Last summer, a black woman in Michigan defended herself, her mother, and her 2-year-old daughter with a registered (and unloaded) gun against a woman who she and her attorneys say tried to hit them with a car. She was a concealed carry permit holder and living in an open carry state — one with a “stand your ground” law in place. Ra’s case is yet another instance of a black gun owner, with the permits to legally carry, defending themselves against violence — and getting punished for it.
Now, Siwatu-Salama Ra is serving a two-year prison sentence at Huron Valley Correctional Facility for felonious assault and felony firearm convictions. She’s seven months pregnant, and according to her attorneys, she’s receiving insufficient medical care — including being shackled to her bed during a vaginal exam — even though her pregnancy is high-risk. The case is under appeal, but the judge deciding Ra’s fate, Thomas Hathaway, has already denied a request to postpone Ra’s sentence until she gives birth.
I spoke with Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, who told me, “Siwatu should be home getting ready to deliver her baby, and being with her family. Instead, she is suffering and isolated being punished for protecting herself, her child and [her] mother. This is a shameful, shameful reality, and it’s clear that we need to challenge a criminal justice system that would try a pregnant black woman for upholding ‘stand your ground’ laws and her Second Amendment rights.”
While concealed carry permit application numbers for both black Americans and women are rising steadily, and the number of black gun owners in total has spiked since the 2016 election, they have long been unable to access the same protections their white neighbors enjoy when it comes to exercising their gun rights, including in “stand your ground” states.
The Urban Institute found that in “stand your ground” states, when white shooters kill black people, 34 percent of the resulting homicides are deemed justifiable. Only 3 percent of deaths are ruled justifiable when the shooter is black and the victim is white. Even when black shooters kill black people, those shootings are less likely to be deemed justifiable in a court of law than those involving white shooters who kill white people.
Maj Toure, founder of Black Guns Matter, a gun rights association aimed at urban communities and black Americans, told me that too often, local governments “drop the ball” when it comes to protecting the gun rights of black Americans. He referenced the case of Marissa Alexander, who served three years in prison for firing a single shot near her husband, who she said had threatened to kill her.
“You have situations where women defending their lives are sent to jail for the dumbest shit on earth. [A man] attempts to attack [a woman] and instead of killing the man, [she] shoots in the air, and that woman is facing years,” he said. “Those scenarios are outrageous and mass media and public outrage is heightened, but justice for these situations is trash.”
Making matters worse, while Black Lives Matter and other left-leaning civil rights organizations have been publicizing Ra’s case and others like it, mainstream pro-gun groups, including the National Rifle Association, have been dispiritingly quiet about the incident — though the “stand your ground” law in place in Michigan, passed in 2006, was made possible by a group working in close contact with the NRA.
FBI agents covertly surveilling a criminal gang suspected of holding at least one person hostage had their cover blown when a swarm of drones descended on them. Joe Mazel, the head of the FBI’s operational technology law unit, said the small unmanned units hovered around the agents and made “high-speed low passes” at them. “We were then blind ― without the situational awareness,” he said.
Mazel, a veteran federal agent, recounted the incident this week while speaking to attendees at the AUVSI Xponential tech conference in Denver, according to Defense One. He said it happened in a large U.S. city last winter but was reportedly careful not to share identifying details about the incident, saying it is “law enforcement sensitive.” The drones, according to Mazel, not only buzzed the agents but also livestreamed the entire thing.
In 2012, the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) put out a statement saying “stand your ground” legislation allows “lawful people to defend themselves, and deters would-be murderers, rapists and robbers.” NRA-ILA executive director Chris W. Cox said in 2013 that “self-defense is not a concept, it’s a fundamental human right.” They “put the footage to YouTube so that [other members of the gang] who had cellular access could go to the YouTube site,” see the video and know the agents’ location, he said. The criminals reportedly managed to foil the FBI’s plans. Mazel did not indicate whether any follow-up attempts were made.
The proliferation of drone use has been of increasing concern to law enforcement agencies as the technology has become easy to acquire and operate. Drones can be flown using GPS technology — meaning it takes minimal practice to fly them — and they can be adapted to carry small payloads. In a response on Twitter, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch said that she had discussed the case on NRATV and on her radio show, but there appear to be no mentions of the case on the NRA website or social media platforms. I’ve reached out to the group for comment on the case.
The technology presents a range of opportunities for criminals. They permit low-risk reconnaissance missions and can been used for everything from drug smuggling to dropping drugs and weapons behind prison walls. Mazel said criminal organizations have also been using drones to monitor activity outside police departments to see “who is going in and out of the facility and who might be cooperating with police.”
Gene Robinson of Drone Pilot Inc, which works with law enforcement and emergency response agencies, said drone countermeasures are somewhat limited because of FAA rules and potential liability issues. “There are effective jamming and spoofing methods out there, but the FCC says it’s a federal offense to jam any signal,” he said. “They don’t make exceptions for anyone, including law enforcement.
Other strategies, such as capturing drones in nets shot from the ground or another drone, can also be problematic, according to Robinson. “It’s a huge liability issue,” he said. “What if that thing falls to the ground and hits someone in the head? Or what if it’s loaded with explosives and detonates near a group of people? Who takes ownership of that?”
The most viable solution right now, Robinson said, is to educate the public. “We do a lot in regard to counterdrone measures, but more than anything else, we educate people so they can recognize nonstandard configurations,” he said. “Typically, if you see a drone, you know what it’s supposed to look like with a camera on it, but if you see some big cube hanging off the bottom or a shuttlecock, you know it’s going to be bad.”
And things aren’t likely going to get better under the new administration, according to Bostwick. “From what little I’ve seen, there’s no particular reason to believe that the new president and his cabinet is going to be sympathetic towards marijuana as a medication,” he told The Scientist. “I don’t have any reason to believe our new president … is going to be easy on marijuana or that there’s going to be a whole lot of either wisdom or priority about declaring it something that needs to be studied.”
Ware, a Canadian, said he doesn’t know what to expect from the US in terms of its official stance on marijuana and research into the drug’s effects. But he remains hopeful. “I fundamentally hope that the science is what drives the policy and not something else,” he said.
“That National Academies report has identified a lot of gaps that still exist that we need answers to,” Ware added. “We shouldn’t be having these conversations 10 years from now, given that things are opening up, there is access, there are people will to take serious looks… . I think we really have to gear the science up to answering these questions.”
Studying the health effects of marijuana just got a little easier. In a statement released last week (June 23), The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the elimination of one of four regulatory hurdles that researchers must clear in order to study medical applications for the drug.
“The president has often said that drug policy should be dictated by unimpeded science instead of ideology, and it’s great to see the Obama administration finally starting to take some real action to back that up,” Tom Angell of the pro-legalization group, Marijuana Majority told the Washington Post.
According to the Washington Post, HHS determined that the regulatory step, which entailed a review by Public Health Services (PHS) was redundant with another required review by the Food and Drug Administration. Drug Policy News reports that the Clinton administration installed the PHS review to keep the growing field of marijuana research under strict controls.
“I think it’s a sensible change; but people are being delusional if they think this will result in a flood of research on the drug,” Kevin Sabet of the anti-legalization group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, told the Washington Post. Marijuana researchers still face other unique barriers, such as the requirement to obtain all marijuana plants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
“This is progress, but the White House should also end the NIDA’s unique monopoly on marijuana production, and allow private entities to grow marijuana, thus facilitating even more important research,” Bill Piper, the Director of Drug Policy Alliance’s Office of National Affairs, told Drug Policy News.