In my foreign land, murder is OKFollow

My favorite part is how news outlets have been trying, in the past week or so, to paint Martin as a terrible kid. Because he was, at the time, suspended from school.

For what? For having an empty baggy of pot. But no record of violence from the school or police. And he played for the school's football team.

Yeah, we've got a real thug on our hands...

I'm sure that's exactly why they're referred to that way in the media. The whole thing is about public perception. Same reason why they have a picture of him that looks like it's a few years old (he certainly looks younger than 17 in that picture).

I've tried to consistently use both their last names, but I'll switch to Trayvon occasionally when directly responding to someone else who used that name. And yeah, I made the same connection about the names that you did.

Yeah, he was following him while talking to the police and ignoring their instructions. That is a little bit different then running into someone in your housing complex. Don't equate the two.

From a legal perspective, they are exactly the same. Why would you think otherwise? Martin had just as much legal justification to attack Zimmerman, as I did to attack the guy who happened to be getting mail at the same time I was.

You're making a fair amount of assumptions yourself, bucko. Nobody witnessed the start of the fight. You can't say that Martin was the aggressor. You could say that he was winning the fight, until the gun came out, but not that he initiated it. There are a fair number of viable scenarios in which either could be the aggressor, and also the possibility that Zimmerman is lying about the encounter to save his ***. Does that sound more or less likely than a teenager unfamiliar with the neighborhood deciding to pick a fight with some random adult?

Which I addressed with the statement "While we can't say just by looking at who's on top at the end of a fight who started the fight...". I'm the one stating over and over that we don't know who started the fight, so we can't assume it was Zimmerman.



At what point? He was absolutely the aggressor during the time period when (at least) three different witnesses all saw him straddling Zimmerman beating him. I've yet to find a single witness account who actually saw Zimmerman throw a punch, or at any point be in control of the situation. Not one.




Ok. But you're switching terms there. I didn't say he initiated it, only that he was the aggressor "during the fight". The fact that we can't know for sure who started the fight does not preclude us from observing who was clearly in control of the fight and clearly attacking the other guy during the fight. Again, we can't conclude from this who started it, but it does blow some serious holes in the argument that Martin was some passive kid whose only objective during the whole thing was to get home.

Do I need to go back to earlier in this thread and start quoting people talking about how Zimmerman "cornered him" or was otherwise keeping him from simply running away? Clearly, Martin could have gotten away if that's all he wanted. He choose to straddle Zimmerman and continue punching him and beating him. This is not the act of a scared little boy who just wants to go home.




Sure. And space aliens could have abducted them both during the fracas too! But we can only act on the evidence we have. We have zero evidence that Zimmerman initiated the physical altercation. And "physical altercation" does not mean following him, or talking to him. It means physically laying hands on the other person in some way.

I guess I'm not sure what people want here. Zimmerman should be arrested and charged because he could have done something? I could have robbed a bank yesterday. Does the fact that I can't prove otherwise make me guilty? No? Then neither does the fact that Zimmerman can't prove he didn't initiate the fight make him guilty.



The difference is that I'm not precluding the possibility that Zimmerman is lying to save his ***. But a whole hell of a lot of people are precluding the possibility that Martin was doing something suspicious and did start the fight and Zimmerman was acting in self-defense. Read some of the stuff being said out there. People are howling for Zimmerman's head, based solely on assumptions that Zimmerman must have been in the wrong because a 17 year old they've never met and don't know could not possibly have been doing anything suspicious, and could not possibly have initiated the fight.


I'm not calling for immediate action, or escalating the issue, or assuming that the police have failed to do their jobs because they didn't arrive at a conclusion I like. Yet, there are a whole lot of highly publicly visible and influential people doing exactly that. And frankly, they should be ashamed for it. I'm all for making sure justice is done, but if you're going to pick a cause to fight, perhaps you should actually get the facts first? The sad part to all of this, is that the next time there is a kid like Martin who's unfairly treated by our legal system, there will be less support for that cause because those calling for it have cried wolf too many times when they were in the wrong.

