They shot him in the back.

According to an independent forensic examination commissioned by the family of Emantic “EJ” Bradford, Jr., the 21-year-old was shot three times from behind—in the head, neck and back.

And then, they lied.

They said the former Army private had been involved in a Thanksgiving night shooting at a suburban Birmingham mall. They said he was the same man who got into a fight on the second floor and was suspected of firing the shots that wounded an 18-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl. Just before 10 p.m., “one man pulled a gun and shot the other twice in the torso” near the entrance of Foot Action, a popular sneaker store, reported a local ABC station, citing an account offered by the Hoover police department.”

First, police claimed that a responding officer shot and killed EJ, the man they said was responsible for the bloodshed, within seconds of the shooting. They said EJ, who was armed, was running away from the scene when Hoover, Ala. officers encountered him. They portrayed their officers as heroes who acted quickly to “take out the threat,” according to the Montgomery Advertiser.

But a day later, law enforcement officials revealed that a second gun had been found in the mall and they were forced to admit that EJ was not the shooter. His gun was cold and had never been fired that night. They remained convinced, they said in a press conference, that the former soldier  was still somehow involved in the incident. ABC pasted a note atop the previous day’s story:

“UPDATE (11/24): According to a release from the Hoover Police Department, new evidence suggests that EJ Fitzgerald Bradford, who was shot and killed by officers, may have been involved in the original altercation, but he likely did not fire the rounds that injured the 18-year-old.”

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That was also a lie. (The police will say now that they were responding to information as it came in, but when that information always ends up putting the person the police shot in the worst possible light, the word “lie” applies.)

Witnesses say the two undercover officers never identified themselves, nor did they give any orders to anyone, before one of them fired the fatal shots. Though he was licensed to carry, witnesses say EJ never produced his weapon. He never threatened anyone. Yet, Hoover police released a statement the following Monday saying EJ “had a gun in his hand” and that “Mr. Bradford brandished a gun.”

Brandish, Webster’s Second tells me, means “To shake or wave (a weapon), usually menacingly.”

Witnesses who contacted the family’s attorney dispute that account and believe mall surveillance and police body camera video will prove the weapon was found still attached to his pants.

Undisputed is the fact that, despite EJ carrying identification, Hoover police did not notify his family for hours and left  his body in public view for some of that time. His parents did not receive confirmation of their son’s death until his father, a former corrections officer battling cancer, contacted a Hoover police detective around 5 a.m. Friday morning. EJ, they were told, had shot two people at the Riverchase Galleria mall before he was killed by officers on the scene.  

Yet, according to witnesses, EJ did everything right. He was trying to help other shoppers get away. He was a law-abiding citizen who had a concealed carry permit and, thus, the legal right to have a gun in his possession at the mall. Within days, after the official story had unraveled and protesters took to the streets, Alabama state law enforcement tracked down the man they now say was the real shooter.

Why was EJ Bradford shot? A police officer “saw a black man with a gun and he made his determination he must be a criminal,” the family attorney—who previously represented the families of  shooting victims Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown—said in a press conference.

I am a gun owner and have been for the better part of my adult life. I gave up carrying a few years ago, in the wake of a high-profile mass shooting. Recently, however, I made the decision to purchase a new gun when I became concerned about my personal security. While my family’s safety was the deciding factor, I am mindful of the inherent risks that come with being black and owning a gun.

By the time I am seen as “a good guy” it may well be too late. State and federal firearms laws will do little to protect me from an officer who sees me a threat and the statistics say a jury will almost certainly agree, if things even get that far.

For us, the Second Amendment all too often does not apply.

In mid-November, a suburban Chicago police officer killed a black security guard who was attempting to detain someone involved in a fight at a bar. Jemel Roberson, who had a gun, was wearing gear that plainly identified him as a guard. “Everybody was screaming out, ‘Security!’,” witness Adam Harris told WGN-TV. Responding officers ignored them.

We know that 12-year-old Tamir Rice will never come home again. A Cleveland police officer shot him in a public park where he had been seen playing with a toy gun. Given no time to respond to commands (if any were made at all), Tamir was shot within seconds of the officer exiting his squad car by a cop who had been previously ruled unfit for duty by a neighboring police department.

We know that the Second Amendment did not protect Philando Castile, who was shot by an officer in Minnesota, even though he told the officer that there was a gun in the car. Officer Jeronimo Yanez said he had “no choice.” Castile was killed as he reached for his identification. A jury acquitted Yanez of manslaughter.

