Fetterman's past gun incident rattles Black Democrats in Pa. Senate race
The incident took center stage in the race last week when John Fetterman’s two Democratic opponents excoriated him over his actions in 2013 and for his refusal to apologize.
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Fetterman's past gun incident rattles Black Democrats in Pa. Senate race
The incident took center stage in the race last week when John Fetterman’s two Democratic opponents excoriated him over his actions in 2013 and for his refusal to apologize.April 25, 2022, 4:31 AM EDT
By Marc Caputo
John Fetterman said he heard what sounded like gunfire and saw a man running away. So he reacted by getting his kid inside to safety before he called 911.
What Fetterman did next, however, still haunts him nine years later as he campaigns for the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Pennsylvania: He chased the man down with a shotgun and detained him until police arrived.
It turned out that the man was jogging and wearing running clothes. According to a police report, the man was unarmed and said the sound of gunfire was actually fireworks, although two witnesses thought they heard shots.
The man Fetterman pulled a gun on is Black. Fetterman — the mayor of the Pittsburgh-area borough of Braddock at the time and now the state’s lieutenant governor — is white. Fetterman, 52, said he couldn’t tell the jogger's race initially because of how he was bundled up in the winter cold.
Across the state, Democrats who work with Black voters and are neutral in the May 17 primary fault Fetterman’s actions and explanations thus far, and they worry that attacks on him over the incident could depress African American turnout in November in its two biggest urban areas, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — a must for Democrats to carry the commonwealth.
The incident took center stage in the race Thursday when Fetterman’s two Democratic opponents — U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta — faced him for the first time at the first statewide televised debate and excoriated him over his actions in 2013 and for his refusal to say whether he erred or whether he would do anything differently today.
“I attacked the gun violence problem in Braddock, and we succeeded,” Fetterman said Thursday on stage, emphasizing that there were no gun deaths in the high-crime borough for more than five of his 13 years as mayor.
Fetterman went on to explain that he made the “split-second decision” to “intercept” the man “until our first responders arrived as Braddock’s chief law enforcement officer and as the mayor.”
Fetterman’s suggestion that he was acting according to law are a new talking point that stands in contrast to his initial comments about the 2013 incident.
“He’s not shooting straight on this, no pun intended. Just 'fess up. Apologize,” said Michael Nutter, Philadelphia’s last Black mayor, who served until 2016.
“All this other stuff — that he was the chief law enforcement officer or that he didn’t know the guy was Black — just doesn’t really sound like he wants to tell the truth,” added Nutter, who is neutral in the Senate primary. “It’s not helping him. Figuratively speaking, he’s shooting himself in the foot, and he doesn’t have to.”
It’s an issue of national importance, Nutter and others argue, because Pennsylvania is a swing state with an open Senate seat that could decide control of the evenly divided chamber of Congress in November.
The Rev. Mark Kelly Tyler, a top Democratic organizer in Philadelphia who helped turn out Black voters in big numbers to help President Joe Biden win the state in 2020, said he was concerned that Fetterman's failure to adequately address the gun incident was reminiscent of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016, when Republicans saturated Black voters with messages about her comment in the 1990s about “superpredators.”
“If you think Black voters didn’t turn out for Hillary Clinton because she called people superpredators but you think that a white guy pulling a shotgun on a Black guy won’t have an effect — in the context of the post-George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor world — then you’re living in fantasy land,” said Tyler, who is also neutral in the primary.
About 11 percent of the state’s voters are Black. And while Black voters overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, turnout needs to be strong to ensure a Democratic win, Tyler said.
“This story can become a drumbeat almost every day or just result in one good ad that can depress Philadelphia’s turnout by 40, 50,000 votes,” Tyler said. “That would be enough to lose the election for us.”
Biden's margin of victory in the state was about 80,000 votes in November 2020. In contrast, Clinton lost by about 44,000 votes in 2016. And she had apologized for her "superpredator" remark — a sign that contrition might not be enough anyway.
After his encounter with the Black jogger, Fetterman acknowledged to a Pittsburgh television station that he might have broken the law by chasing the man with a gun. Fetterman at the time didn’t mention anything about being a chief law enforcement officer.
The admission of possible wrongdoing in 2013 doesn’t square with his talking points now, said Fawn Walker-Montgomery, a Black political consultant and former City Council member from McKeesport, near Braddock. Walker-Montgomery hasn’t endorsed a candidate in the primary.
“He wasn’t the chief law enforcement officer. That insults our intelligence. He was a white man with a gun chasing a Black man,” Walker-Montgomery said in an interview. “I used to be on the council in McKeesport, and if I chased after a person with a gun, I would still be in jail. He’s showing he’s not aware of his white privilege.”
A spokesman for Fetterman’s campaign said he started using the term “chief law enforcement officer” last year to push back against opponents like Kenyatta as they accused him of acting like a “vigilante.” His campaign also said he didn’t invent the term in relation to his duties as mayor and pointed out that the Pennsylvania Association of Borough Mayors uses the wording in a handbook to describe the duties of the office.
Fetterman backers say he’s being unfairly singled out.
