The Daily Show host Trevor Noah took a break from telling jokes Tuesday night to speak directly to his audience about Emantic Bradford Jr., the innocent black man whom police officers mistakenly identified as a mass shooter in an Alabama mall over Thanksgiving weekend and shot dead. The actual shooter escaped alive and is believed to still be on the run.
“How does this shit keep happening?” Noah asked after laying out the details of the tragic incident. “The cops are called into a situation. They see a black person. And then immediately they shoot.”
“Even if we work within a world where the police truly believed he was the shooter, how many times have we seen a shooter who is white and a man get talked down?” he asked, citing the gunmen in an Aurora movie theater, Charleston church and others as prominent examples of authorities taking white male mass shooters into custody alive. When white male mass shooters do die, he added, it’s most often because they shoot themselves. When it’s a black man, he said the process is too often “shoot now, ask questions later.”
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“By the looks of it, it looks like this guy was a ‘good guy with a gun,’” Noah said. “That’s what they always say, that the ‘good guy with a gun’ stops the crime.” But if he “happens to be a black ‘good guy with a gun’ they don’t get any of the benefits.”
The entire incident made him realize that “the Second Amendment is not intended for black people,” adding “It’s an uncomfortable thing to say, but it’s the truth.”
“If you’re a black person in America, gun rights are not for you. It’s as simple as that,” Noah concluded. “It’s some bullshit, but it’s true. The Second Amendment was not made for black folks.”
