Over the weekend, nearly 40 members of Ohio Open Carry, an armed and mostly white pro-gun group, rallied outside the Walmart in Beavercreek, a suburb of Dayton.
Displaying pistols and even a few assault rifles, they gathered there to protest the death of John Crawford, a 22-year-old black man who was shot and killed by police in August as he walked around the superstore with a pellet gun he had picked up in the sporting goods section.
While organizers paid some lip service to the young man’s family and made a show of solidarity, the true motivation behind their presence was something else entirely.
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“The whole point of this is to be a peaceful protest and educate people that Ohio is an open-carry state,” one masked attendee told WCPO, declining to give his name. “And a man was killed while open carrying a gun inside the Walmart.”
To really hammer the point home, dozens of Ohio Open Carry members at the rally took turns posing with a printout reading, “I am John Crawford,” which included an image of the slain young man. They later posted the photographs to the group’s Facebook page and culled a montage to make a YouTube video.
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