On Monday night, Daily Show host Trevor Noah took some time out to blast the National Rifle Association for its deafening silence over the recent verdict regarding the police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile—a legal gun owner—during a traffic stop.
Last week’s verdict acquitted the officer, Jeronimo Yanez, of all charges in the fatal shooting of Castile. Noah replayed a clip of the original video of the shooting, which Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, livestreamed on Facebook.
“Every time I watch that video, I just ask myself how ... just how? How does a black person not get shot in America?” Noah said.
“Philando Castile wasn’t just a man shot at a traffic stop. 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,” Noah added.
The NRA, as we all know, is usually vocal about defending Americans who uphold their lawful right to carry firearms, but in the case of Castile, a black man who legally carried a firearm, the NRA has remained deathly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, silent.
Noah pointed out the NRA’s hypocrisy by showing a clip of NRA CEO Wayne La Pierre’s speech in 2014, in which he stated that Americans have “no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want.”
“‘Unless you’re black,’ is what it should say,” Noah argued. “The people who define themselves by one American right—the right to bear arms—show that once race is involved, the only right they believe in is their right to remain silent.”