Racism?

People are saying — at least African-American people are saying — that George Zimmerman got off because he was white (actually, of course, he was Hispanic, at least on his mother's side) and Trayvon Martin was black. I've seen it written that if the races were reversed, there would have been a guilty verdict. I'm not so sure.

I remember, a few years ago, another trial. An African-American defendant killed two white people, one being his wife. And a court acquitted him. Remember O. J. Simpson? When the verdict came out in that trial, it was white people who were complaining about a miscarriage of justice, and African-Americans saying justice was done.

What we are seeing is not a racist America. (It certainly is a racially divided America, when a strong majority of white people voted for Mitt Romney last year, but the African American community was nearly unanimous behind Barack Obama for the second successive Presidential election.) The trial, and the O. J. Simpson trial, point out the way our criminal justice system works. The burden of proof is on the prosecution; the presumption of innocence favors the defense. Even if there is a lot of evidence showing that a murder occurred, if there is a “reasonable doubt,” the jury is supposed to acquit. And in both trials, the prosecution failed to make its case properly.

Perhaps this prosecutor was incompetent. At least one column I saw on the net says she was worthy of disbarment. This may be so, but it's too late to fix that. We have rules about “double jeopardy.” Like O. J. Simpson, George Zimmerman may face a civil suit, which may go the other way because the standards for evidence are weaker. But he cannot be tried for murder again.

One of the few sensible comments on the Zimmerman trial

Although Derek Hunter's column at Townhall.com is dated July 14, 2013, it was apparently written before the verdict came out on George Zimmerman. But it still strikes me as the most sensible comment I've read on the whole series of events:

Can I just say something controversial that must be said? I don’t care about the George Zimmerman trial. I don’t, not even a little. That’s not to say I don’t feel sorry for those involved who’ve lost a loved one, I do. One family lost a child to a gun, the other lost a child to a mob. One is in eternal rest far too soon, the other will never know rest in all his remaining days. But that doesn’t mean I should care about it, nor should you.

Sympathize away, but being invested emotionally while not being a friend or family member of anyone involved is irrational and dangerous.

But an emotional investment is exactly what every news outlet in the country wants you to have. There’s money in it and it fits their progressive agenda.

From the first moment the MSNBC prime-time clown car metaphorically emptied into Sanford, Florida, an agenda was set in motion to manipulate as many people as possible into believing things that were not true. But they weren’t alone.

While progressives tried to paint a picture of racism to fit their needed narrative of an America where the Klan roam the streets and hold public office (as Democrats, a part of their past they always conveniently omit), many conservatives attempted to prove that there is no circumstance under which George Zimmerman shares at least a slice of the blame pie.

The progressive case goes something like this: Trayvon Martin, a black 17 year old, went to the store to buy candy and a drink. On his way home, this black teenager, was racially profiled by a “white” Hispanic guy, who followed him with the intention of killing him for being black. He provoked Trayvon into punching him in the nose and banging his head on the sidewalk so he could shoot him. Diabolical. Oh, and did I mention Trayvon Martin is black?

The conservatives who care present a case probably closer to the truth, but no less speculative. A generally good guy was looking out for his neighborhood and saw someone he didn’t recognize walking in an odd place. With the neighborhood having suffered its fair share of crime, he called the police and, trying to be extra helpful, set out on foot to follow a guy walking home. Trayvon decided to confront the “creepy-ass cracker” stalking him by jumping out of the bushes and punching him in the face. Zimmerman, completely overpowered and fearing for his life, shot Martin in self-defense.

Actually, the meat of the column is the next short paragraph:

The truth is somewhere in the middle and nowhere as clear-cut. There were dozens of opportunities for this not to happen, Zimmerman could’ve not gotten out of his car, Martin could have not decked him, etc. But they did. Someone’s dislike of these facts doesn’t make them any less so.

As I read somewhere else on the Net, there were two idiots acting idiotically. Either one could have ended the confrontation, and Trayvon Martin would be alive today, and George Zimmerman would have gone back to his ordinary life. But, continuing with the column:

So we’re left with a dead kid and a man on trial. This happens all the time in the world, but it doesn’t get this much attention.

Over the 4^th of July weekend, the city of Chicago had 74 people shot, 12 died. One of the shooting victims was a 5-year-old boy. There’s no ambiguity about that. What was that child’s name? What are any of their names? You don’t know because not only were the suspected shooters black, so were the victims. In the progressive media equation of what constitutes news, black on black crime – a tragic epidemic by any normal unit of measure – doesn’t rate.

