Fraggle Rocker, can you cite this claim? I have googled and searched and searched but turned up nothing.
Check out
nnwi.com, the National Neighborhood Watch Institute. Neighborhood Watch volunteers are
not vigilantes. The country would never have tolerated that and the movement would have collapsed. (Remember the more recent "militia" movement? Yeah right. Nobody does!) The point is that these people do not have police training or police uniforms so they have neither the skills nor the cachet of authority to stop and apprehend people. As far as any of us private citizens are concerned, if one of these jokers got in our face
we would call for help and follow that with a call to 911. Unfortunately Martin is a kid--and a black kid at that, in the Neanderthal part of the USA--and he let his anger get the better of him. When two citizens get in a quarrel it's not unusual that it might turn into physical violence. But if one of them pulls a gun to resolve the quarrel, then he's gone over the line. Zimmerman relinquished his claim on civilization and should be treated accordingly.
I have no idea, currently, since he has a concealed weapon permit, whether he was still forbidden to be armed.
It doesn't matter if he has a permit to conceal a weapon or a permit to raise hogs: a Neighborhood Watch volunteer on duty is not allowed by the rules of the organization to A) carry a gun and B) go after suspects. Their duty is to call the police, period.
The medical reports cannot verify who started the fight.
It doesn't matter who threw the first punch. Zimmerman was in the wrong to start with, by harassing a private citizen with no authority to do so. If you get in somebody's face by, in essence, impersonating a police officer and he gets angry and hits you, you deserve whatever you get.
So as it is now, only ONE eyewitness and the account of Zimmerman himself, along with those reports can substantiate that Martin Returned to Zimmerman and assaulted him.
You claim to be an American but I can tell that you've never had the experience of serving on a jury. Eyewitness testimony is worthless. Its reliability is less than 50%. One of the juries I was on heard testimony from two eyewitnesses, neither of whom had any reason to lie, and their stories were almost completely opposite.
Apparently that much is not enough to cause reasonable doubt- and override your Guilty unless proven innocent meme.
Are you sure you're really an American? It's "guilty
until proven innocent." We all know that from watching TV, if nothing else.
I CAN say that everything I've read said he was advised to not pursue suspects. But that's not the same as forbidden.
No, there's no law against one citizen pursuing another. But if you stop him and harass him, when the cops show up to sort it out you'd better have some damn good evidence that you personally saw him commit a crime and were making a "citizen's arrest." Otherwise the law is on his side.
This is true. Zimmerman was a zealot, overly enthusiastic about stopping crime in his neighborhood.
That's a kind way to put it. I'd say he was a paranoid racist who thought that Afro-American kids should not be allowed out on the streets after dark. A typical Southerner from the old days; unfortunately they're not extinct.
Who assaulted who is not just relevant, it's a determining factor.
Absolutely not. If Zimmerman was committing a crime of harassing a citizen without good cause, then any death that occurred in the ensuing quarrel is automatically his fault, regardless of who escalated it. U.S. law is plain as day on that count.
But the evidence does lean in support of Zimemrman's personal account.
Doesn't matter. He broke the law by detaining a citizen without authority. Neighborhood Watch volunteers are
specifically denied the authority to act as police officers.
What IS established is that he was looking to prevent crime in his neighborhood.
Not to my satisfaction it's not. That's the way people "prevented crime in their neighborhoods" in the Wild West in the frontier days. We've put great effort into changing the USA into a civilized nation in which
the citizens do not go around shooting each other. Zimmerman is an affront to our national character, a throwback to the Bad Old Days. If he lived on an isolated lot out in the middle of the Arizona desert and saw someone he didn't recognize walking toward his house, then it would not be unreasonable to subject him to some questioning. And everybody in Arizona has a gun, one of the reasons I was so happy to escape from that shit-hole and go off to college. But he lives in a town in Florida which, for all my hyperbole about its citizens still hanging onto their Confederate money, has a police force to handle such matters.
You assume a great deal, Fraggle... and it is not reasonable.
I'm not sure I've made any assumptions other than the rather reasonable one that he was not simply acting in the role of a Neighborhood Watch volunteer, for the very good reason that this is not how Neighborhood Watch volunteers are indoctrinated and trained to act. I make no assumptions about who hit whom first or about Martin's frame of mind after being accosted by a white man on a dark street in the Deep South.
Martins report showed no bruising except for his knuckles. This is very indicative that Martin was, indeed, the first to strike.
Doesn't matter. If I were young and strong and (apparently) a good fighter, and some weird-looking loser started hassling me for the well-known crime in that part of the country known as
walking while black, I'd probably slam his ugly face into the pavement too.
Add to this that he overwhelmed Zimmerman enough to continue doing damage to his head, slamming it into the ground.
I wish I had been there (at a discrete distance of course) to cheer him on. Zimmerman is exactly the kind of American we don't need in our gene pool: a hothead with a gun and no respect for rules.
Likliest conclusion is that Zimmerman was calling for help, in fear of his life.
This is the sort of thing that you can expect will happen to you eventually if you make a practice of going around being an asshole. The whole point of Neighborhood Watch is that
they do not want their people walking around being assholes or we'll run their organization out of town.
IF so- Zimmerman was calling for help- in fear of his life- PRIOR TO DISCHARGING A WEAPON.
Sure, now that he's at a disadvantage he'll be happy to see a police car pull up. Where was that respect for the Rule of Law when he thought he had an "uppity Nigger" to toy with?
Admit it Fraggle, I have put forth stronger evidence than you have.
