Posted on 07/16/2013 4:25:49 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Let's set aside the issue of race for just a moment in the Trayvon Martin case. Strip away the hyperbole on the left and the right and cut to the facts.
Here is what the not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial tells us.
In the state of Florida, a grown man can stalk a teenage boy whom he thinks "is up to no good" in his gated community. He can disobey a police dispatcher who tells him he doesn't need to follow the 17-year-old. When the teen, who happens to be visiting the man's neighbor, gets upset that some stranger is following him and the two wind up in a brawl, the man can pull out a concealed gun and shoot him dead. Then he can claim self-defense even though he was the one who provoked the confrontation. Walk away scot free with the law on his side.
On Saturday, a jury of six women found Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder. A number of legal experts — among them civil rights attorney John Burris — have said the prosecution failed to make its case.
A legal finding of not guilty, however, does not absolve Zimmerman of the fact that he took the life of a teen who was simply returning from the store with a box of Skittles — a teen who would be alive today if the neighborhood watch member and wannabe-cop had not initiated a confrontation, then escalated it by pulling a gun.
The tragic circumstances of Martin's killing just three weeks after his 17th birthday are deserving of the national protests since the verdict was handed down.
More than 350,000 people have signed a petition by the NAACP calling on the Justice Department to file civil rights charges against Zimmerman. They believe that Zimmerman, who is half-white and half-Peruvian, singled out Martin and ultimately killed him for no other reason than that he was African-American and wearing a hoodie.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called Martin's killing "tragic and unnecessary" and said the department was investigating to determine whether to file federal charges. But I think that, rather than racial profiling, the main focus ought to be on the insanity of Florida's gun laws.
Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law allows people to defend themselves with force, including deadly force, if they feel threatened in their home, business, car, or a place where they "have a legal right to be" — rather than retreat if they fear for their lives. The police in Sanford waited 44 days to arrest Zimmerman, in part, because of the right to use force under "Stand Your Ground," although his lawyers did not use that defense in the trial.
At least 21 states have versions of the same law, which are an open invitation to vigilantism. The Florida law is so broad it can be interpreted to allow people to use lethal force anytime if they believe their lives are in danger.
Nine months after Martin was killed, Jordan Davis, another 17-year-old African-American was gunned down in a gas station parking lot in Jacksonville, Fla. Michael Dunn, 45, who is white, is accused of shooting into a parked car where Davis was sitting because he and his friends wouldn't turn down their music.
He has been charged with second-degree murder and goes to trial in September. He is using the "Stand Your Ground" law in his defense. Dunn claimed that he thought Davis and his friends had a gun but none was found in the car.
Dunn, at least, was arrested, unlike Zimmerman, who wasn't charged until the case generated national outrage, but his arrest isn't going to bring Davis back.
How many more Martins and Davises must there be?
Parade of Fools is probably about right.
Our laws in Florida are for us. We don’t need New York Bloomberg SUK-UPS to give us their advice. Clean up your own back yard then work on Chicago and Detroit, the garden cities of the No’th.
Now I feel better.
Ah yes, the fixings for Purple Drank, aka Lean.
Ain’t it great what kids these days are into?
where is this fool living?
I wish the NAACP and other fringe extreme left wing groups do a boycott of our state and leave us alone
Russia or Poland
not just them but all the kooks and race baiters please.
Me and Putin are seeing eye to eye on a lot of things lately....
FL for FL and not for those liberal race bating yankees or liberal kooks
me too unless the yankee liberal race baiting homosexual turds get out of here and never come back
Ummmmm . . . . . . . . Tammerlin? In your second sentence, you said "Strip away the hyperbole from left and right and look at the facts". And then, you proceed to write this incredibly biased, incorrect, hyperbole-laced "description".
Tell me, Tammerlin, who do you see when you look in the mirror? Someone who looks like you? Or Tyra Banks?
That's what I thought.
By the way, I am white with a grand mother who is half black. Does that make me a White-black? (/Sarc off)
Tammerlin Drummond looks to be a white-black just like her hero Obamo, who wants to bring civil rights charges against the white-hispanic George Zimmerman, who is married to another white-hispanic. George Zimmerman’s defense team was comprised of two white-whites and one black-black. It’s all so confusing.
Being OF COLOR. What’s your take on what the OJ trail told us.
I am so tired of hearing how he disobeyed the radio dispatcher and followed TM. According to his statements to police, the dispatcher did not tell him not to follow TM but that they didn’t need him to do that. When they said that, he discontinued following him and went back to his car. He was only trying to answer the dispatcher when he asked him where TM was going?
When he got out of his car a second time, it was to find a street sign to answer the question of his location and it was at that point that TM ambushed him.
Trayvon Martin, according to the testimony of Rachel Jeantel, had arrived at his father’s front door but didn’t go inside. There was a 4 minute gap from that time to the time he ambushed GZ. What was he doing during that time? He didn’t need to be there and confront a strange man, who we now know was assumed to be a male sexual predator by his friend, Rachel J.
Well yes white is a color.
OJ Trial? We already knew that money buys good lawyers. We did learn that many blacks care more about skin color than justice. Perhaps us whites are the same but I dont think so.
Depends, if you are a liberal it makes you black. If you are conservative then you are white.
Anyone can disobey a police dispatcher. They are not law enforcement officers, just office staff. Their “commands” have even less force than a mom reminding a child to brush their teeth.
Your grandmother was a mulatto. If her husband was white, her child — your parent — (be it your mother or father) would be a quadroon. Thus, you’d be — if your other parent were white — an octoroon.
My favorite mix is macaroon
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