To the progressive media, who set the narrative tone, a busty blonde being involved in a crime, either as victim or perp, trumps everything else. After that, it’s black victim with a white perpetrator. The list beyond that fades into insignificance until you reach “I don’t know what you’re talking about” level. Under that, tied with “putting your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘lalalala, I’m not listening’ is black on black crime.

You’d think a “civil rights leader” like MSNBC’s Al Sharpton would care since it’s what he claims to care about, but you’d be wrong. There’s not nearly as much camera time and money in scores of bleeding bodies on Chicago’s south side as there is when the perpetrator is white.

Aside from the rank hypocrisy of silence on an ongoing issue of life and death, the Zimmerman trial offered another opportunity for progressives to express distracting outrage to avoid an important issue.

Trayvon Martin’s girlfriend, Rachel Jeantel, a 19-year-old high school senior, testified in the case and was mocked for not being able to read cursive handwriting. Progressives were outraged anyone would mock this woman who has obviously gone through Hell. But imagine the good that could come out of her testimony had the progressive media been half as angry at a union dominated public education system that churns out 19-year-olds who can’t read cursive as they were at people who found it odd. Opportunity lost because it didn’t fit the narrative.

The George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case is a tragedy, but it’s not unique or special, it’s simply one that can be exploited. Progressives need people to believe America is a horribly and hopelessly racist nation to justify bigger government and more thought crimes.

If Zimmerman walks or is found guilty, life will continue. That you know about this case in the first place is a testament to just how powerfully manipulative the progressive media is. That you can’t name one person shot in Chicago over a 3-day weekend from a list of 74, or that people aren’t protesting outside of Rachel Jeantel’s school chanting “malpractice,” shows just how effective the corrupt progressive media is.

There are lessons to be learned from everything in life, that’s especially true in the Zimmerman trial. Unfortunately, the progressive media will learn only how to manipulate even better the next time because actually talking about and solving problems for which they’ve appointed themselves champions would put them out of business.

There are so many sensible observations in this column, I just had to quote it here.

The Zimmerman verdict

I haven't been closely following the Zimmerman trial. But it's clear that there were a lot of loose ends. On the one hand, we have the spectacle of an unarmed teenager shot to death while carrying an iced tea and some candy, hardly a lethal weapon. But on the other hand, it seems that there was a good chance he was beating up on Zimmerman. Yet back on the first hand, what might Zimmerman have said or done to provoke Trayvon Martin's attacking him?

We know that Trayvon Martin was a trouble-maker in school, and a drug user. But we also know that George Zimmerman was a hair-trigger type who habitually called 911 for things like a garage door being open. This kind of person should never have been allowed to carry a gun. But Florida is one of those states that takes the Second Amendment — the absolute worst piece of our Constitution — seriously. Florida's “Stand your ground” law will lead to a lot more Trayvon Martins in the future.

Zimmerman was found not guilty. And probably the jury had their “reasonable doubts,” and on that ground the verdict was justified under our judicial system. But the really guilty party is the State of Florida. (Of course, I've said this before, more than a year ago.)

Another voice on the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman story

Mansfield Frazier wrote a post on the Daily Beast site this morning. The main title talks about the need to try George Zimmerman, but it is another point he makes that I want to emphasize:

At heart, this case is really about the type of society some want to have versus the one the National Rifle Association wants to foist on an unsuspecting public. Just imagine for a minute that Trayvon Martin was an adult instead of a juvenile; further, that he was licensed to carry a concealed weapon; and still further, that he had a gun on his person when Zimmerman approached him. Under “Stand Your Ground” laws Martin could have just as easily shot and killed Zimmerman instead, and (if not for the fact he was black, and that laws—when race enters into the picture—have been applied unequally in this country for centuries) he then could have made the same self-defense claim. Under this type of Wild West mentality fistfights can (and will) escalate into murders.


Nonetheless, more laws are being proposed in some states to allow concealed weapons to be carried into bars, schools, and public buildings, all in the name of creating a safer society.


According to a study published in the prestigious American Journal of Epidemiology, however, “Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home …”


Writing on the website for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Violence, Dennis Henigan said, “The NRA has a wonderfully simple story to tell. In the NRA’s world, people are neatly divided into two readily identifiable groups: good guys and bad guys. In this imaginary world, we know that legal carriers of guns must be good guys and that good guys use their guns only in legitimate self-defense—that’s what makes them good guys in the first place. The Trayvon Martin tragedy reveals the real world to be far more complicated.” Indeed it is.


In the streets there’s a phenomenon called “pistol courage” which poses the question, would Zimmerman—if he wasn’t armed—have approached Martin in the aggressive manner in which he did? Put another way, are cowards, when they’re empowered with the advantage of firepower, willing to take more risks, and even provoke situations that could have been handled in another manner if they were not armed?


