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The 'Good Guy With the Gun' Is Never Black
WhatCouldGoWrongHat Retweeted"This isn’t about whether or not you like guns, whether you’d like to stockpile them or melt them all down. This is about everyone being able to enjoy the full freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, and thus equal protection under the law.”
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HOME > POLITICS > POLITICS FEATURES NOVEMBER 27, 2018 4:09PM ET
The ‘Good Guy With the Gun’ Is Never Black
The deaths of Emantic Bradford and Jemel Roberson remind us who the Second Amendment protects
By JAMIL SMITH
Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford, Jr., was a good guy, if you believe his mama.
“Emantic was that person who people went to when they needed someone to talk to,” April Pipkins tells Rolling Stone on Monday, four days after her son, known as “EJ,” was shot to death by a police officer in Hoover, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. He was only 21-years-old. “It was just heartbreaking, because I’ve lost my best friend also. I know that, if anything, he was trying to help people. That was his character. That’s how I raised him.”
That is why Pipkins believes the witnesses on the scene at the Riverchase Galleria who, according to family attorney Benjamin Crump, claim that Emantic was trying to help the situation on Thanksgiving night. “Several people have said that he was responsible for saving their lives,” he said to me. Shots had rung out at the mall, and an 18-year-old man was hit. So, too, was a 12-year-old girl whom the Hoover police department called an “innocent bystander.” But Bradford, a recently discharged Army veteran who had a permit to carry a firearm in his open-carry state, was the only person who died that night.
The Hoover police department has had difficulty explaining why Bradford is dead. First, it was because he was supposedly the mall shooter (he wasn’t). “Thank God we had our officers very close,” Nick Derzis, the Hoover police chief, told AL.com. “They heard the gunfire, they engaged the subject, and they took out the threat.” Then a day later, the department told us that he “likely did not fire the rounds” that struck the two victims. But wait! Bradford “may have been involved in some aspect” of the crime, the police claimed in a since-deleted tweet. That seems likely why both the city of Hoover and the department said in a joint statement on Monday that “the initial shooter” was still at large and that Bradford “brandished a gun during the seconds following the gunshots, which instantly heightened the sense of threat to approaching police officers responding to the chaotic scene.” (Crump claims that the Hoover officer pulled the trigger without issuing any verbal warnings or commands; the department has yet to respond to Rolling Stone’s request for further comment.)
....
The ‘Good Guy With the Gun’ Is Never Black
The deaths of Emantic Bradford and Jemel Roberson remind us who the Second Amendment protects
By JAMIL SMITH
Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford, Jr., was a good guy, if you believe his mama.
“Emantic was that person who people went to when they needed someone to talk to,” April Pipkins tells Rolling Stone on Monday, four days after her son, known as “EJ,” was shot to death by a police officer in Hoover, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. He was only 21-years-old. “It was just heartbreaking, because I’ve lost my best friend also. I know that, if anything, he was trying to help people. That was his character. That’s how I raised him.”
That is why Pipkins believes the witnesses on the scene at the Riverchase Galleria who, according to family attorney Benjamin Crump, claim that Emantic was trying to help the situation on Thanksgiving night. “Several people have said that he was responsible for saving their lives,” he said to me. Shots had rung out at the mall, and an 18-year-old man was hit. So, too, was a 12-year-old girl whom the Hoover police department called an “innocent bystander.” But Bradford, a recently discharged Army veteran who had a permit to carry a firearm in his open-carry state, was the only person who died that night.
The Hoover police department has had difficulty explaining why Bradford is dead. First, it was because he was supposedly the mall shooter (he wasn’t). “Thank God we had our officers very close,” Nick Derzis, the Hoover police chief, told AL.com. “They heard the gunfire, they engaged the subject, and they took out the threat.” Then a day later, the department told us that he “likely did not fire the rounds” that struck the two victims. But wait! Bradford “may have been involved in some aspect” of the crime, the police claimed in a since-deleted tweet. That seems likely why both the city of Hoover and the department said in a joint statement on Monday that “the initial shooter” was still at large and that Bradford “brandished a gun during the seconds following the gunshots, which instantly heightened the sense of threat to approaching police officers responding to the chaotic scene.” (Crump claims that the Hoover officer pulled the trigger without issuing any verbal warnings or commands; the department has yet to respond to Rolling Stone’s request for further comment.)
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