“Daily Show” host Trevor Noah started out laughing Monday night, cracking jokes about news stories including President Donald Trump’s Cuba policies and legal team. But he turned serious as he addressed the acquittal of the police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile.
“How does a black person not get shot in America?” Noah asked. “The bar is always moving, the goal posts are always shifting. There’s always a different thing that explains why a person got shot. Oh, the person was wearing a hoodie. Oh, the person was running away from the police. Oh, no, the person was going toward the police. Oh, no, the person was running around at night.”
Officer Jeronimo Yanez killed Castile, 32, in Minnesota last year. At the time, Castile was sitting in his car with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her 4-year-old daughter. Reynolds live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting.
“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.”
He pointed out that the National Rifle Association has been uncharacteristically quiet in the wake of Yanez’s trial.
“There’s a group you would expect would be losing their goddamned minds about this: the NRA,” Noah said. “For some strange reason, on this particular case, they’ve been completely silent. And yet, according to their rhetoric, this is everything that they stand against, right? An officer of the state depriving a citizen of his life because he was legally carrying a firearm.”
He then showed a clip of Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, insisting in 2014 that “there is 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 said. “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 their right to remain silent.”
Watch the full clip above.
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