Here's what that BB gun, the Crosman MK-177 Tactical Air Rifle, with a magazine that can hold 300 BBs, looks like on the Walmart website, where it is still for sale because capitalism, man, capitalism.
That is a badass looking BB gun. Made in the US of A, like all good guns should be, except for all those cool ones we get from China. Yep, a black man would look awfully scary waving that around and pointing it at children, as 911 caller Ronald Ritchie said Crawford was doing.
Except here's the problem. The video footage of his entire time holding the rifle, from the moment he picked it up to the moment he dropped it after being shot by the cops, he doesn't aim it at anyone. And when the cops enter, not only is no one anywhere near Crawford, but when he is shot, it is from all the way down the aisle. Seriously, not a goddamn person is around him:
You don't even see him reacting to the cops. They shot right when they entered.
Now who was the wrongest person in this whole clusterfuck?
If you're an asshole, you could fault Crawford for mindlessly walking around Walmart with the scary-looking gun. After all, he is black. But, then again, you'd have to fault every white asshole who walks around mindlessly with a gun, Second Amendmenting all over the joint, like these white people who did so (and it took less than ten seconds to find these photos on People of Walmart):
The worst thing that's happened to any white person with a gun is they were asked to leave because Walmart sells alcohol. That happened to this Texas fucknut, a pastor, of course:
So, no, by no measure is Crawford even wrong.
The cops? Well, sure, they're pretty damn wrong, as all cops are who have been trained to kill everything that looks like it might breathe wrong at them. Add in a good dose of racism and racial paranoia and you've got all you need to do something truly criminal, but, you know, you're a cop and rarely does anyone blame you because fuck everyone else.
No, the Rude Pundit is gonna go with Ronald Ritchie here as the most utterly wrong motherfucker in this whole situation. A George Zimmerman without the same level of commitment, when he called 911, Ritchie lied to the dispatcher about what he saw, as he later revealed in an interview with the Guardian. "At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody," Ritchie said a month after the incident, which is the opposite of what he said on the 911 call. He told the dispatcher that he thought he saw Crawford loading the gun with bullets, which, as we know, would have more than likely involved pouring tiny metal balls into the magazine. The dispatcher relayed that information to the cops, that a 6-foot tall black man was waving around a gun and pointing it at people at Walmart. Ritchie even lied about the shooting, saying that Crawford swung around and pointed the gun at the police. No, he did not. Ritchie knew he was lying.
But Ritchie took it even further, making himself sound like a hero on the local news when, in reality, he was just a racist little bitch. Frankly, Ritchie should be arrested. He yelled, "Fire!" in the crowded theater of our societal racial anxiety when he didn't even see smoke. And he is responsible for killing John Crawford almost as much as the cop who pulled the trigger.
