Anyone familiar with my previous comments on the police and murder investigations and wrongful convictions might be a bit surprised at my take on the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Many people seem to have settled into a comfortable consensus that a suspicious Zimmerman chased Martin through a quiet neighborhood on a rainy night, even after the police dispatcher told him not to, and tried to detain him, because Martin was black, and then assaulted him and, when Martin defended himself, shot him to death. And that is almost indisputably what happened. Martin is dead, Zimmerman had the gun. Martin did not go looking for a guy in a pick-up truck. Zimmerman was looking for burglars.
The part that is hard to figure out is what happened exactly at the moment Zimmerman met Martin. The first narrative is that Zimmerman tried to detain or stop Martin from returning to the condo where he was staying with his father’s fiancé at the time, and when Martin refused to remain with him to wait for the police, Zimmerman tried to physically restrain him and a struggle ensued. During the struggle, Zimmerman reached for his gun and shot Martin in the chest. By this account, yes, Zimmerman was shooting in self-defense, in a sense: against a man resisting his attempt to detain him without cause. Given a richer understanding of all the information we have, that seems like the fairest explanation of why Zimmerman did have signs of injury on his face. No rational person can believe, in the least, that he simply walked up to Trayvon Martin and shot him. There was an altercation.
Zimmerman claims that Martin surprised him. But Zimmerman had left his car to go looking for Martin. I doubt we’ll ever know if Martin, knowing Zimmerman was following him, decided to confront him, or Zimmerman, trying to justify shooting an unarmed man, made it up. In Zimmerman’s parable, Martin says “you got a problem”? That’s good dialogue. That makes sense, in a way.
There are photos of Zimmerman’s face that show rather convincingly that he did take some abuse during the altercation. There is some evidence– fairly strong– that he called for help before the shooting. There is very convincing evidence that he followed Trayvon Martin and confronted him. Zimmerman was not wearing a police uniform because he was not a cop. He did not appear to have identified himself as a “neighborhood watch” official, as if. He was just a citizen with a gun in a nation that has insanely stupid laws about guns. As far as Trayvon Martin was concerned, this was just some prick following him and looking for a fight. Trayvon Martin is black. He knows what it’s like to be an instant suspect.
Under existing U.S. law and jurisprudence, if Trayvon Martin had had a gun, he could have simply shot and killed Zimmerman for following him in the dark. “Stand your ground”, man. In fact, let this be a cautionary tale for all black young men in the U.S.: join the NRA and start packing. And the first piece of information you want to get out there after you shoot somebody is “I was frightened” and “I am a member of the NRA exercising my sacred God-given right to defend myself”. You’ll be fine.
Yes, if the law were applied equally.
But, in fact, I suspect that if Martin had done so, he would have been arrested and charged with murder immediately, and the motive would have been robbery, and there would have been no long delay while people publicly disputed whether any racism was involved or if Zimmerman were on drugs, and the NRA would have not have stepped up to defend Martin’s sacred right to use a gun to defend himself when a strange mixed-race man approaches him in the dark. Does anyone doubt this? I’m open minded. Show a similar case.
This doesn’t obscure the fact that Zimmerman is a jerk precisely in the sense that he is a product of a mentality and culture that believes we would all be safe if we all had guns, safer than we would be if nobody had guns. But he is not a jerk in the sense that he seemed to be looking for someone to kill. He did something criminally stupid and he should be punished for criminal stupidity, but I haven’t seen any evidence to indicate that he acted out of malevolence.