Then there was John Crawford III, who picked up a toy gun in an Ohio Walmart. He had threatened no one. There was no inciting incident. “Police said Crawford, who was 22, didn't obey commands to drop what they learned later was an air rifle he was carrying from a store shelf,” according to NBC News, despite video showing Crawford was shot immediately when officers entered the aisle.

No one was ever charged in his killing.

After the Alabama shooting, the National Rifle Association—a group that pays and publicly touts several prominent black spokespersons—said what it does after nearly every incident involving police shooting a black man with a legal weapon: nothing.

Writing in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer named it The Rice Rule:

There are no circumstances in which the responsibility for a police shooting of an unarmed black person cannot be placed on the victim.

The same applies, of course, to an armed black person.

“I did not want to see pictures of my son laying in a pool of blood and when I accidentally came across it I broke down,” said Bradford’s mother, April Pipkins, who stumbled across the horrific image as it circulated online and who has said that she believes she son would still be alive if he had been white.

“And I can’t get it out of my head. I cannot get the scene out of my head of my child laying there, nobody around him trying to help him, just laying like a piece of trash where everyone can walk around and parade and post pictures of him on social media.”

Hoover city officials—including the mayor and police chief—apologized to the family in a private meeting the following Tuesday. They offered their sympathies and said they were sorry for publicly misidentifying EJ as the shooter, but not for shooting him. After all, he was carrying a gun.

Because he had a gun, they said, EJ was “heightening” the threat and thus culpable in his own death—after they shot him three times in the back.

Republicans and radical feminists have all but abandoned it, but the fight against porn has an unlikely new champion: college men.

Combining the energy of the #MeToo movement with a moral fervor, students at universities across the country told The Daily Beast they are working to get pornography off their campuses.

The effort started at Notre Dame University in October, when 80 male students penned an open letter requesting a porn filter on the campus WiFi. Since then, lead letter-writer Jim Martinson said, he’s received emails from more than 40 students at other universities who want to install a filter on their own campuses.

Georgetown senior Amelia Irvine, a conservative firebrand, told The Daily Beast that Martinson’s letter inspired her to push for something similar at her Catholic university. She plans to recruit support over the winter break and start an open letter or petition in the spring.

Students at secular schools like Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania also said they were excited by the idea, but were still figuring out how it could work on their campuses. At Princeton and Penn, students said they were already tabling and handing out fliers about the dangers of pornography on campus.

"I’m excited and I think we can really get this done,” Martinson said. “And I’m also confident that if we do get it done at Notre Dame, that other universities will follow suit.”

The proposal is simple: install a filter on the campus Wi-Fi that bars access to the 25 most popular X-rated websites. Notre Dame’s technology policy already bans accessing pornographic, sexually explicit or offensive material on campus networks, but Martinson said he was shocked by the amount of support for a digital barrier. A petition in support of the measure was signed by more than 1,000 men and women—more than a tenth of the Notre Dame student body.

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Martinson’s open letter in the Notre Dame Observer claimed that pornography teaches men to objectify women, normalizes sexual assault, and exploits the men and women involved. The men of Notre Dame were calling for a filter, he wrote, “in order to stand up for the dignity of all people, especially women.”

The letter was quickly followed by a response from more than 60 “women of Notre Dame,” who argued that pornography’s prevalence on campus was “preventing men and women from encountering the full personhood of one another in friendships and relationships.”

The proposal’s popularity made headlines in the conservative National Review and the frat-boy favorite Barstool Sports. The student senate discussed it at a recent meeting, according to the Observer, and Martinson said he broached the idea with administrators at the “top of the university.”

“The university has been very receptive,” Martinson said. “I'm confident that we'll be able to get it done by the end of the year.” Notre Dame officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Campus porn filters aren’t a totally new idea. Michael Griffin, senior vice president of Holy Cross College, told the Observer the school had installed one 15 years ago to save bandwidth, but kept it in place for moral reasons. Northern Illinois University attempted a similar ban in 2014, according to the Northern Star, but later revised it to cover only employees. Private companies like McDonalds, Panera, and Starbucks have all installed similar filters on their public Wi-Fi networks.

Whether porn is actually a problem on campus, however, is debatable. Martinson said he began advocating for the filter after hearing from male classmates who were struggling with pornography addiction. But a 2013 study found that the average college student engaged in “arousal-oriented online sexual activity” less than once or twice per month. A 2014 study of students across four countries found that 76 percent had viewed online “sexual entertainment” in their lifetimes, but showed “relatively infrequent experience” with the subject matter in the previous three months.

There’s also little evidence that porn consumption leads to negative treatment of women. A 2007 study from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia found that the amount of pornography viewed did not predict negative attitudes toward women. And as some experts have pointed out, the rate of sexual assault has decreased in recent decades, even as porn use has soared.

