Since you are so curiously focused on why he slept with a gun let's expand to understand why anyone feels threatened enough to ccw at all.

You can expand if you like, but let's not pretend my essay was about that subject. Amir died because local crime frightened him enough to sleep with a gun. Why you find my focusing on that point "curious" isn't clear, since I am addressing why he is dead. Why other people carry guns is a whole 'nother subject.

Only Black people can fix Black-on-Black crime for the same reason that only the people in any neighborhood can fix local-on-local crime. Saying the argument is "racially motivated" is a gratuitous, ad hominem distraction that says nothing about whether the problem is real. When Black people stop killing each other in such large numbers, people will stop pointing to Black-on-Black crime as a thing.

To be clear, I am not concerned in this essay with why Black people kill each other. Given the history of how Black people have been treated here, the phenomenon is not surprising. But that does not mean that anyone else is going to solve the problem. Indeed, it suggests that no one else is going to solve it. It is in that sense that I believe only Black people can solve it.

My point is that the race of the police officers in this case is not why Amir Locke is dead. He is dead because his cousin, who happens to be Black, killed a man who also happened to be Black, in a neighborhood where innocent Black people like Mr. Locke feel obliged, for that reason, to sleep with a gun.