Democratic presidential candidate former Housing Secretary Julian Castro speaks in a Democratic presidential primary debate. Photo: John Minchillo At Tuesday’s Democratic primary debate in Ohio, moderator Anderson Cooper asked Julián Castro how he’d end gun violence. Until then, the solutions put forth by his fellow candidates had focused mostly on implementing universal background checks, buying back some assault rifles, confiscating others, and banning their future sales.
And y’all saw a couple days ago what happened to Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth. A cop showed up at 2 in the morning at her house when she was playing video games with her nephew. He didn’t even announce himself. And within four seconds he shot her and killed her through her home window. She was in her own home. And so I’m not gonna give these police officers another reason to go door-to-door in certain communities, because police violence is also gun violence, and we need to address that.
Castro drew attention to an under-examined aspect of the gun-violence debate: That too often, gun-control efforts seek intervention from the state, often using force, to prevent violence between civilians without challenging the state’s ability to use the same violence against them. This dynamic is vivified by cases like Jefferson’s, one of dozens of people killed each year by law enforcement — a disproportionate share of them black — who don’t even need guns to be viewed as threats.
American police officers regularly kill upwards of 900 people each year. The impunity with which they do so — the frequent lack of legal consequences, the regularity with which they lie to exaggerate the magnitude of an alleged threat and evade the perception of wrongdoing — raises the bigger question of whether they should suddenly be the only people carrying guns.
Castro has made policing reform a centerpiece of his struggling campaign, including restricting the use of deadly force and making it easier to prosecute officers for misconduct. At multiple junctures, he’s invoked the names of black and Latino people killed by law enforcement to illustrate the need for such a plan, which he touts as the only one of its kind in the entire 2020 Democratic field.
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