is about a punk with a gun. I'm sure he fancied himself all powerful while he carried that thing and deluded himself into thinking he was a combination cop and super hero.

It's really sad, the whole thing is. Had he followed the dispatcher's instructions to stay in his truck and wait for a squad car, DU would have been a very tranquil place over the last couple of weeks.

someone on a whim (a perceived threat, no matter how paranoid, unrealistic, or jaded).

"people should be taught to use every possible alternative before shooting someone."

including Law Enforcement.

Last edited Mon Apr 16, 2012, 11:50 AM - Edit history (1)

I had forgotten that Bill Cosby lost his son in this way, so I'll give him a pass on this.

However, it's not smart to turn this debate from a matter of race, where we can win, to one of guns, where we cannot.

Your statement implies that you are more concerned with "winning" the issue than resolving the problem.

How Orwellian of you....

is making the social changes needed to keep another Trayvon Martin from being killed. I think if we turn the focus from race to guns, we stand a much lower chance of achieving those changes.

Exactly how is that Orwellian?

I suspect many people have forgotten (or perhaps never knew) that Bill Cosby lost one of his own children in this way.

if Zimmerman did not have a gun, which I believe emboldened him, he would not have pursued Trayvon. So yea, the gun probably made him feel powerful.

Same feeling I belive is whats wrong with a lot of gun owners. It makes them feel strong and powerful.

a gated community = automatically deemed "suspicious." It is an unfortunate and ugly truth, but it is still the truth. Yes, Zimmerman's prejudiced, trigger-happy vigilante behavior and refusal to listen to the dispatcher telling him to not get out of the car played a significant factor in the outcome, but ultimately, it was race. If Trayvon had been a white kid, I don't think he'd be dead. Plain and simple.

Add in the impotent angry man syndrome, and that explains it all.

We live in a country were a member of the United States Congress, members of her staff and bystanders were gunned down at a public forum and in the days, weeks and months afterward there was no real effort to discuss guns in the country by our elected leaders. None. Not from our President (D). Not from the Senate Majority Leader (D). Not from the U.S. Representative herself, the victim of gun violence (also ... a D).

The NRA won this battle already. Our own leaders have failed us by not even talking about it.

Truely, a new definition for "automatic weapon".

That's if you want to split hairs about it, but I hope you don't think you have a real argument here. I'm not 8 years old, which is about the age I was when I first heard that quip.

this issue is about both race AND guns

has raised a generation of bullies. They loved Bush and Cheney and their bully diplomacy.

A large part of the Trayvon Martin case is that the guy was going to walk away after murdering him with no charges. Either very little or absolutely no investigation was done. If Zimmerman had been black and Martin white, that would never have happened. No effort would have been spared to convict him.

It started off about race, then it was about guns Zimmerman shot Martin, then immediately afterward it was about race again. It can be about both.

Think you're exactly right...

My first thought on reading the headline of the OP was "it's both."

But everything up to that point was a race issue.

Racism was what got Zimmerman worked enough to follow, racism let the police take Zimmerman's word for what had happened, but this stupid law gave Zimmerman a free pass that night.

The fact that an unstable person like Zimmerman was easily able to get not only a license to own a gun but a concealed carry permit is the third leg of this situation.

Maybe we can do something about the first two things, the we can address the gun problem.

The Sanford police department was never going to take Trayvon's side of the issue. Their investigation and process had huge holes in it, which is why Zimmerman was never charged.

They had Trayvon's 911 tapes indicating that they could access immediately, but never did. If they had, they would have realized that Trayvon was not the threat that Zimmerman claimed he was. They would have known that Zimmerman made the wrong decision by moving forward. They also had the fact that you had a prosecutor who was ready to arrest him, but was told not to by State Attorney Wolfinger.

This was all about race up to the point of arrest.

Now we're on an even playing field. Only because this case has national attention.

> who taught him how to behave with it.

