In an interview with NewsMax’s Steve Malzberg yesterday, Gun Owners of American executive director Larry Pratt said that Trayvon Martin was killed because he had a “broken family.”
Pratt and Malzberg were discussing last week’s Senate hearing on Stand Your Ground laws, at which Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton gave impassioned testimony. At the hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz dismissed Fulton’s testimony as “simply mourning the loss of your son” and asserted that Stand Your Ground laws in fact “protect those in African-American communities.”
The gun activist and radio host heartily agreed with Cruz. “Had she looked at the numbers, she would have found that as a percentage of blacks compared to a percentage of whites…” Pratt began. Malzberg finished his sentence: “The laws benefit the African-American community down there more so than they do the white community, you’re right.”
In fact, a Tampa Bay Times analysis of Stand Your Ground cases in Florida found substantial racial disparities in the application of the law, including that “people who killed a black person walked free 73 percent of the time, while those who killed a white person went free 59 percent of the time.” A national study found a similar disparity.
Pratt concluded that Fulton had it all wrong and “probably what killed her son was the broken family that he was forced to deal with. That’s often an indicator that a young man is going to have trouble, of either race, of any race.”
Pratt has previously said that Attorney General Holder is “racist” and was using the Martin case to “intimidate” white people into not defending themselves against “black mobs,” and even alleged that Holder and President Obama were using the case to bring about communism.
