But here are my thoughts on the infamous Zimmerman trial.
1. Suppose Zimmerman’s gun never goes off, he is the only one injured, and Martin is put on trial for assault. Martin would be acquitted. When two men get in a scuffle, and no one is there who witnessed it clearly from the beginning, no jury is going to convict anyone. Unless there is some very unusual forensic evidence, self-defense is going to be hard to rule out.
2. A question hanging over the incident is this: if Martin had been white skinned, would he be alive today? The verdict in the trial does not settle that question. I don’t know the answer to that question. I would advise conservatives not to accuse anyone of exploiting the incident, unless you think that you can show that the answer to the question is “no” or that the question does not matter.
3. Although this is not the question on most people’s minds, the question I have is why we can’t teach young men to avoid getting into scuffles. I think everyone would have to agree that Zimmerman could have avoided getting into a scuffle. Personally, I am just as convinced that Martin could have avoided getting into a scuffle. He could have turned his back and walked quickly. Or he could have politely said, “Excuse me? You’re making me nervous the way you seem to be following me.”
4. Another non-central question I have is whether there is a causal relationship between the use of profanity/derogatory language and violence. I take the view that unrestrained use of four-letter words undermines our respect for the dignity of other people. Refraining from the use of profanity is a way of saying, “I respect you. I put limits on my behavior in your presence.” Of course, that does not mean that stamping out profanity would address the cause of disrespect.
“I think everyone would have to agree that Zimmerman could have avoided getting into a scuffle.”
I don’t agree. If Zimmerman’s account is accurate.
So no, not everyone would have to agree.
I think Arnold meant that if Zimmerman stayed in the car and didn’t chase after him, then yes, everyone could agree a scuffle could have been avoided. But I also disagree with Arnold, too. I think because Martin ran away first, he satisfied my personal pre-requisite for “avoiding scuffles”
“When two men get in a scuffle, and no one is there who witnessed it clearly from the beginning, no jury is going to convict anyone. ”
People often get convicted on he-said/he-saids.
The lesson should be, just walk away. That may be harder for a teenager than an adult, but maybe not.
Lord:
Zimmerman had a gun. Zimmerman saw Martin as an intruder. Zimmerman was expecting the cops to show up shortly. I don’t think “just walking away” was supposed to be an option for Martin. I think his options were supposed to be (a) holding his hands sort of high in the air or (b) holding his hands very high in the air.
Martin could have easily just walked home at regular walking speed before Zimmerman would have even completed his 4 minute 911 call without issue. Why isn’t “just walking away” an option? The conflict occurred closer to Zimmerman’s car than Martin’s residence.
You seem to have missed some evidence in the trial (from a *prosecution* witness) that Martin had already walked away. And then, for some reason, came back to confront Zimmerman. And once there, the option he choose was to try to beat the crap out of Zimmerman (also confirmed by a witness). There is no evidence anywhere of Zimmerman asking Martin to hold his hands in the air or anything of that nature
> if Martin had been white skinned, would he be alive today?
Of course we don’t know. But the reverse question could also be asked in regard to many white people who have been killed by black flashmob/get-whitey violence who might not have been killed had they been black skinned. But those stories get no press, and are explained away by a-culture-gone-wrong justifications.
No one was asking, but I appreciate hearing Arnold’s thoughts in it anyway. Specifically point number 4 which to me seems to lie on the civilization/barbarism axis, something I did not expect but find interesting.
Contrary to what the post and some of the comments seem to assume, the question at the trial wasn’t who was at fault for starting a “scuffle” or whether Zimmerman should or should not have been following or confronting Martin. The question was whether or not Zimmerman was privileged to use deadly force at the moment he fired the gun because he did so in self defense. The evidence overwhelmingly showed that, when Zimmerman shot Martin, Zimmerman was one his back, with Martin on top of him, having his head banged against the pavement and his face pummelled. This was deadly force by Martin, to which Zimmerman claimed to have responded. There was no evidence showing that Zimmerman had initiated the use of deadly force. Thus, however the incident started, and regardless of whether Zimmerman wrongly “profiled” Martin, the jury quite reasonably concluded that the state had not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman was not privileged to shoot Martin in self defense.
All the questions about who started the fight (which seems unanswerable now), and whether Zimmerman was following Martin out of racist motives, may be interesting, but it was irrelevant to the question of whether Zimmerman acted in justifiable self defense when he pulled the trigger. Last time I checked, even racists (not that there’s any reason to belive that the Obama-supporting Zimmerman is a racist) have a right to defend themselves from deadly force.
There’s such a thing as letting one’s charitable proclivities get out of hand.
I think you misunderstood my post. I agree that the issue of race was not what was on trial. I agree that the verdict was based on other issues that were more immediately pertinent, and I agree that the verdict was correct. My point was simply that the race questions still hang in the air.
The “race questions” may be hanging in the air – but are they honest questions? Coming from people like Eric Holder and the writers at the NY Times editorial page, I don’t think so. If the question is, what are the real problems facing African Americans today (as opposed to, say, Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s), I don’t think that random violence from racist whites (or even from a “white hispanic” with substantial African ancestry, who in any other context would not be described as “white”) is an honest answer.
Anyway, I appreciate your clarification. Sorry if I misunderstood.
On #3 you have a couple reasons. The two big ones are:
1: It was Zimmerman’s duty as the neighborhood watch person on duty to follow and watch Martin. That’s the entire point to neighborhood watches and community self-policing, otherwise you end up with the bystander effect. When I say neighborhood watch here I meant the concept, not the strict tenants of “Neighborhood Watch(tm)”.
