Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MSNBC Daily.
On May 3, almost eight years after a Minnesota police officer shot dead Philando Castile, a Black motorist who’d dutifully informed the officer of his firearm, a Florida sheriff’s deputy shot dead Roger Fortson, a Black 23-year-old senior Air Force airman who answered the banging on his door with his legally owned pistol pointed at the floor. A funeral for Fortson was to be held Friday at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb.
in 2015. The next year, America saw the Facebook Livestream that Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, started seconds after the officer had shot him. “He’s licensed to carry,” she said to the camera. “He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out of his pocket and he let the officer know that he was — he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet.
’s membership exploded after Castile's death. There has been a similar spike in interest in his organization since Fortson was killed, he said. And plenty of anger from some members of his organization, both Black and white. The killings of Castile and Forston underscore the disservice many news outlets have done in their stories emphasizing that a Black man killed by the police was “unarmed.
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