The professor has had a long slow bout of the blues as the trial and the verdict in the trail of George Zimmerman came in followed by the victory laps of the hate filled segment of the internet. They seem obscenely glad a black child is dead and that he was shot. It’s a depressing look into the minds of the hateful. The Professor well understands that most of them would never actually kill a black child themselves but they are more than ready to cheer as it is done.
This brings me, tangentially as always to the point of the mini rant here today. Amada Marcotte in her brilliant feminist blog Pandagon points out that in a sane society George Zimmerman would not have been allowed to own a gun given his clouded personal history: arrested on charges of assaulting a police officer, later plea bargained provided he went to mandatory alcohol counseling, getting fired from a bouncers job for being too violent especially with female patrons, and an order of protection filed against him by his ex wife. Amanda notes that in a sane society this man would not be allowed to own anything more dangerous than balls of string. But the Professor would like to point out that even in a semi-sane society a person with this history would not be allowed a concealed carry permit – which brings us to the point here.
To wit, the Second Amendment killed Trayvon Martin.
Or more precisely the gun nut culture NRA absolutists killed Trayvon Martin.
It’s a simple if depressing postulate; that if George Zimmerman had not been armed he would never have gotten out of the car, followed the kid on foot which led to the confrontation. No gun and nobody would have died that night.
Zimmerman’s defenders offer somewhat twisted supporting evidence for this – they continually cite Trayvon’s height, youth, the menace of the hoodie, and blackty black black; if this was, and one can safely assume it was, Zimmerman’s mindset about black people (given George’s large number of calls to the police to report black men in his neighborhood), Zimmerman does not venture from the safety of his car if he’s not packing and the confrontation does not ensue. He had already called the police who may or may not have been in the process of replying to yet another of his calls of a black kid in his neighborhood. They might well have harassed Trayvon for being what they would have considered to be the wrong area but if they had, Trayvon would not have ended up on a slab in the country morgue office with a tag on his toe.
It was the gun, more precisely Zimmerman’s posse ion of it that night which lead the death. It turned a stupid and ugly situation into a deadly one. But that is what guns do – guns make killing easy and as a result, people die.
The case has started a bit of soul searching on the part of Americas about race and our thoughts on it (save for the ones doing the victory laps) which in the long term that might do a great of good.
However in the short term, and I think the short term is measured in years if not decades in this case, people are going to continue to be insane fear crazed, violent, racist fuck-sticks, so what can be done is to limit their access –cough – background checks – cough – to weapons that all too easily turn someone’s paranoia into something deadly. That is something that can be done. Changing the hearts of men is a long a difficult process and one the poltical arena is one ill sutied to.
