speaker says, represents, or is part of. Pocket the win, and use it.

    “We have the right, n enforcers don’t get to selectively apply summary judgment.”

    “This is exactly why “pro-gun” folks are against limitations, restrictions, and approvals. They end up applied unevenly: cover for biased and abuse, just like “driving while black.” That’s not O K with us.”

    “Sadly, we’ve seen this in this country already — black folks denied legal arms, leaving them vulnerable to thuggery n threats, including ‘If you try to vote, we’ll kill you.'”

    “Gun rights are civil righth, n everybody has them.”

    You don’t have to win the whole game on one hand. Win tbe hand, n pocket the win.

    • It’s not a win. It’s a lie and obfuscation. The simple truth is that black people don’t understand the law. They simply and truly don’t. When you see a black politico like this ’embrace’ the second amendment, it is usually because he or she is trying to obfuscate what the black criminal who just died was doing at the time. Alton Sterling became a “concealed carrier”, even though he was a felon-in-possession fighting with cops. Now K. L. Scott becomes an “open carrier” because we couldn’t get people to believe he had a book in his hand.

      The reality is that black people, on average, have no idea what the law actually says regarding guns. They’ve been conditioned by fifty years of leftist rhetoric (including the lie that Martin Luther King was anti-gun/pacifist) to hate guns and to see them as the problem. Whenever they see white people using/carrying guns, it is immediately explained away as some sort of white privelege. When a black man gets killed with a gun in his hand, they claim he was doing ‘just what the whites were doing’, when in reality he was doing nothing of the sort. This woman wouldn’t know ‘brandishing’ vs. ‘open carry’ if you drew her a map. This is just another back-channel way to claim racism.

      • It’s not a win. It’s a lie and obfuscation. The simple truth is that black people don’t understand the law.

        You make my point for me. It doesn’t matter what she understands or believes. It matters what she said.

        So, she’s brought up the notions of the right to carry, of arbitrary enforcement, of gun rights as civil rights, and of enforcement as a stealth way to keep out groups down. It doesn’t matter whether she understands any of those things accurately.

        “As whoever, of the NAACP said…” then quote the parts that fit.

        She can be a completely programmed operative of manipulation, attempting to advance a nefarious agenda, and it doesn’t matter. She could be saying this stuff in the context of any number of wrong and heinous agenda and supporting any degree of agitprop. It doesn’t matter.

        Lighten up (Francis) about the underlying cultural themes, and pocket the win: what she said, that we can use to advance citizen gun ownership.

        While you’re at it, could you refrain from saying things that sound racist, or can be made to. That’s not helpful.

  11. I applaud her sentiments — no, the police shouldn’t shoot someone just because they have a gun.

    The question of carrying it is raised, however, because Keith Lamont Scott was a convicted violent felon (he plead “no contest” to charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon about 13 years ago). He spent 8 years in prison. As far as I know, he had not had his rights restored, and according to the CNN article detailing it, “Under North Carolina law, Scott would have been prohibited from owning firearms or ammunition because he had been convicted of a violent felony.”

    http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/22/us/keith-lamont-scott/

    So that raises a whole ‘nother set of questions. If he had a book in his hand, obviously it would be outrageous to shoot him for that. If it was a gun instead of a book, what was it doing in his hand? If they repeatedly told him to drop it and he didn’t, then — well, I think we all know what happens when multiple officers tell someone to drop a gun and they don’t. But if he was a convicted felon for violent assault with a gun in his hand – that changes the question of expected behavior quite a bit, doesn’t it? Presumably he knew that he could not own a gun, so what do you think his mindset was in getting out of the car with a gun in hand and police present?

    Only thing we can say for certain is that, once again, the initial reports and initial story rarely reflect what actually happens when more details come out.

    • “Only thing we can say for certain is that, once again, the initial reports and initial story rarely reflect what actually happens when more details come out.”

      That does seem to be the common theme with all of these “protests,” eh?

    • “But if he was a convicted felon for violent assault with a gun in his hand – that changes the question of expected behavior quite a bit, doesn’t it?”

      Yes, but only if they had firmly established his identity — if they hadn’t, then this position ends up authorizing cops to shoot people because “We thought it was (felon so-and-so)”.

  13. To my knowledge Dean is a privileged person. Being of the peasant class, I don’t have the same rights. Police will ignore a lot of crimes and infractions from middle class people but react with maximum force against poor class people.

    Money shields you from a lot of things, Dean.

  14. I’m a middle aged white guy that was surrounded by several cops with guns drawn just for OCing and minding my own business. I’m still here to tell the tale because I know how to listen and cooperate.

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