Exactly. That is why the Founding Fathers mentioned "well-regulated" in the 2nd Amendment. Federalist Paper #29 addresses the Founder's ideas on what we now call "2nd Amendment issues". They were aghast at the idea of a bunch of people running around untrained with guns. "Well-regulated" is defined there, and paraphrased says "trained like an army".

Anybody concerned with guns is highly advised to read it.

There's a reason state authorities were forced to step in, and why federal authorities have taken an interest as well... and it isn't because they're worried about anyone's 2nd Amendment rights being curtailed.

I don't see Zimmerman as the Grand Dragon of the KKK. He may very well indeed have been the person to have a "safe" black friend or acquanitance or two at some point in his life. Having listened to the 911 tapes, I'm not 100% convinced he said "coons" as opposed to "punks", but it is quite possible he used "punks." I haven't heard anything yet that supports the proposition that he was an open and unabashed hater of blacks to the point he freely expressed his unbridled vitriol towards them.

That all said, there is still most definitely a racial component in all this. Because while I haven't yet seen anything to support the notion that Zimmerman was an out and out racist, I have seen plenty to support the idea that Zimmerman had a twisted vigalante and trigger happy persona about him with a self-imposed sense of legal duty to him: he was going to be the law, regardless of the fact that he lacked a badge and any reasonable sense of self-restraint. And in that twisted mind of his, he probably thought that because--quite sadly--a large percentage of the prison populations are young African American males, that in his mind meant that any young African American male was a potentially a threat and up to no good. And in his deficient personality, his desire to be Charles Bronson combined with a CCW card that he thought gave him unlimited power culminated in a deadly result of an innocent kid being killed (and arguably murdered.)

So in other words, it was the classic profiling situation, which is soft-bigotry at its finest. And while I try to avoid hard bigots like the plague and thankfully find them far and few between, I've found that I've come across plenty of people who have fallen into the trap of soft bigotry. They don't necessarily hate blacks or Muslims or (name whatever group), but for whatever reason they don't want to trust the true fact that most people regardless of race are genuinely good people, and they don't fully trust members of that race. It's sad, but it's all too common place.

Take New York City and the proposed Islamic Center in lower Manhattan. You had a few people--like that whackjob Pam Geller--who weren't afraid to show us their ugly side and expose themselves as hard bigots who clearly hate all Muslims. But you had a lot more people who didn't necessarily express that hatred, but thought that the mere fact that building an mosque or Islamic Center close to the Ground Zero cite would somehow be "insensitive" or "inappropriate" to the victims of September 11th. Nevermind that a) there were many victims in the September 11th attacks who were Muslim, b) there was no evidence whatsoever that the Muslims seeking to build this Islamic Center had even the slightest ties to September 11th or Al Queada or to organized terrorism, or c) in the United States of America, you have the freedom to worship whatever you want, wherever you want, period.

But that is soft bigotry at play for you, and that is perhaps a greater threat to this country than hard bigotry. Because not only does it infect more people, but it is harder for people to reject and condemn because it is more subtle and commonplace. And its a trap that we see our neighbors or even members of our own family fall into, despite them being otherwise decent people.

I think one of the mistakes regarding the Trayvon Martin case was to immediately to compare it to the murder of Emmitt Till. Yes, there were some glaring factual simularities between the two cases. But the Till murder was a true lynching of the first magnitude, hard bigotry on display at its worst. It was a much more horribly simple case of hatred. The Trayvon Martin case is a much more complicated case indicative of 21st Century complexities. It was the nexis of the soft bigotry of racial profiling and a trigger happy, gun loving society.

So Bill Cosby was definitely on the ball by identifying a major issue of this case as being a matter of a gun-worshipping, trigger happy society. And he was also right that simply labling this case as a mere matter of hard bigotry doesn't necessarily do us any favors in contemplating it. But there is also most definitely a racial component to this case that cannot be ignored, that being the matter of soft bigotry. And while soft bigotry alone might not be a major danger to society, when you combine it with said trigger-happy, gun worshiping vigalante attitude expressed by many, the results can be--as Trayvon Martin tragically learned--very deadly.