Trevor Noah has so much news to get through every day that he frequently packs as much as he can into a segment called “Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That” — but on his June 19 show, he made sure to devote some of the segment’s airtime to Philando Castile.
After the cop who fatally shot Castile in July 2016 was acquitted of all charges last week, Noah had a couple questions. The main one, however, was simple: How?
“Every time I watch that video,” Noah began, referring to the Facebook Live video that Castille’s girlfriend, who witnessed the shooting, streamed in its immediate aftermath, “the question I ask myself is, ‘How?’ Just ... how? How does a black person not get shot in America? Because if you think about it, the bar is always moving. The goalposts are always shifting. There’s always a different thing that explains why a person got shot ... at some point you realize, there’s no real answer.”
What’s more, Noah continued, is that at least one group is demonstrating some appalling hypocrisy by not speaking out on this verdict in particular. “Philando Castile wasn’t just a man shot at a traffic stop,” Noah said. “He was a legal gun owner whose family was in the car, and who had committed no crime at all ... because he was lawfully armed, you would think that one powerful group in America would say something about it. This is a group you’d expect to be losing their goddamn minds about this.”
But, no. As Noah pointed out, the NRA has been “completely silent” on the Castile verdict, despite his case being, “according to their rhetoric, everything they stand against: an officer of the state depriving a citizen of his life because he was legally carrying a firearm.” Noah then played a clip of NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre giving a speech at 2014’s CPAC in which he declared that there’s “no greater freedom” than the right to defend oneself with “all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want.”
“...‘Unless you’re black,’ is what [LaPierre] should’ve said,” Noah countered. “It’s interesting how the people who define themselves by one fundamental American right — the right to bear arms — show that once race is involved, the only right that they believe in is the right to remain silent.”
You can watch the full clip above; the Philando Castile segment starts around four minutes in.
