For the past two days, the only topic of conversation on our news media has been the Zimmerman verdict. But I believe that the only significance of the verdict is that it manifests a problem that merits universal and fervent attention, and it isn't bigotry. It may be that the crime itself was racial in its fundamental nature, but the verdict is not a manifestation of that kind of prejudice. Zimmerman may be a racist, but we will never know unless a means by which to plumb his mind is created and we can get him to submit to it. And the possibility that a racist carrying a gun killed Trayvon Martin is disturbing, but the fact is that anyone who has been paying attention for the past three hundred years knows that there is racism in America, and this is far from the first time that it has been deadly. The problem that the Zimmerman case represents however is much broader than racial prejudice. The problem is the mentality that makes people like Zimmerman carry guns and the mentality that allows the election of legislators who would pass laws like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" statutes without anything to circumscribe the license they provide. The common law makes such provisions when it comes to civil liability, but statutory law...at least in Florida...does not, and it should now be plain that it must even though the Zimmerman case was about self-defense and not standing your ground.
There are some basic premises in common law that are sometimes embodied in statutory law but control civil law, that is the law of personal liability, that should guide legislation relating to self-defense, but in Florida they do not seem to. Specifically, life takes precedence over property in civil law. You cannot take life to defend property; you can only take it in self-defense. And cognate with that principle is the principle that you must retreat from a threat of personal harm until further retreat would be to no avail before you kill someone. That is because until you have done so, lethal force is not necessary. Retreat is the better option compared to inflicting deadly force on, say, an intruder. That law has been in the making for a thousand years and that is the area to which the concept of standing your ground should be limited if it is to be enacted anywhere as the inspiration for such laws is generally in the area of home intrusions. People feel that they have an absolute right to defend themselves in their homes...that retreat to the confines of the four walls of one's abode is all that should be required of him before he acts to defend himself, with lethal force if necessary. And while I see such a principle as problematic for more than one reason, I can accept the motivation for it as valid. There are limits to which we should let the decay in our society intrude into our lives. But what about in the case of a confrontation outside the home.
In cases like that, the common law principle is that when one's assailant retreats, one may not pursue him. At the point of the other party's retreat or withdrawal from an altercation, one becomes the aggressor if he follows he is therefore liable for injury he inflicts from that point on. It doesn't make any difference who started the fight or what inspired it; withdrawal by one party makes the other party the assailant if he pursues. The lack of such a constraint in the statutory code of Florida to counteract what appears to be the open ended license to kill if one perceives himself to be in mortal danger under the statutory stand-your-ground law allows people like George Zimmerman to kill with what turns out to be impunity. That is the real problem exposed by the Zimmerman verdict: people carrying guns...and inevitably using them...for the wrong reasons. That is why I'm staying out of Florida and the other several states that allow guns to be carried by would-be cowboys and cops. Bigots are problem enough, but as long as they aren't armed, they are a non-lethal problem. Give them guns however and that is no longer the case. And add to them those members of our society who adopt the rubric of childhood backyard games that simplifies the taxonomy of the human race into two categories--bad guys and good guys--and you have what made the wild west wild. The availability of a gun on one's hip doesn't make him capable of dispensing justice. It makes him capable of dispensing death...indiscriminately...and that's the real problem manifested by the Zimmerman case. We live in a society in which people think themselves capable of deciding for themselves the nature of law and order, and now we are more and more often allowing them to arm themselves. In addition, even members of our society who should be perceptive enough to understand the problem continue to use the over simplified division of human beings into just those two categories--good and bad--in their discourse. You hear generals and politicians alike talking in those terms all the time, and police officers in particular seem prone to such mindlessly permissive thought. But a child kills a bad guy with an erect thumb and a simulated trigger finger; soldiers and cops do it with a gun...and the bad guy often doesn't get up afterward. The use of such simple reasoning gives permission to act not just to those who do have the right but to those who don't as well, and therefore, those who do have both the right and the power should be more careful about what they say. That in turn requires that they...and we as a society...think considerably more about it.
We have passed the point in our discussion of gun control at which Sandy Hook Elementary School and Sanford, Florida are central. It is now the child in the back yard who learns at an early age that shooting and killing are remedies for problems that we must now think about. Because eventually that child becomes a man or a woman, and lately, any man or woman can be armed with something more dangerous than a cocked finger and a raised thumb.
Your friend,
Mike
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