Stand Your Ground

Whatever else one may think of the Zimmerman-Martin trials, it's worth noting two things that they really were not about:

1. Race
2. Stand your ground laws.

Martin happened to be black, and Zimmerman happened to be white (Hispanic), but this was tangential at best to this case. The folks like Je$$e Jack$on and Al $harpton (and for that matter, Barack Obama and Eric Holder) do the nation no favors by attempting to make it about race. I'm thinking that Zimmerman probably would have shot Martin had he been white or Hispanic or Asian rather than black. And, as it turns out, about a year before this whole incident Zimmerman himself had testified before against the the local police in defense of a homeless black man. So race really doesn't come into play here.

Second, there's the "Stand Your Ground" laws, which are in the media's crosshairs. However, that law was never mentioned in the trial, neither by defense nor prosecution (and believe me, the prosecution tried everything and anything it could think of, including the ridiculous--this is the one place where race actually did come into play during the trial). The Stand Your Ground laws are actually quite reasonable: they basically mean that a person who is attacked in a public (or private) place does not need to retreat before pulling a gun in self-defense.

Some states have the opposite kind of law; a sort of "you must attempt to retreat first" law, which in some cases has applied even to private property. This means that the law effectively states that during a home invasion, a person is required to attempt to gather himself and his family into the farthest reach of the house before he can legally pull a gun and start shooting. That seems to me to be a bit of overkill in the opposite direction, and it gives an immediate tactical advantage to any criminal who attempts a home invasion.

The same is true in public spaces. In any good defensive carry class, the instructors will teach you to look for a way to avoid conflict (including by fleeing) before pulling a gun in defense; that's pretty much a given. But there is a world of difference between saying that a person must make some attempt to flee before defending himself, and saying that flight is the best first option. Zimmerman may have acted foolishly in following Martin around, and he is paying for that folly in ways that most of us cannot imagine. He got lucky with the innocent verdict, and I think that this ultimately was the right verdict, but he will still have that hanging on his conscience: did he do everything he could to avoid the situation? And he will never be able to go back to life as he knew it again: there are plenty of people who (thanks to the race-baiting mentioned above) will no doubt be looking for ways to "get" him and those whom he loves. He'll have to watch his back as a result.

However, Zimmerman's foolishness cannot be fairly blamed on the Stand Your Ground laws (he claims to have not been aware of those laws at the time, though this seems a little odd and suggests the need for some improvement in the CCW instructions/licensing for Florida). At the point in which the encounter turned violent, there wasn't much opportunity for Zimmerman to flee anyway, and certainly not at the point when he shot Martin--at least not according to the evidence we have available.

The media does nobody any favors by politicizing this court case, or otherwise attempting to manufacture "facts" in pursuit of their own agenda. Overturning laws which are on the books for very valid reasons will not bring back Martin, and it furthermore won't help anybody to sleep safer at night.