Protests were organised in the US town of Ferguson, Mo after the police shooting of Michael Brown. [AP]
Al Jazeera
On August 5, a man named John Crawford was playing with a toy rifle in an Ohio Wal-Mart. Someone called 911, and police showed up and shot him in the chest. He died.
On August 9, a man named Michael Brown was walking in the street in Ferguson, Missouri, when a police officer stopped him. According to the friend that was with him, Brown put his hands up to show that he was unarmed. The officer shot him in the back. Brown's body was left in the street for hours before being removed.
Since then, the incident in Ferguson has overshadowed the Ohio Wal-Mart shooting. Protesters have been gathering, and demanding answers from the police, who have become increasingly skittish and violent. Journalists are being told to turn off their cameras, local residents are getting tear gassed.
Nobody knows exactly what happened, but whatever the facts may be, things certainly look bad now. To most Americans, this is the stuff of horror films: A sleepy rural town being terrorised by an advanced military.
All of this then, begs the question: Where is the National Rifle Association (NRA), and where is the Tea Party?
Ohio, after all, is an open-carry state, which means that people are allowed to carry guns wherever they choose. This is a right flaunted often by white gun activists, who like to take assault rifles to shopping malls. So why isn't the NRA making noise about John Crawford?
And police firing into crowds of protestors, blocking media access, and enforcing a 9 pm curfew in a residential area: Isn't this the big-government tyranny that the Tea Party has been talking about since its inception? Why aren't they sending a militia to Ferguson?
The answer to these questions is simple, of course: Both John Crawford and Michael Brown were black.