Thanks for the summary, lots of rumors in schools. My 16 year old stepdaughter and I were driving last week and she brought this up. Couldn’t believe what she said...”I heard he was shot in the back twice, and when he was screaming for help, he shot him again”.
Again, these were rumors from other kids, but there is some serious lack of information out there.
My son’s English teacher gave the kids a copy of an editorial from the NYT - a black author basically trying to say that blacks are assumed to be “up to no good” for just walking down the street. They were supposed to answer factual questions about what the editorial claimed and then give their response about what this event means to them.
My son came home and said, “Mom, I think I’m going to need your help figuring out how to respond to this.”
I asked him what kind of discussion they had in class about it. He said he was one of only two who weren’t gushing on about “That’s terrible! Nobody should get shot just for walking down the street!” The other was a fellow trombonist who he had already talked to about the real story and how the media had lied about the evidence, so he recognized what was going on in the NYT editorial right away.
I work with a guy who teaches gun safety classes. A big guy who has told me about training his daughter in self-defense. We were talking about when karate moves would be needed above and beyond a good right hook and I said if somebody was armed karate would be helpful. He agreed, and it went into a discussion about the Trayvon situation. I think he’s a democrat, based on some things he’s said, so I was a little afraid of what he’d say but after I mentioned that Zimmerman had a busted nose and gash on the back of his head from having his head banged on the ground, he agreed that Zimmerman would have been dead meat without the gun. If a guy is going after your head, to bash it in, you have to either end the fight right now or there’s going to be brain damage so you can’t end the fight at all.
I think when people have genuine facts they reach reasonable conclusions. Unless they have a strong motive not to see the truth.