Edited, Mar 26th 2012 5:12pm by gbaji

I think if I lived in this neighborhood with Zimmerman, I'd be thinking about moving. Self-appointed vigilante, roaming the streets with a gun? No thank you. Next, it'll be someone else that looks "suspicious".

That's what bothers me. Not who started this fight, but the fact that this guy has decided that he's going to take the place of the police and take "justice" into his own hands. He sounds unstable to me and someone really needs to revoke his carry license.

Also, did gbaji say he attacked some guy for getting his mail??

You're right. It's more the act of someone being harassed.

It's a federal offense to tamper with someone else's mail, though not necessarily worth a shootin'.

Unless you're in Florida.

IIT: People repeat overly simplistic statements that have already been responded to fully and clearly.

Anyone could argue the potential for violence exists. I mean, when a woman out for a morning jog can be randomly attacked - can't it be said we are all potential targets for violence?

Now I do come from a a certain perspective:
I don't generally agree with anyone carrying hidden weapons in civilian society.

If there is a need for weapons in civilian society - if it is, as you describe it, a war zone, doesn't that suggest something is wrong on the home front?

I haven't heard of much here that would suggest to me that law enforcement officials would require a hidden weapon off hours. I mean I could see it with undercover people involved in gangs, if there are any, obviously an investigation like that could call for exceptions, but what does it say for the tenor of the society as a whole if there is out and out warfare between agents of the state and significant portions of the population? I mean warfare is what it looks like to me when police are so insecure that they feel the need to carry a weapon off hours and tons of other people just feel the need to own and carry weapons regardless.

Isn't that a hint that there may be some societal breakdown going on?

Edited, Mar 26th 2012 5:58pm by Olorinus

See? Cliff Claven voice makes it alllll better.

You're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether the scenarios are viable or absurd. If we don't know what happened and *can't* know what happened, we can't assume anything, much less press charges against someone.

Yet that's exactly what the mob is demanding in this case.



You're changing the words again. We're dealing with a case where Martin was seen (by at least three witnesses) straddling Zimmerman and beating him just before Zimmerman shot him. At some point, whether we call it an encounter, or an altercation, or whatever, a physical fight started. The cause of that fight is in question. Either Zimmerman started the fight, or Martin did. If Zimmerman did, his case for self defense is invalid. If Martin did, his case is valid.


And while I suppose you can make a case for Martin feeling threatened, you'd need to make a much stronger case for an explicit threat from Zimmerman to justify the end result the eye witnesses saw. As I've said many times so far in this thread, we can speculate an endless set of possible things Zimmerman could have done which might make Martin so sure he was going to be attacked that he might attack first. Or we could speculate that Zimmerman just ran up and attacked Martin out of the blue with no warning. But all of that is just speculation. We don't know what is true and unless there's some additional information that we're missing, we *can't* know.


It just sounds like you're trying to come up with excuses to explain Martin's behavior, but those excuses are getting more and more bizarre and unlikely as more facts about this case appear. You should step back from the issue for a second and ask what your position would be if you'd just heard about this for the first time today. I honestly believe that most people are continuing to insist that Zimmerman should be arrested not because of the facts of the case, but because they adopted that position a week or so ago when all they knew was a slanted view presented by the Martin's lawyer and now they don't want to face the possibility that something they felt so strongly about was wrong.


This is why I keep saying that people are acting on emotion and not reason in this case. I fully get why the Martin's lawyer did this. It's good for her clients to stir up public support. But this is precisely why we should wait to pass judgment until we know all the facts (or as many as possible). Frankly, the behavior of the media and many public figures in this case has been abhorrent. While screaming for justice, they've been effectively preventing it from being done. Hopefully, it wont be long before cooler heads prevail and the public perception shifts. The real question is whether we'll learn from this lesson, or repeat it again the next time it happens.