Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Missing The Point

Too late.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/trayvon-martin-shooting-details-emerge-facebook-twitter-accounts-180103647.html

Trayvon Martin was not a saint.  Trayvon Martin was a teenager.

Did Trayvon Martin turn and attack the armed guy who was stalking him through the neighborhood?  Possibly.  Maybe probably.

Does that matter?

No.

The problem is that Zimmerman followed him around with a loaded gun.  The problem is that the idiotic Stand Your Ground law is written so poorly that it basically allowed what looks to be at least voluntary manslaughter to go - at first - unpunished.  The problem is that if Zimmerman were black and Martin white, there is no way Zimmerman would have not been arrested.

This is the problem with the personalization of issues like this.  Martin was just a normal kid with normal kid issues.  He should not be dead.  But because Martin came to stand for things that maybe his actual life could not bear, we will get a muddied result from all this.

And it some point, someone else is going to get killed because of this Stand Your Ground bullshit.

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