2: Because it’s a losing strategy as a male and thousand of years of genetics have encoded this. Even if you were enlightened enough to practice this, the other guy might not be (especially if he initiated the incident) and will simply sucker punch you or shoot you in the back; that or steal the girl you are trying to pickup because countless studies have shown the alpha male affect on courtship. You are forgetting testosterone here in a big way along with a culture of competition.
On #4 I I think what you meant is “people of a certain culture background are more likely to swear. These same people tend to be more prone to casual violence.”. I only bring this up because, in conversations, I usually swear every other word. Saying “what the fuck is up with this shit” to a co-worker (about a bosses poor decision) with a response of “Who the fuck knows, fuck ‘im. Let’s get some coffee” isn’t disrespectful nor violence inducing. I think where you go wrong here is you probably live in social circles where swearing isn’t extremely common. Sometimes this can cause conflict because of misunderstandings but it goes both ways.
You might experiment with going for a month without swearing. You might be surprised at how it affects your outlook
Swearing is a stress reliever for some people. If he tries to give it up cold turkey, he’ll probably wind up chain smoking Camel unfiltereds or something to compensate.
“1. Suppose Zimmerman’s gun never goes off, he is the only one injured, and Martin is put on trial for assault. Martin would be acquitted.”
I don’t think that’s true. If the gun had malfunctioned, the beating would have continued. Already at that point, Zimmerman was bloody and Martin was uninjured. If the shooting hadn’t ended things, how badly would Zimmerman have been beaten? It’s not self-defense to sit on top of someone and pummel them until they’re unconscious or dead. If the injuries were all one-sided and resulted from an extended assault, I don’t think a conviction would have been unlikely at all.
“3 […] I think everyone would have to agree that Zimmerman could have avoided getting into a scuffle.”
I don’t think that’s true. By that I mean that a sudden, unprovoked attack by Martin seems entirely plausible — especially given the (inadmissible) belligerent texts on his phone.
“the question I have is why we can’t teach young men to avoid getting into scuffles”
We can. In the right kinds of cultural environments, we don’t even have to do much teaching — scuffles even among young men are rare. I haven’t been in any kind of fight since 7th grade. The same can be said for my son and, to my knowledge, all of his friends. But Trayvon Martin didn’t grow up in an upper-middle class context. George Zimmerman, on the other hand — well, when was the last time that he was in a fight before the night of the shooting?
OT on #4
I do not like John Stewart because I saw him interview Mike Hucabee and he did not use profanity/derogatory language but he does when he talks to his audience which included me at one time.
Two things that are missing from the discussion, I think, are:
(1) property rights: Can I walk anywhere, anytime, for no good reason? Can I demand that people who have no business walking in my neighborhood leave even though they are not causing trouble?
(2) statistical discrimination: This can be about race and yet not be about racism, given statistics about young black men and violence.
Mike Shupp wrote ” I think his options were supposed to be (a) holding his hands sort of high in the air or (b) holding his hands very high in the air.”
Jack PQ wrote “Can I demand that people who have no business walking in my neighborhood leave even though they are not causing trouble?” Why is that missing from the discussion? What does it have to do with the case?
Um, what the heck are you guys theorizing happened in the runup to the fight and the shooting? Zimmerman had chosen to call the cops, and seemed to be genuinely interested in continuing to do the official neighborhood watch thing and maintain a good relationship with the police. Do you really believe he then chose to confront Martin and demand that he leave the neighborhood, at great risk that he’d have to justify that bizarre behavior to the police a few minutes later? And having the gun out before the broken nose and headslamming seems hard to believe, because AFAIK all the evidence agrees that the shouting went on for quite some time before the one and only shot was fired, and the medical evidence is that a considerable amount of beating went on before the shot was fired. It’s not so easy to reconcile that evidence with Zimmerman drawing on Martin before being pinned down and punched.
Arnold Kling wrote “A question hanging over the incident is this: if Martin had been white skinned, would he be alive today? The verdict in the trial does not settle that question. I don’t know the answer to that question.”
I don’t think it’s all that straightforward to turn that into a well-defined question. The guy whose behavior Zimmerman happened to find suspicious somehow turned out to be someone who had very recently been caught with stolen goods from another burglary. If you just think of Martin as a member of broad categories like “black skinned person returning from the convenience store” or “white skinned person returning from the convenience store,” Martin’s extremely strong connection with burglary is an unreasonably weird coincidence. Therefore, those broad categories don’t seem to be a sensible way to analyze this incident. And given narrower categories like a “white [or black] skinned person who was evidently either a burglar himself or at least a collaborator in a burglary enterprise” it gets tricky to guesstimate probabilities in the counterfactual. At least it’s tricky unless you know more about burglary and neighborhood watch in Florida than I do. How suspicious do we imagine the burglar-or-burglary-groupie’s behavior to be independent of possible stereotypes about his race? And how likely was Zimmerman to report and follow any stranger unconditionally given the recent unsolved burglaries? And how likely would it be that the white or black burglar-or-burglary-groupie being followed would somehow decide that his best plan was to attack the guy who was following and watching him? Once he does choose to attack Zimmerman, though, I believe that race is pretty irrelevant: people who carry guns seldom act as though they have taken unbreakable vows not to defend themselves against beatings by whites.
Kudos to Arnold for being thoughtful (as usual) on a controversial incident. #3 is an issue that almost no one is talking about.