Police killing of Philando Castile a reminder Second Amendment and NRA campaigns don't apply to Black people

Philando Castile (L) with a colleague in undated J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School yearbook photo.

The National Rifle Association has been silent after Wednesday's police killing of Philando Castile, a 32 year old black man who had a conceal carry gun license, and whose legal right to that weapon played a key role in his death.

"He's licensed, he's carrying, so he's licensed to carry," said Castile's girlfriend, Diamond "Lavish" Reynolds, streaming a now infamous Facebook Live video just after the Minnesota cop shot Castile 5 times.

"He let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm."

At Fusion, Daniel Rivero writes:

On Thursday, I called the NRA and asked if it had issued, or planned on issuing, any comment about his death.

The woman who picked up the phone told me that they "might not put out any statement" about the matter.

What does that tell you?

What does it tell us? That the Second Amendment has never really been meant for black people. Rivero continues:

Evidence of this can be found even before America was officially a country. The first gun control law in the territory that is now the United States was passed in Virginia in 1640. It explicitly banned black people from owning guns, even if they were not slaves.

Over 200 years later, in 1857, the specter of black people with guns was a key factor in the notorious Dred Scott case. Scott was attempting to gain his citizenship and all the rights that came with it, but the court infamously ruled that "a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves," were not "intended to be included in the general words used in [the Constitution]."

The Second Amendment was never meant for black people [fusion]

What kind of man was killed by that police officer, for "absolutely no reason at all"? A good man.

Castile, who was known by friends as Phil, was a cafeteria supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School in Saint Paul, Minn., where he memorized the names of the 500 children he served every day — along with their food allergies, his former coworker said.

"He remembered their names. He remembered who couldn't have milk. He knew what they could have to eat and what they couldn't," Joan Edman, a recently retired paraprofessional at the school, told TIME. "This was a real guy. He made a real contribution. Yes, black lives matter. But this man mattered."

Previously on Boing Boing: Philando Castile shot dead by police on camera "for no reason at all"