Who is Tom Lambert?
Tom Lambert is from Kentwood, Michigan. He works in IT and is the Director of Michigan Open Carry, the third largest gun rights group in Michigan. He identifies as politically Libertarian.
Excerpt from interview with Tom Lambert by Whitney Dow, 2017
Q: How would you identify yourself racially?
Lambert: [16:16:07] I’m white, I guess. Caucasian. To be quite honest, it’s not something I often think about.
Q: Why do you think that it’s not something that you think about?
Lambert: [16:16:21] Perhaps it’s just something I don’t have to think about. We could say in my community it’s just not an issue. In the gun rights community, for what it’s worth, I do think there are a lot of people where it is something that they have to think about. In west Michigan, I think west Michigan is a great area of the state. I think our law enforcement and our prosecutors over here tend to have a lot more common sense and view things a little differently than, let’s say, Wayne County [Michigan], which is the county that houses Detroit [Michigan]. I receive calls probably at least once a month from somebody in Detroit who’s being charged with some sort of felony with regard to a firearm.
The Detroit Police Department and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, they’re just absolutely horrendous. Horrendous, horrendous people that are just destroying their communities. And I do think race, I don’t know if it necessarily plays a part in terms of people being targeted, but it absolutely is not fair. A white guy in northern Michigan doing something versus a black guy in Detroit doing something—they could do the exactly same things, and they will absolutely reach different outcomes.