Zimmerman not guilty.

[Fisherking]

I think what happened is that the jury realized they couldn´t give him the death penalty.
so they gave it to him anyway by putting him back on the streets....it's kinda brilliant.

I think Zimmerman was a want-a-be hero doing his neighborhood watch captain thing. He didn’t disregard the dispatchers instructions. He went back to his truck, which is where it should have ended. However Martin chose to double back and confront him.

Did Martin look suspicious? If he was walking through people’s lawns at night with a hood over his head, he did. He was a stranger on other peoples property. Sufficient to be arrested for trespassing.

Some where in that confrontation Zimmerman ended up on the ground with a broken nose and his head being pounded into the sidewalk. Was he seriously hurt? No. Did he have reason to believe he might be? Yes. Is that justification for the use of deadly force? Under Florida law, it is.

Was there a racial motive to the shooting? Not according to an FBI investigation into the matter.

Most of this is inflammatory and concocted from the media. There was a similar case recently also in Florida where the shooter was black and the dead one was white. The shooter went home.

Was it tragic that a young man lost his life that day? It was indeed. And it was also tragic that approximately 20 other young black men lost their lives that day and every other day since. But unlike Martin they didn’t make it into the news because their killers were also black.

It is not a gun problem. It is a violence problem and a culture problem and it was brought about, at least to a large degree by Government Policy.

But that brings no media outcry or rush to change. No calls of injustice or racism. And that is the larger tragedy.

[Greyblades]

If I may, what are you referring to when you say it is due to the government policy?

[Fisherking]

If I may, what are you referring to when you say it is due to the government policy?

The war on poverty. Welfare as practiced in the US.

Google destruction of the black family or the travesty of black education. I am sure you will find enough to understand what I mean.

In part, at least, it was well meant but ill considered. Other parts were far more cynically implemented for political gain. Even when you take away any political bias it is pretty damning. But neither side has rushed to fix it.

[Lemur]

Pretty strong correlation between War on Drugs, mass incarceration of black men, and the national breakdown of the black family.

That's one angle. There's also a correlation between welfare and the breakdown of the black family (as Fisherking mentions—less direct evidence for this hypothesis, but it's not without merit, and it's a favorite trope of Libertarians and the Far Right).

So from the Law & Order crowd you have drug laws that imprison a disproportionate number of black men, with every negative side-effect that entails, and from the Care Bears you have a welfare system that creates disincentives for marriage and family bonding. Quite the fecal taco.

Best/easiest/cheapest thing we could do, as a nation, would be to wind down the expensive and counter-productive War on Drugs. Welfare has already been heavily modified (without corresponding upticks in black employment and family outcomes, which implies welfare was not the central disruption that Libertarians hypothesize).

One thing I find troubling in this discussion:

Do the media sensationalize and attempt to portray the simplest possible conflict to sell airtime/ads? Yes.

Do black and liberal politicians attempt to sell racial conflict, regardless of merit? Yes.

But ... but. We do have a history of racial injustice in this country, and I get wary when I hear people implying that the only form of racism is black-on-white, and that the only injustice is the White Man's Burden as he deals with the Troublesome Negro. Some posts in this thread have tiptoed dangerously close to that border.

I would not want to be a young black man in the American South for a large number of reasons. It's a crappy starting position. Yes, the only way to fix things is to fix them yourself, but to ignore the institutional disadvantages placed on black Americans is a bit much. You don't have to be a gutmensch pinko drum-circler to recognize that there are structures in place that disproportionately impact black men and women.

[Fragony]

Well I don't mind being dangerously close to that. I won't cross that line but this doesn't seem to be what some some people want it to be (not here on the org)

[Fisherking]

Thanks for bringing up the other topics Lemur.

The law and order crowd has much to answer for too.

No one should escape all blame. Left, Right, or Center, politicians black and white and to an extent activist groups likewise.

The Unions of the 1960s were also a part of the problem but now 50 years gone by the level of unrest can still be brought to a fever pitch without people bothering to find out the facts.

A thousand men can be swayed by their prejudices faster and easier than one man can be persuaded by reason.
Friedrich Hayek

I like most others I assumed Zimmerman guilty from media reports, until I started looking into the matter and that was most of the way through the trial.

Crime is not a matter of black or white, it is most often a matter of poverty and lack of opportunity.

Most people today do not see everything in racial tones. Most have long ago given up such stereotypes.

There were no clear racial overtones to this case until they were manufactured by the press. Rather than back down from them, they seem to be perpetuating them.

The case should be over and needs to be over. People upset at the death of one person and its injustice need to be aware of a much larger problem. If that got real national attention perhaps something more could be done.