In fact, research shows that whether or not someone thinks of pornography as a problem is closely tied to how religious they are. A 2014 study, for example, found that religiosity and moral disapproval were the best predictors of perceived addiction to porn, but were completely unrelated to actual levels of use.

It’s no surprise then, that the push for porn filters comes from a religious segment of campus. The Notre Dame letter, for example, was part of a yearly anti-porn campaign by a campus group called the Students for Child Oriented Policy (SCOP). The group advertises itself as nonpartisan and nonsectarian, but has hosted several anti-abortion talks on campus and once circulated a petition asking Notre Dame to take a “clear stand” against same-sex marriage. Irvine, meanwhile, is president of a pro-heterosexual-marriage campus group that has been accused of promoting intolerance against LGBTQ students.

Martinson said the religious aspect was important to him personally, but that he preferred to focus on the issues of addiction and objectification of women. “It’s really important to frame things from a secular perspective because you just appeal to more people,” he said.

One Harvard student who reached out to Martinson about the filter is a converted Catholic and co-president of the Anscombe Society, which advocates for “premarital abstinence and sexual integrity.” (The group is also strongly opposed to same-sex marriage.) Will Long—a computer science and government major who recently penned an op-ed for The Harvard Crimson on “recovering the beauty of sex”—linked the use of pornography to campus hookup culture and dating apps, which he said corrode relationships between students.

This kind of moral disdain for porn isn’t new for religious conservatives, who’ve made it central to their political campaigns for decades. But the new campus anti-porn crowd is refreshing their moral arguments with the language of the #MeToo and anti-campus-rape movements, repeating familiar feminist talking points about the objectification of women and how pornography focuses predominantly on male pleasure.

Every student who spoke with The Daily Beast mentioned the levels of violence against women displayed in modern pornography. (A third of all porn scenes showed perceived physical or psychological harm to another person, one recent study found.) While the students never claimed that porn directly caused sexual assault, several said they felt it contributed to the current cultural moment.

Jack Whelan, an anti-porn advocate at Princeton, pointed to a recent video asking men to distinguish between porn scenes and stories of sexual assault.

“It’s not hard to draw a connection between men viewing that type of pornography and men acting in similar ways towards women,” Whelan said. “I think that it’s much easier to objectify women and to not see them as people when you’re simply viewing them as objects of sexual pleasure.”

The words could have been taken from the mouths of second-wave feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who mounted protests against the burgeoning porn industry of the 1980s. In fact, Long said he thought he could partner on this fight with the women’s center or “other left-leaning women's groups”—groups he said he usually would not count as allies. (The Harvard women’s center did not respond to a request for comment.)

Today’s feminists, however, seemed largely unexcited by the porn filter proposal. In a response to the men’s letter, Notre Dame student Jackie O'Brien wrote her own letter to the editor calling the idea “patronizing” and “degrading” to sex workers. Anne Jarrett—a Notre Dame gender studies major and self-described “obvious feminist”—urged the letter-writers to call their legislators or work for a campaign around sexual assault, rather than wasting their time banning porn.

“Rather than judging these consensual acts, let’s celebrate that people are practicing consent and communicating openly with their partner (on screen or off),” she wrote.

The women weren’t alone. The original porn filter proposal sparked six letters to the editor against the idea, as well as one satirical column calling for a filter on food porn and a rebuttal entitled “Give Me Pornhub Or Give Me Death.”

Peter Jeffery, a professor at the school, wrote to say that such a filter could prevent people with a porn addiction from speaking out and finding help. Richard G. Hoover, an alumnus from the class of 1974, said he disliked pornography but did not feel “censorship” was the answer.

Even the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—which previously advocated for SCOP when it was denied club recognition over its stance on gay marriage—said the filter would earn its “red light” rating for infringing on freedom of speech.

“Most pornographic, sexually explicit, and offensive material is protected under the First Amendment,” the civil liberties group wrote. “As such, any institution that claims to protect free speech should not treat pornography substantially different than other protected speech.”

The students admitted that advocating for a ban on porn—or for more chaste sexual ethics in general—doesn’t make them popular on campus. Whelan said he largely confined his conversations on the subject to his close friends, while Irvine said she’d recently ended things with a suitor who she learned was watching porn.

And Long said he’d received dozens of critical messages after writing his op-ed, though it didn’t curb his enthusiasm for the porn filter. Being the go-to person for these issues on campus was isolating, he said—though not necessarily in a bad way.

“I think learning to hold on to something that you believe to be true and that you believe to be important and good,” he said. “It can have good effects on individuals if they choose to hold on to that truth."