Did he try to pull a gun on You? Because if someone is pulling a gun on you then slamming his head into the pavement until he stops pulling a gun on you sounds like an appropriate response.
Earlier you seemed to be of the opinion that Zimmerman did not draw his gun prior to the physical altercation. Have you changed your opinion?
“Your side”? Martin’s not-girlfriend testified as to what Martin’s location was before Martin chose to return and confront Zimmerman. Dee Dee also testified that Martin used several racial slurs to describe the person who was following him. Meanwhile, Zimmerman was waiting near the “T” for the police to arrive. Unfortunately, Martin arrived before the police did.
No, because if we require Trayvon to wait until the gun is drawn, then as you have pointed out numerous times, it would be ludicrous to expect Zimmerman to have suffered so many injuries, because he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be killed. So Trayvon would be justified in attacking Zimmerman with deadly force as soon as Zimmerman went for his gun. See also: every police shooting thread.
What likely happened is that Zimmerman and Trayvon got into an altercation. At this point Trayvon (or if you insist, Zimmerman) yelled “Get off!”. Then Zimmerman went for his gun, Trayvon tried to defend himself, but was killed.
When my wife is stuck in traffic on the way home from work, she’ll call me sometimes, because my hours are earlier than hers and I’m already home. When she reaches our street she’ll usually say, “I’m right by the house” despite the fact that she’s almost a mile away.
Excellent! (Do you think you could explain this concept to ElvisL1ves?)
Whether Martin was ‘defending himself’ or ‘attacking’ hinges on who started the physical altercation. Merely seeing a holstered gun does not justify assault (see open-carriers, for example).
Cool, then you probably shouldn’t say it as though it were an adage that holds true in all circumstances then.
So, if someone says “What are you doing here?” while they pull back their jacket to show off their gun, that’s merely seeing?
Do you consider brandishing to actually be a thing, or no?
One last question, if someone was following you to your home, and when confronted, they let you “merely see” that they are armed, what would your reaction be?
It is by no means clear that Martin said it. Therefore -
There is an eyewitness who saw Martin on top of Zimmerman. There was moisture and grass stains on the back of Zimmerman’s jacket. There was moisture and grass stains on Martin’s knees. There was no moisture or grass stains on Martin’s back. What does the balance of the evidence indicate about who was on top of whom, and therefore was likely to be the one saying “get off”?
Regards,
Shodan
Not physical assault, because that’s bringing fists to a gun fight. Not unless they were actively threatening me with it. Revealing it, especially when it’s hidden, would communicate to me that they don’t want to escalate but are prepared to. Drawing it and beginning shooting at me, I might try to jump them if there was no way to flee. Short of doing that, it’s a declaration of being armed, not a threat.
Then again, I grew up in the country; guns aren’t inherently terrifying.
Yes. Florida has a statute (790.10) which says:
We don’t have any evidence that Zimmerman exhibited his firearm in a rude, careless, angry, or threatening manner, not in necessary self-defense.
I’d put “merely seeing” under the heading of “careless”. It wouldn’t justify an assault, even though it might be a violation of 790.10 (Florida is, oddly enough, one of the relatively few states that prohibit open-carry). Your scenario (someone says “What are you doing here?” while they pull back their jacket to show off their gun) strikes me as rude, again probably a violation of 790.10, and again, probably not rising to the level of “imminent use of unlawful force” that triggers justified self-defense. There are certainly ways one could exhibit a firearm in angry or threatening manners that would justify self-defense (for example, pointing a gun at someone while shouting “I’m going to kill you”), but we don’t have any evidence that Zimmerman did anything like that. For that matter, we don’t have any evidence that suggests he violated 790.10 at all.
My response would probably depend on too many variables that you haven’t given me. “Punch him in the face” is probably a low-probability outcome though.
As you have said though, if Zimmerman gets to the point where he is pointing a gun at Martin, then it’s too late for Martin to defend himself. So either you’re saying that self defense is a right only gun owners have, or Trayvon should be able to defend himself when sufficiently threatened BEFORE a gun is pointed directly at him.
Regardless of what you think Trayvon “should be able to” do, the law says that the threatened use of unlawful force must be “imminent”. Given the rather extensive case law on the subject, I don’t believe the proposed scenario (someone says “What are you doing here?” while they pull back their jacket to show off their gun) would generally qualify.
There are certainly some scenarios short of “gun pointed at me” that would qualify, but again, we don’t have any evidence that Martin was in one of those scenarios.
I agree that it’s unfortunate when a person does not have adequate warning of an impending criminal assault to defend themselves, but I don’t think you really want to relax the legal requirements for lawful self-defense, do you?
