In the end, Trayvon is the one that was executed for his crimes by George. Different George, though.

The big concern now is this: Black will riot in cities across the land and/or mainly whitish vigilantes will flood the streets and shoot anything with a hoodie.

For the most part neither of these things will happen. If there is one thing we’ve learned from the last few decades of changes in gun laws, sudden and dramatic events related to firearm use and abuse, etc. is that a) the brownish people never really go to the streets to kill all the whitish people and b) the gun nuts never really change what they do or the rate at which they do it. And, I’ll add c) criminals and miscreants don’t pay much attention to any of this stuff. Nothing is going to happen.

I’m not saying that there isn’t going to be change. The Zimmerman trial outcome has actually helped to galvanize the anti-gun lobby a little bit, and that lobby was already in action. If anything, this event may bring into the fold a few groups that were not already as engaged. It turns out that the youth are at constant risk of being killed or maimed in this country by older males with firearms, and that this risk applies across levels of privilege, variations in skin tone, regions of the country, urban vs. rural, and all of that.

For young people in the United States, your chance of being killed by a firearm-wielding adult male, in a fire arms accident, or by a self inflicted gunshot, is much higher than the chance of dying of any disease. Guns are the new polio. Guns are the new small pox. Guns are the new plague.

Two things are starting to dawn on the American population. First, we are realizing that the possession of handguns as a constitutionally protected right to stave off an oppressive government is a failed fantasy. Imagine having the right to free speech but everyone’s larynx is removed routinely at birth. Imagine having the right to free assembly and due process but we are locked in separate cages at the age of ten forever. Absurd ideas, aren’t they? We are guaranteed the right to stave off an oppressive government by having a right to own firearms. That worked great with the Patriot Act. The NSA … they never considered spying on American citizens because HANDGUNS. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies will never use Drones on US soil because …. hey, wait a minute …

The second thing we’ve come to realize is that guns are actually very very dangerous. For a couple of generations we’ve grown up with “bang bang you’re dead” style entertainment on TV and in movies, and I think a lot of people don’t realize what really happens when someone pulls the trigger. People don’t experience the temporary (or not) loss of hearing from the sound (especially in a closed space), the smell of the explosion that happens inside the gun, the smell of the blood that spills of the floor. When you ears start to hear again after the shots, there is the sound of the screaming or moaning or incredulous ranting (“You shot me, you shot me, I can’t believe you shot me”) followed by some sort of silence, the silence of a severely wounded person, the silence of a brooding son or daughter with a minor injury to the flesh but a permanent injury to their psyche having just been shot at by daddy, or the silence a person makes when they lie unconscious and bleeding out, or the silence of a corpse.

But now we have soldiers, many more soldiers, among us who know that guns are real and “bang band you’re dead” is not. We have an increasing awareness of an increasing number of incidents in which all the people in a school or all the people who went to see a movie or all the people who visited their candidate for Congress or some other thing suddenly experience the terror of the blasting, the smells, the screaming, the different kinds of deathly silence, and in many cases, personally experience the tearing and exploding flesh, with the lucky ones perhaps being those who are killed quickly by some guy who has expressed his constitutional right to bear arms by firing as many bullets as possible into a crowd.

The Zimmerman verdict moves us measurably closer to effective gun control. This is not the way we should be moving away from the Middle Ages and towards a Civilized World, but it is in fact the only way we seem to be moving. There will be more stand-your-ground shootings, more archaic laws, more unjust verdicts, more mass shootings, all against the background of something close to 3,000 firearm assisted youth suicides and a somewhat larger number of deadly gunshot wounds during crime and street fighting, and no effect on what the government or big corporations do to repress or exploit the average person and no invasions from Canada or Mexico that could only be stopped by a “well regulated militia.” And every now and then some truly good guy will shoot a truly bad guy, stopping the bad guy from doing something truly bad, and people will notice that a handful of such cases against thousands and thousands of gun related deaths a year is not worth it.

