MSNBC's Toure is at it again. This time he has turned the tragedy in Colorado into, you guessed it, a debate about race. Toure accused supporters of the Second Amendment of wanting to ensure "white people" had access to guns while keeping "black criminals" from getting them. He also invoked the Trayvon Martin situation, which has nothing to do with what happened in Colorado last Friday. Here is what he said.
We never have this debate until we have a tragedy and then its over emotionalized, its over fraught [sic], you can't have a substantive debate when everybody's so sensitive.
Day to day crime, as we've talked about, has fallen over the last 20 years so I think the average voter feels less of the fear that would motivate lawmakers to do something. These spectacular mass killings are way up from when our dads were kids -- I think there was something like 11 in the 50s and 60s and over 550 in the last part of the last century a decade ago.
So, those things sort of make us think about these things, but we understand those are outlier crimes, somebody going to shoot up the mall or shoot up the school. I would hope that it would be something like a Trayvon Martin situation that would make people think, 'Wow. wrongful death, even though it's a legal gun owner. How do we move forward from this situation?' But so much of this issue, I think comes down to, 'Let's make sure law abiding white people are able to have access to guns and make sure that black criminals are not and that becomes part of the locus of the problem.
And we don't even want to talk about that sort of racial, black sort of bottom of it all, but that's definitely part of it.
Clearly Toure is ignorant of and unfamiliar with McDonald v. City of Chicago. In that case, a black man named Otis McDonald sued the City of Chicago for infringing upon his Second Amendment rights with restrictive local gun laws, including a ban on handguns. McDonald was trying to protect himself, his family and his home from violent criminals, black and white. The Supreme Court ruled the Chicago handgun ban unconstitutional and determined the Second Amendment applies to individual states. Not to mention, the FBI issued a report just two weeks ago stating there is no evidence of racism in the Trayvon Martin case.
Toure should look up the definition of "jumping the shark."