My take-away from the Zimmerman fiasco:
There's legal, and there's right. They don't always intersect. Often times, legal will hijack right and rape it into submission.
That's the Zimmerman verdict.
The lefty, pro-black angle of this thing is basically summed up as... Trayvon was not engaged at crime at that moment. He had legitimate reason to be in the neighborhood. He felt threatened by the "creepy-a$$ cracka" following him around, with one friend on the phone suggesting he might be a child molester. Trayvon chose to confront this person that might have been a threat, and the person gave evasive answers.
The righty, pro-defense angle of this thing is summed up as... Zimmerman spotted inappropriate and suspicious behavior and reported it while surveiling the suspect. He left his vehicle and continued on foot, then was told he didn't need to pursue any more by the dispatcher. He complied and headed back to his car. A verbal altercation started, initiated by Trayvon, then a physical confrontation where Zimmerman was bested physically until he produced his gun and shot Trayvon.
SYG is being claimed by both sides.
And the collision of SYG caused an escalation of force.
Zimmerman was lucky that Martin was not well trained in fighting. Had Martin been a boxer or martial artist, 2-3 good quick hits is all it takes to incapacitate or kill a man (or even just 1).
Who here doesn't feel that it's appropriate to turn the tables on a stalker and give them fair warning to eff off right now?
Who here doesn't feel that it's appropriate to shoot someone that is in the act of pummeling your face, and that person initiated the fight?
The lefty, black community also feels that Trayvon's "sentence" doesn't fit his "crime." He's dead. He committed assault and battery in a confusing SYG situation, and his penalty is death. They're saying that if Zimmerman just stopped fighting, justice could have been pursued after the altercation.
Part of me that yearns for a more old-fashioned approach to this world of ours agrees with the lefty black community. How many westerns have you watched where a fight starts off and both men have pistols and knives, but the fight goes on to decide its victor and neither man draws the weapons? My understanding is that tradition carried on well into the 20th century, talking with my grandparents and others of older generations.
In a way, I think we've lost something as a society by culling our ability to fight honorably to settle disputes.
Yes, God made man and Sam Colt made them equal. I get it. But not everything is a life and death altercation.
Learning to fight is important. Learning to win a fight is important. Learning to lose a fight is important. Learning when to stop fighting is important. And learning when to never stop fighting is important.
People need to know how to take a punch. People need to know when they've won a fight and stop it graciously before the pounding results in more than a swollen face and cracked ribs, and results in something life threatening or altering.
I think this fight (Z&M) was more about territorialism and chest-thumping than real self defense. As such, it actually could have been handled as a fight. Z got his butt whipped. M might have been winding down (or not... who knows?) and delivered his last punch, about to de-straddle Z. That might have given Z his opening to produce his pistol, essentially when the fight was over but Z didn't know it.
Yes, it's highly speculative and monday morning quarterbacking. No, it doesn't stand up to legal scrutiny for prosecution to use. That's not the point of this argument.
I'm just saying that in a world with honor, this would have just been a fight between two men and left at that.
In this world, where the rules of fighting between men as a means of dispute resolution are lost to the passage of time, it means that M is dead.
My verdict is that we as a society have lost this case, due to overlegislation of human interaction and the culling of the thousands-year-old tradition of fisticuffs as a means of dispute resolution.