No. You keep pretending that the exact sequence of events matters. All that matters is that Zimmerman had no authority to accost Martin so he was breaking the law. Anything that happened as the result of that criminal act is, by legal definition, his fault.
My only issue is that Zimmermans enthusiasm is not murder.
In the eyes of the law, if you commit a crime and someone dies, you're guilty. It doesn't matter if you merely scared the guy and he had a heart attack, or just fainted and hit his head on a rock. You're still a murderer. If you watched "Harry's Law" on TV, in a recent episode they dealt with the doctrine of
felony murder.
You do not like guns, I can assume from this post. You think anyone who owns are supports guns and gun rights are slavering neanderthals.
No, I do not like guns. I don't allow them in my house and I don't trust people who own them. But my "slobbering Neanderthal" epithet was directed solely at Zimmerman. He clearly grabbed his gun, hopped in his car, and went looking for trouble. If he was merely doing his duty as a Neighborhood Watch volunteer he would have been following their rules and sitting at his upstairs window with a pair of binoculars and a CB radio.
It was MARTINS behavior, not Zimmerman, that led to Martins death.
Please review the laws on felony murder. For that matter, if someone dies while you're committing a misdemeanor you're still at fault, although it will not be Murder One. As I said, he could get off with manslaughter or some other less draconian charge. I think America would probably walk away from this story with a little grumbling if he is only convicted of some form of wrongful death. That will restore our faith in our own justice system. Otherwise I'll continue to say that Grant was an idiot for taking the South back.
Zimmerman would most likely never have pulled that weapon out if he was not being beaten and screaming for help.
He hassled the kid. What did he expect him to do, lie down on the ground meekly and whine, "Please kick me, Massa, I'se so sorry for violating the Sunset Law and being out after dark when you'all can't see me because I'se so dark."
If Zimmerman pursued a suspect and the suspect allowed himself to be questioned or explained himself, instead of beating the other man senseless, NONE of this would have happened.
But the suspect was under
no obligation to act that way. What would you do if some total stranger came up to you in the dark with a bad attitude? A butt-ugly one at that; I know that's not his fault but it certainly doesn't help with the ol' "first impresson" and he needs to take it into account when hatching his criminal plots.
So while we can say that Zimmerman may have been wrong to pursue- Zimmermans pursuit should NOT have led to Martins Death.
Martin had no way of knowing how this was going to play out. Again, I have trouble believing that you're an American because you seem to have absolutely no understanding of race relations in small towns in the South. It would not be unreasonable for Martin to literally fear for his life in such a situation.
Martins attacking and threatening the health, safety and maybe life of Zimmerman CAN have led to Martins Death. Martin is the one who shoulders the burden of blame in his own death.
Again, I'd really like to see how you'd react in such an incident, even with your (presumably) white skin.
Fraggle your assumptions and character assassinations are the failing of your argument.
These are reasonable inferences, not assumptions. As for the character assassination, let's see what the press digs up on this guy before we decide who wins this bet. He may turn out to be like that kid in Arizona who shot the congresswoman: a time bomb waiting to go off, and nobody bothered to do anything about it.
You have painted a very bleak and sinister picture of a man. A man that "packs heat" . . . .
[You don't even seem to be familiar with American slang, much less race relations.]
. . . . so that he can use it to run around killing people. Because he's a slobbering Neanderthal.
No. He's a slobbering Neanderthal because he does these things. It's an insult, not a demographic category. Forgive me if I didn't make that clear.
You may not be hating racially, but hating nonetheless.
No, I only hate the roommate who pulled out his gun and shot my cat in 1963. Oh yeah, and those brave National Guardsmen who murdered the kids at Kent State in 1970. Oh yeah and the brave infantrymen who killed the civilians in Iraq just for fun. Well okay, I guess I don't have a high opinion of anyone who carries a gun. It's just a giant phallic symbol and it's used to perform a form of rape.
It is just as illogical, profiles just as heavily and I wonder what you think of Cops and Soldiers who also must be armed.
Despite the occasional senseless high-profile police shooting (such as the Prince George's County sheriff's SWAT team breaking down the wrong door and shooting two dogs in the back who were running away) they actually do not often shoot people and even less often people who did not themselves shoot first. Cops are well-trained in psychology, criminology and the use of their weapons. These are the people whom Zimmerman should have called to deal with Trayvon Martin. It was his failure to
follow the rules which bound him that resulted in the death.
But soldiers, that's a much different matter. Soldiers are brainwashed into believing that violence can sometimes be a legitimate way to resolve a dispute. They're brainwashed into following orders rather than using their own judgment in something as monumentally important as the decision to kill another human being. They're even brainwashed into believing that anyone their officers identify as our enemy is less than human so they have free rein to piss on their corpses and rape their daughters.
So no, I have little respect for soldiers. I grieve for their families when they die. But then I catch myself and remember that this is, finally, an all-volunteer army and those families raised those kids to
want to become paid professional killers and so some of them get what they signed up for.
Hardly a surprise, except for the fact that you simply don't come across as American. There are too many things about this country that you don't know.
After-all, What would Inspire US to have gone into the field knowing that not only would we be ARMED, we would be armed against other people- not hunting deer or boar.
I don't understand the question. But the last time the USA was attacked by a foreign nation was Pearl Harbor. So every undeclared war our soldiers have fought in since then starting with Korea--all the wars during my lifetime--was unconstitutional and immoral. Our politicians dress them up and give them clever names like "the war on terror." As if we don't understand that
terror is not a country so declaring a war on terror is as stupid as declaring a war on drugs--which has taken a comparable number of casualties, but since they're all in Mexico we don't give a shit.