Above all, and please never lose sight of this, guns are toys. We are talking about the preservation of the right to play with specific toys, and the right to extend that play into the street and to involve people who did not want to play with these toys to begin with. Stand your ground is a game, it is boys with their toys playing cops and robbers. Boys with their toys build forts in their homes and protect them from invasion. Boys with their toys get together in groups and go out on the street to play army. Boys with their toys collect toys and take them apart and put them together and clean them until they are shiny. Boys with their toys go to big meetings with other boys and trade and sell and exchange and show off. Boys with their toys go to galleries where they can practice and raise their scores.

George Zimmerman was a boy with his toy, and he played cops and robbers, and Treyvon Martin died because he did not follow Zimmerman’s instructions to stand down. Half this country thinks it is OK for a boy like George to take his toy into the street and make other people play and kill them when they do not. The other half is appalled. That second half, it’s growing.

Hmmm…I wonder if that paragraph should have come with two or three trigger warnings…

Anyway, Zimmerman says he is sorry that it happened. He says he loves his own children. (He has no children.) He prays for the parents of the man he murdered every day. Note the interesting editing in the following extended segment from the interview.

Here’s the part about God’s Plan:

“No sir” in answer to a question that essentially meant, “If you had a chance, would you have let Trayvon Martin live?”

Apparently, a person described as a “George Zimmerman Supporter” (read: Person who likes persons who shoot black kids in cold blood) is selling targets, for target practice, meant to resemble the young Trayvon Martin, who was murdered early this year. The targets show a person wearing a hoodie and carrying iced tea and Skittles, as Trayvon was the night he was gunned down in cold blood. (Details here and here.)

Apparently the targets, available at Gun Broker Dot Com, sold out very quickly. (Gun broker has taken down the page, but you can probably contact them through their customer service department.)

The unidentified producer of this target has indicated that is main motivation is to “make money off the controversy.”

(Kudos to gun lovers who have taken exception to this target.)

There is a petition to sign to encourage the Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cucinelli, to take action against the Hiller Armament Company, in Virginia. Click here to read the petition and consider signing it.

But, aside from that, this is worth a watch:

There have been protests, a lot of noise from the Liberal Blogosphere, and even a write in campaign using the Sanford Police’s own web site (click here to get in on that!), and limited criticism from the press.

(The 911 calls related to this case are very damning of Zimmerman, and you can listen to them here.)

Here’s the scenario. The white teenage son of the white police chief of a middle class community in Florida is walking home from the corner store having bought skittles and gummy bears. It is night and it is dark. The neighborhood through which the young white man is passing is mostly black, and one of the black people who lives there, a black man in his 20s or 30s who has a record of violence, and who is carrying a firearm, follows the young white man for a while, then eventually chases him down and confronts him. People nearby hear the young white boy yelling “help help” for a while, then they hear a gunshot. The white boy, the son of the police chief, is dead, and the big black man with the record of violence admits to having shot him, but makes a claim that it was in self defense even though he chased the boy before shooting him dead, and the boy was unarmed.

Still with me? Good. The next part of this thought experiment gets a bit tricky.

The police have arrived. They observe that the teenage son of the police chief is dead. Several neighbors have called in to 911 and reported the same thing, and people at the scene are now being interviewed and they are all saying the same thing as well: It is confirmed that the black guy chased down the white kid and shot him, but he, the big scary black man with the gun, is now claiming self defense.

The police at the scene are faced with the question of what to do when they catch up to the black man. Here are some of the options:

1) Shoot him on sight and say he made a false move.
2) Shoot him if he makes any actual false moves, or arrest him.
3) Wrestle him to the ground violently, put hand cuffs on him, drag him down to the police station, work him over, place him under arrest; later, the criminal justice system puts him in prison for life where, as a killer of a cop’s family member, he is later murdered by prison guards who are never identified or charged.
4) Hear his pleas that he shot the boy in self defense and let him go, don’t file charges. Call the coroner to pick up the body.

