One VERY well written response worth Quotinghttp://theconservativetreehouse.com/201 ... arcerated/James Crawford says:
June 3, 2012 at 11:26 pm The headlines might have read, “Vigilante Hardware Store Owner Stalks Then Murders Unarmed Motorist.”. Police and alleged self defense experts might have chastised the store owner for being foolish enough to confront the man in the van that had pulled into the loading area behind his hardware store. One of the responding officers might have been quoted as saying, “this was avoidable. If only the hardware store owner had stayed in his store rather than confronting the man in the van parked by his loading dock, no one would have died.” Political pundits no doubt would have pontificated about the brutal execution of a petty thief who was simply stealing a garbage can. The gun control lobby would have cited the case as just one more tragic consequence of the proliferation of guns in our culture and the dangerous delusion of self defense. If the man in the van had been African-American, Hispanic or even Asian, the case might have provoked violent protests and the offer of a $10,000 reward for apprehension of the hardware store owner, dead or alive.
Perhaps the people who are venting their outrage about the Trayvon Martin shooting would claim that it was fortunate that my brother wasn’t armed that night he confronted that “unarmed victim” behind his hardware store. The crime certainly provoked no national outrage because the man in the van was white, just like my brother, and no one was shot. The fact that my brother was brutally murdered by a robber who intentionally ran him down with a Dodge van received laudable, front page coverage from the local paper, The Oregonian, which actually led to the arrest of the perpetrator. However; there were no lurid articles or photos documenting how the van lurched from a stop to repeatedly bump my brother until he was knocked down, then accelerated over a distance of forty feet across the parking lot with my brother trapped under the rear axle, leaving a gruesome trail of cloth and blood and skin and flesh and bone ground into the asphalt. There were no published accounts of how my brother was left laying in the parking lot of his hardware store with what the coroner clinically described as a “flail chest injury.”. No reporter was at the trial to hear the paramedics describe how this horrific trauma allowed them to actually watch my brother’s heart as it stopped beating.
Reading the inflammatory rhetoric about the Trayvon Martin shooting and how Mr. Zimmerman “stalked him” before “gunning him down” forces me to wonder what might have happened that night if Zimmerman hadn’t been armed with a gun. Would only a handful of journalists be reporting on what would be dismissed as just another, routine murder by some anonymous, black male? Perhaps the pundits might have remarked on the highly unusual circumstances of an African-American killing his victim by smashing his skull against the pavement rather than shooting him before proclaiming the need for stricter gun control laws? Would the crime remain unsolved as almost all homicides by unrelated assailants are? Would police take notice of Zimmermann’s one arrest for nonviolently resisting arrest to dismiss his killing as a “misdemeanor murder” that is unworthy of serious investigation? Would Zimmerman’s murder have become just one more line in the FBI’s annual Supplementary Homicide Reports that all to often list page after page of homicides of usually Black or Hispanic victims whose assailant or assailants are identified only as a “u”, indicating that the crime was never solved?
I do not know for certain what happened that night, only Mr Zimmerman does. However; Mr. Zimmerman’s calm, cooperative demeanor during his call to the police was hardly consistent with the caricature of a crazed, racist vigilante. While I have read and heard much speculation about how Mr. Zimmerman stalked, cornered and confronted Trayvon, I have seen no reporting in the mainstream media that analyzes the relative positions of people, vehicles and Trayvon’s body, times and speeds to determine what scenarios were plausible much less acknowledge that almost all of the evidence is consistent with Zimmerman’s account of events.
Perhaps what is most alarming about the Trayvon Martin shooting is that for to many people, the racial implications of the shooting transcend the facts. They seem to believe that by simply taking notice of Mr. Martin and becoming suspicious enough to call the police and follow him, Mr. Zimmerman was demonstrating such racist disrespect that it was perfectly appropriate for Trayvon to assault him. The FBI arrests statistics that conclusively demonstrate that young, African-American males who resemble both Trayvon and President Obama’s hypothetical son commit a grossly disproportionate number of homicides, rapes, robberies and assaults are irrelevant to them. Equally irrelevant is Trayvon’s own, well documented history of assaultive behavior. The implication is that White people should cower in their homes rather than carefully observe a seemingly suspicious unrecognized Black person in their neighborhood who may or may not be committing a crime. Even more reprehensible is the presumption that Mister Zimmerman wasn’t in reasonable fear for his life when he pulled the trigger as Trayvon was pounding his head into the pavement. Anyone making this assertion that Trayvon was not committing a deadly force assault is cordially invited to prove it by conducting an experiment using their own skull as the test subject.
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FAQ
Do not go gentle into that good night.
What is so different about this murder case then?
