In the wake of Philando Castile’s death at the hands of a police officer in Minnesota, much is being said about whether the National Rifle Association should have weighed in.
Castile was a black man in Minnesota who was killed by officer Jeronimo Yanez at a traffic stop for a broken tail light. He was a gun owner who was legally licensed to carry a firearm and he informed Officer Yanez of this fact. At which point Castile was told not to reach for his gun, but also to produce his license.
Conflicting commands by a police officer, compounded by the officer’s fear led to Castile being shot at seven times.
A Minnesota jury acquitted Yanez of second-degree manslaughter and endangering safety by discharging a firearm. People are upset by this verdict and they’re right to be. Now that the facts of the case are known, it certainly looks like a miscarriage of justice. Which brings us to the NRA.
The National Rifle Association is the nation’s pre-eminent (and if you are a supporter of the Second Amendment, least nutty) civil rights group defending the rights of Americans to keep and bear arms. But how and where they defend the Second Amendment varies. After the jury acquitted Jeronimo Yanez, many hot takes were issued on the Internet. The underlying complaint in all of them was that the NRA should have spoken out on behalf of Castile. Or, as Reason put it, the NRA had “shun[ned] a Second Amendment martyr.”
Yet while these criticisms make sense superficially, they’re actually criticisms of an alternate-universe NRA that doesn’t exist. And what’s more, they’re criticisms of an NRA that we shouldn’t want to exist.
For starters, the Castile case was incredibly atypical. In 2017 (so far) 460 people have been shot and killed by police, according to the Washington Post. (During which time 62 officers have died in the line of duty, though not all of them in shootings.) And according to the Violence Policy Center, in the last decade, 18 law enforcement officers have been killed by individuals with concealed handgun licenses, who typically commit crimes far less often than those who lack a license.
But concealed carry holders who were questionably shot and/or killed by police? No readily available statistic seems to be available. This is a very small category of incident. And in general, you shouldn’t try to conduct policy stemming from black-swan events. As the legal theorists say, hard cases make bad law.
But even when you zoom out to the general, the NRA is not in the business of talking about individual cases. There are tens of thousands of shootings a year in the United States, and the NRA comments on probably fewer than one percent of them, if at all. There’s a reason for that: It’s not what they do. Legal cases are complicated and can take months, or sometimes years, to play out.
The NRA’s focus isn’t on narrow individual cases, but on public policy. Whether you support it or oppose it, the NRA’s mission is to fight for Second Amendment rights broadly and let the legal system sort the individual cases out. The NRA only gets involved if a case (such as Heller or McDonald) can be used to further policy goals.
What could the NRA have done in this case, other than weigh in with a sympathetic PR statement? (Which, by the way, they did—days after the shooting and before all of the facts were known.) And how would comment from the NRA have advanced Second Amendment rights in the wake of Castile’s death? Would some new law the NRA would support have prevented or mitigated the chances of it happening? No.
The fundamental misunderstanding here is that people confuse the NRA (which is a policy shop with a lobbying arm, or vice versa, depending on your perspective) with the ACLU—which is a special-interest legal force designed to be deployed at the grassroots level.
In a case like Castile’s you want the ACLU approach. You want an organization to stand up and speak out against injustice. But the NRA isn’t that organization. And regardless of your politics, you shouldn’t want it to be.
Remember when the NRA got involved after the Newtown shooting? They did so in response to proposed legislation, and the left hated it. Do liberals want more of that kind of engagement? Not likely.
But what about conservatives, who make up most of the NRA’s dues-paying base? Would they want the NRA wading in to defend the rights of neo-nazis to openly carry firearms at a protest? Because that’s what an ACLU for gun owners would have to do.
If you have a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to bear arms, you’re going to have a group dedicated to defending it. And whatever your opinion of the Second Amendment, we’re all much better off with the NRA we have than we would be with an NRA that behaved like the ACLU.
