Hypothetical Trayvon Martin

Recently information has come out about George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin about a month ago. It’s been said that when he arrived at the police station he was bloodied and he claims this is because Martin assaulted him in the street. Other details have also been circulating, like Martin’s suspension from school because his backpack hadtraces of marijuana, that are so irrelevant to the issue at hand that the only explanation I can think for their release is an asinine attempt to discredit Martin’s character. Likewise is Geraldo Rivera’s opinion that wearing a hoodedsweatshirt is asking for it, sounding strikingly familiar to the laughable argument that rape is the woman’s fault, not the perpetrator – logic that, taken to its extreme, excuses mad gunmen from killing anyone in a hooded sweatshirt or raping any woman wearing a skirt.

 

As far as the allegations that Martin assaulted Zimmerman and prompted him to fire in self-defense, I just can’t see how they could be true. Why would the information come out after the federal investigation, after hundreds of thousands of marches all across the country, after the Miami Heat took a team photo in their hooded sweatshirts in solidarity, and especially after President Obama told the world that if he had a son, he would look likeTrayvon Martin? Obama’s personal speech about Martin is particularly surprising. As I’ve mentioned before, Obama has steered clear of racial rhetoric, but in this case he used a racial connection to make a strong point. Only to be made a fool later because of Zimmerman’s police report coming in a month late? Obama is too calculating for this to be true. He would never have made that personal speech for the Trayvon Martin some want us to believe he was.

However, let’s play the “what if” game for a moment.

1.     What if Martin really had assaulted Zimmerman in the streets? According to the Stand Your Ground law that allowed Zimmerman to fire his gun at someone acting “suspicious,” Martin would have been entirely within his rights. Records of the cell phone conversation he had while Zimmerman was stalking him (recordings that discredit Zimmerman’s previous accounts of the incident) show that he was being followed and made to feel unsafe by the man’s suspicious activity. Therefore, if Martin had decided to attack this stalker – which I highly doubt he did – he would have been acting in self-defense under this law. It doesn’t make the hypothetical assault excusable, but it does make it legal, and it provides a valuable example of how Stand Your Ground laws are not beneficial.

2.     What if Martin really was a delinquent drug seller and user with a violent history? Does that excuse Zimmerman’s shadowing him and killing him? Of course not. Zimmerman was not a detective or a police investigator. He was not trailing Martin because he saw someone with a criminal past; it was because he saw a black teenager wearing a hoodie. Even if he had known of this hypothetical delinquency, why does he have the right to shoot him and kill him without due process of law, without a trial of his peers? Basically, under Stand Your Ground laws gun owners can execute anyone for the crime of being “suspicious,” which is a grievous violation of the Constitution. Even terrible hypothetical Trayvon Martin deserves due process of law before being sentenced to death, especially if his only crime is appearing like a potential criminal.

3.     What if everything were true, that Martin wastaking a break from all the drug dealing and bus driver assaulting and puppy torturing in order to beat up some guy who happened to be following him down the street? Does that make Stand Your Ground laws okay? No way José. If Zimmerman really killed this horrible not-Trayvon-Martin-hypothetical-person in self-defense as he now has decided to claim, that would not be an example of the Stand Your Ground Law in action. It seems to me that the main goal of whoever has been portraying Martin so maliciously is to take focus away from the injustice of Stand Your Ground laws. 2^nd Amendment activists must be terrified that people have realized that George Zimmerman are allowed to assassinate the other Trayvon Martin, the non-hypothetical Trayvon Martin, with Stand Your Ground’s legal protection. Right now Trayvon Martin the symbol represents everything wrong with Stand Your Ground, a disaster for the NRA. But now we know about these abusive laws, and even if Travon Martin really was hypothetical Trayvon Martin we know what these laws have the capacity to do to real Trayvon Martins.

In other news, Berkeley trumpeter Khalil Shaheed passed away on Friday, March 23. He was one of my first teachers at summer jazz camp, a beautiful player and a more beautiful person. He will be sorely missed.

Also, a bit of housekeeping for you email subscribers out there: sometimes it seems that my emails end up in the spam folder. Ugh, it’s a real drag. Mark one of them not-spam and the problem should be solved, so you’ll get to read every bit of pompous opinionating I’ve got.

And finally, the paperback for A Torn Page, the literary anthology where my short story “Cliché Central” appears, is now available on Amazon.com. It’s cheap – grab a copy!