Despite rumors to the contrary, vigilantism against suspicious, tea-weilding black kids in hoodie sweatshirts IS against the law! This is good news, because for a while there, I had to turn down the hip-hop music in my car for fear of getting shot by some neighborhood watchman with a boner for street justice. The state of Florida is charging George Zimmerman with 2nd degree murder for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the toughest charge possible without premeditation. Is that too strong a charge? I don't think so. Say what you want about using the law to send a message, but it cannot become anything even resembling okay for the average gun-toting citizen to go around killing people with nothing more than a gut feeling. This can't be what the average gun-toting citizen wants, can it?
More Americans than we would like to admit are racist assholes too. As for Zimmerman, it would appear that the scary black kid in a hoodie sweatshirt was too much for him to cope with, so much of a threat that he decided to tail him, confront him, and fatally shoot him despite numerous police warnings not to go anywhere near the guy. Something about that smells racist and malicious to me, and although I do know that George Zimmerman is a piece of shit, I have no idea whether he was acting based on conscious feeling of malice toward black people or not.
However, the way that the whole situation was "handled" has been ... well, fucked up. First, there wasn't enough evidence to charge anyone, despite the fact that one guy was dead and it was perfectly clear who had done it. But it was a black kid who got shot, so the story about Trayvon Martin being a threat and a menace seemed reasonable to the authorities. Then, lo! Martin might have had some weed on him at some point in his life, or some crap like that, which proves he was a menace, and that Zimmerman was being honest in his assessment of the situation. This is a completely bullshit perspective - that is unless we're planning on opening the door for hunting season on recreational drug users. And we ought to include nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine on that list if we're going to include marijuana, so we'd all be screwed - many of us would be screwed several times over if the charges were additive. It was all a lot of bending over backwards to justify the actions of people like Zimmerman, and that's the real frightening part.
So what I'm saying is, go for the gold - and by gold, I mean the murder charge. Let the people decide whether the shoe fits. I mean, the fucker killed a guy in the street because he "felt threatened." We'll see what happens - stuff like this tends to bring the real creeps out of the woodwork, both in and out of the courtroom.
No comments:
Post a Comment