Man, I hate to even be in the neighborhood of agreeing with HurricaneDitka (who I have zero respect for) or Shodan (who is a nice enough poster in some contexts but has a long history of saying stupid things for stupid reasons), but I feel like a lot of posters in this thread are bending over backward to assign 100% of the blame for everything that happened entirely on Zimmerman. Which is nearly as ridiculous as assigning 100% of the blame for everything that happened entirely on Trayvon.
I think the overwhelming likelihood is that something approximately like this happened:
-Zimmerman was (and is) a horrible person, a self-fancying vigilante type and almost certainly fairly racist
-He sees Trayvon “acting suspicious”, and lurks around him for a while
-Trayvon gets pissed off (justifiably) and escalates things rather than just walking away, because teenage boys aren’t super-noted for self control
-A confrontation ensues and escalates to violence
-Trayvon is “winning” the violence, being on top and pounding Zimmerman’s head into the ground
-Zimmerman then kills Trayvon
The main thing we will never really know is exactly how the “A confrontation ensues and escalates to violence” step really went. It’s certainly possible that Zimmerman was the instigator of every single escalatory step, he was the one responsible for keeping the encounter going, he was the first one to throw a punch, etc. Or even more cynically, it’s possible that he cold-bloodedly and deliberately (or even subconsciously) goaded Trayvon step by step so as to have an excuse to kill him, because he’d always wanted to actually kill a bad guy; and he only erred by waiting long enough that Trayvon actually came close to doing him serious permanent harm. But far more likely is the Occam’s Razor explanation that it was two men with egos who got in each other’s faces, both of them feeling justified, and things escalated. As has tragically happened over and over again since the dawn of time.
I think the vast, VAST majority of the responsibility for the situation existing in the first place falls squarely at the feet of Zimmerman. WTF was he even doing there in the first place? Why did the interaction even happen? But that doesn’t mean that we can deduce with certainty how the micro-level details of the confrontation played out.
I absolutely assign a huge degree of moral culpability to Zimmerman for Trayvon’s tragically avoidable death. But I can’t make a logical leap from there to “Zimmerman must have been the one to start the actual physical confrontation” or “Zimmerman must have menaced Trayvon with his gun in such a threatening fashion that Trayvon was legally acting in self defense”. I don’t know it didn’t play out that way. But I certainly don’t know it did.
See, honestly, I agree with you, Trayvon isn’t blameless. But like you say, the situation was entirely created by Zimmerman, and the death of Trayvon Martin should fall squarely at his feet. Murder 2 or 3 would do it nicely.
But when you’re arguing with those two, for whom Trayvon’s marijuana use makes him a dangerous thug, it’s hard to show nuance.
As has already been pointed out, it wasn’t his marijuana use that made him a dangerous thug, it was his beating up George Zimmerman.
Sure, but the question became “why did Martin get into this confrontation?” which calls for speculation, which does come from opinions as to motivations.
IMHO, Martin was scared of this guy prowling his neighborhood and following him at night. He was concerned for not only his own, but also his family’s safety. I see no reason why he would not have seen that Zimmerman was armed, and I see no reason why Zimmerman would not have shown off that he was armed while confronting Martin. Even if Martin threw the first punch, I see it as him defending himself from someone who is acting as a serious threat.
What happened, we can never really know, as we only have the word of someone who has motivation to make things in as good a light as possible for himself.
However, the speculation on the other side of the aisle is that Martin was just a violent thug who saw someone out in the dark and decided to assault him for no reason that they are willing to articulate.
I ask of HD and Shodan, if someone is following you, and you see that they are armed, what do you do? Then after you have come up with the scenario of what a white middle age middle class man would do, then consider what you would do it you were black, of a more modest income, 17 year old.
Did Martin make a mistake here? Well sure, no matter whether Zimmerman went free or went to jail for life, Martin still ended up dead. The question is not did Martin not act perfectly and make every decision with perfect knowledge and rationality, it is whether making a fairly reasonable mistake of believing that an armed stranger following you in the dark was a threat means you should die.
And ultimately, the question of the thread is, was this a Positive Gun News of the day story?
So he was neither dangerous nor a thug before the altercation? Good to know.
I already responded:
The “reasonable mistake” you describe isn’t what got Martin killed. It was his decision to attack Zimmerman. One might “make a fairly reasonably mistake of believing that an armed stranger following you in the dark was a threat” and choose to respond in a different manner: calling the police oneself, running away, hiding, calling out for help, trying to talk to the supposed-threat to see if you might be able to calm them down (or at least stall for time), etc. The response he chose (punching Zimmerman in the face, climbing on top of him, and bashing his head on the concrete) is what got him killed.
I’m not sure why you felt the need to add the parentheticals. Next time, don’t.
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