Imagine, if you will, that this scenario plays out a hundred times in Florida and other southern states. Imagine that we record what occurs each time and we make a chart. Using the numbers in the list above to label the histogram, what do you think that histogram would look like? I think it would look like this:

Now consider what happened when George Zimmerman gunned down 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. It was the same scenario described above but the victim was a black kid and the shooter was not black. Now, before you go ballistic about me playing the race card here, let me make something very clear. In the thought experiment, I set it up so that a black man shoots an unarmed privileged and connected white boy and ask you to imagine the outcome. You did not seriously consider that the police would say “oh, OK” on hearing that it was self defense, letting the guy go. No one with two neurons to rub together would ever consider that as a possibility. It does not matter if George Zimmerman was acting in a racist manner or not for this to be a racial problem. When the black man is the perp, he receives the full attention of the police force and suffers the full weight of the law, plus more, and there is sometimes a death sentence without justice. When the perp is a white man something more like real justice happens. That is racism.

There are two possible reasons that George Zimmerman did not get arrested for having committed the murder of Trayvon Martin. One is that this is truly a racial event, and the local police saw this as one of their own putting down a black boy. Zimmerman did say to the cop something like “These assholes are always getting away.” This time, the asshole did not get away. The other possibility is that Zimmerman is not being held responsible for what he did because of the NRA, the gun lobby, and the political activism and campaign donations of the gun-nut community and their unabashed political power. This would be because Zimmerman was (according to some) exercising his right to “stand his ground” under Florida’s relatively new “stand your ground” law.

The “stand your ground” law removes the time honored rule codified in many laws and clarified in many court cases that you must beat a retreat if threatened, and allow the authorities to take over for you. The “stand your ground law” was passed in Florida and has been considered in many other states because, it is said, the police will never arrive on time to save or protect you, so you better be able to carry a firearm and shoot when you feel threatened. So far, I don’t know of any cases where someone has properly acted to “stand his ground” though there are numerous cases where people violently attacked others–using firearms or not–in public places, in states where lots of people carry firearms legally and demand to do so in order to defend themselves or others from felonious violence, where there was not any citizen response of any kind. And now, we have a case of a person “standing his ground” by stalking, running down, and executing a young man who’s only crime was that he liked skittles. And, this case happens where even if the young man who was murdered in cold blood was actually committing a crime, the police could have easily gotten there in time and dealt with him. (I note, based on a comment by Gwen on another post, that Zimmerman had called the police about once a day for several weeks prior to this event, reporting suspicious activity, clearly showing some sort of mental derangement. Clearly he should not have been permitted to own a gun and he should have been charged long earlier for abusing the 911 system. One wonders if he was linked to the police force some way, via friendship or family ties.)

Both of these–racism or gun nuttery–could apply at the same time, of course. Zimmerman could have acted in a racist manner. Perhaps he had been looking for a black kid to execute. Or, perhaps he’s just a vigilante who had been looking for a chance to gun down anyone handy. Or, perhaps the latter applies to him generally, but the former was opportune; if you shoot a black kid to death, the local police would be less concerned than, say, if the scenario in the thought experiment (above) had played out. In truth, we can’t separate the issues of gun violence and overzealous worship of guns and gun ownership from the issue of race and racism. For the most part, “right to carry” and “stand your ground” and “castle defense” and “you can pry my guns out of my cold dead hands” attitudes and arguments are white, and often over-white, as in white supremacist, racist, and rather tea-flavored, if you catch my drift.

It is utterly astonishing that Zimmerman has yet to be arrested, even after this incident has received national, and negative, attention. Perhaps something violent has to happen. Perhaps some white kids have to get popped, or a downtown business district burned to the ground, or a half dozen police cars torched and tipped over. I hope not. I hope the authorities act quickly to bring this matter to a close, and then, that state legislatures around the country that have passed “Stand your ground” or similar gun-nut favoring laws undo their idiotic decisions, and those considering such legislation drop the matter. Also, I hope we all recognize that the gun lobby has lost a lot of ground on this one. This event shows the gun nuts for what they are, and it shows what happens when they get their way.

I personally don’t have a problem with well regulated gun ownership (which this event in Florida is not an example of!) but I do think that the Second Amendment needs to be repealed, because it gives the pro-gun lobby cachet they can never earn on their morals.

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