Many gun nuts brag about how they could blow someone away and sleep like babies, and for some of them that’s the gospel truth. But for others (even case-hardened soldiers and police officers) once they’ve taken the life of another human being they’re forever changed—and not for the better. And there’s really no way to know in advance how a person will be affected.


In the Martin/Zimmerman case, issues such as who was crying out for help and what Trayvon was saying to his girlfriend in the seconds before the confrontation cannot be dismissed, and can only be thoroughly examined in a court of law. But the real upside of a trial is that a much-needed spotlight will be placed on “Stand Your Ground” laws. Even if Zimmerman is found not guilty, if those dangerous laws are changed, society will have won a victory.

I'm glad to see this post. As I said earlier, it's really these gun laws that need to be blamed for the Trayvon Martin death. But I was perplexed that others didn't see it that way. Mansfield Frazier clearly gets it.

Truth: a casualty of liberal thinking?

As I have mentioned more than once, I get a lot of material for my posts from columns I read in the Washington Examiner. Many of the columns do not really share my opinions, and I've agreed with some and disagreed with others. (In some, I have not really cited the column, such as one by Gene Healy on Gary Johnson, though it was because of that column that I wrote my most recent post, which was about Johnson.) And yesterday I saw another column I'd like to cite; this one by the Examiner columnist I tend most to agree with: Noemie Emery. Her column, in yesterday's paper, was entitled “The year of losing touch with reality”: among some of the things she says is

Somewhere in the recent past (say, about the time “Dreams From My Father” was published), liberals decided reality wasn't really their thing. It was too dull. It didn't give closure. Sometimes the endings weren't right. So it turns out that Obama's main squeeze in his young days was a “composite,” digitally enhanced for your reading experience.

Then, it turned out that even the blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts for his seat in the Senate, was hired by Harvard as an American Indian, though the proportion of Cherokee in her bloodline was just 1 in 32 parts. Just how pale-faced is Warren? A lot more than George Zimmerman, the brown-skinned son of a Peruvian mother who is accused of murdering Trayvon Martin. He was described by the New York Times as a “white Hispanic,” because if you're going to characterize a death as a lynching, the one who commits it had better be white.

I have to say that I enjoyed seeing those words in her column, and I felt I really needed to quote them. She also goes on to say, later in the same column,

What could be less real than that? Well, there is one thing — conjecture about what would have been in an alternative universe, in which much is asserted and nothing proved. These have become mainstays for President Obama, whose case for re-election is based not on what has happened, but what could, would or might have occurred under different conditions, which he is allowed to make up. One is his belief that his stimulus averted a second Depression. A second is to charge that a President Romney would not have made the call to take out Osama bin Laden and then to attack Romney for a “decision” he never had the opportunity to make. The supposed evidence for this claim came from a wide-ranging interview on general strategy that Romney had given five years earlier.

I recommend that you read the entire column, but these excerpts show how Noemie Emery tells it “like it is.” More power to her.

The real perpetrator in the Trayvon Martin murder: Florida law

So George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin (claiming “self-defense,” though Martin was carrying nothing more threatening than some candy and an iced tea!) will be tried for murder in Florida. It took this long to charge him, because they had to figure out how to deal with Florida's “stand your ground” law. Zimmerman should, I agree, be tried, and if the facts are as we have been told, convicted and sentenced (Florida law would not, it seems, give him the death penalty for this crime. Too bad). But just the fact that Florida law encouraged Zimmerman to “stand his ground” and permitted him (a known overreactor, who once called 911 because a neighbor left his garage door open!) to own and carry a gun, makes me feel that the true villain of the case is the State of Florida.

I still feel, even if this puts me at odds with every other person who generally shares my “conservative/libertarian” philosophy, that no person, other than the military and law-enforcement personnel, has a genuine need to carry a gun. If Zimmerman had no gun in his possession, Trayvon Martin would be alive today. And he is not the first person, regardless of the race of the shooter or the victim, to be shot by someone believing he was acting in “self-defense,” who in fact was not threatened. (And then, there are accidental shootings, where nobody was even trying to kill someone!)

But some will argue that we need to be able to defend ourselves from really threatening people carrying guns. My response is: if guns were only made in quantities necessary to supply the police and military, how would the bad guys get them? Right now, perhaps, an insignificant minority of the guns circulating around were lost by police or military warehouses. Most were manufactured for private sale, intended of course to be sold to people who can, under today's laws, own them legally. If nobody could buy a gun (except the police and military), these criminal-owned guns would never have been manufactured. So there simply would not be a need for “self-defense.”