Trayvon Martin case hurts all guns owners.

[VBshooter]

They sure arn't shy about asking for money are they? None of their lying BS is a surprise as they'll do anything to promote their position

[sigster]

Sounds to me like zimmerman hounded the kid until he got fed up and struck back, which is what zimmerman wanted because it gave him the opening he needed to shoot in what he calls self defense.

That's just speculation on my part going by what I've read but it looks like that to me.

How does one strike "back" when they have not been stricken in the first place? Logic fail

Following, nor speaking to someone in a reasonable fashion is NOT an assault! Have you all lost your minds?

Can we expect to see only baby photos of Trayvon (lil Barak Junior) going forward, for both maximum sympathetic effect and to put a face to teh proverbial "baby" who "dient do nuffin?"

The local wannabe race warriors here in CLT organized a caravan to FL to force an arrest "or else" of Zimmerman. The name of their group? THUG!!! No crap. True Healing Under God. Pious individuals all, indubitably.

At this point, I am practically longing for the day that us crackers will become a "minority group." This is so played out.

Well I did say it was speculation. At the time I had not read all the other accounts and eyewitness reports.

[Tweaker]

In the interest of fair reportage, my evenings guest, whose friend is Broward SWAT, stated that Hermano Zimmermein was quite the cop fetishist. Failed multiple times the polease psych, physical and intellect qualification exams for the police academy. Furthermore, he supposedly emptied 9 rounds from his firearm, 4 of which entered Barak Jr's body.

/Alleged hearsay off

None of this changes my previous statements regarding waiting for proper evidentiary protocol before fashioning a noose, or what does or does not constitute an assault.

[XSNOWMANx]

I'm sorry for this young mans death, and for his families grief. My personal thoughts on the case aside I prefer to only look at what I do know before making decisions. All that comes to me is I must be missing crucial information about this case, because if it was as it looks he (Zimmerman) would have been arrested a long time ago. Race, stand your ground, all the hype and hooplah around this incident wouldnt be of consequence if it was as cut and dry as it seems.

[Kreutz]

I'm sorry for this young mans death, and for his families grief. My personal thoughts on the case aside I prefer to only look at what I do know before making decisions. All that comes to me is I must be missing crucial information about this case, because if it was as it looks he (Zimmerman) would have been arrested a long time ago. Race, stand your ground, all the hype and hooplah around this incident wouldnt be of consequence if it was as cut and dry as it seems.

Thats the thing, it is cut and dry (why he was never charged).

The MSM will not let it be so. This is the once in a decade black victim story, they're not gonna let this pass. The hysteria is intentional.

Some black folks lit some white kid on fire with gasoline a day or two ago because he was white. Ho hum.

Reverse it and we'd see, well,what we're seeing now.

[mamabearCali]

This really isn't stand your ground. If the reports are true that Zimmerman was on his back on the ground being pounded he really could not retreat anyway. It becomes simple self defense.

A few things here. It is not illegal to walk down a street, it is equally not illegal to watch someone watch down the street and keep an eye on them. Perhaps it is not smart to do so, or to follow so closely, but it is not illegal. It is also not illegal to ask someone what they are doing? A person does not have to answer of course, but Martin could have just kept on walking or took off running.

If young Mr. Martin had a problem or was worried with Zimmerman following him he could have called the police as well. He had a phone too. I have tried to put myslef in both men's positions. I would have made very different decisions as each of them. It comes to it that both men (sorry if you are 6 foot 3 you don't get called a child in my book) made "mistakes" that led to this tradgedy.

It is looking more and more like, though Zimmerman was an idiot to follow so closely and on foot, that Mr. Martin struck first (Zimmermans back being all wet and the only wounds on Martin being his gun shot wounds) and was pounding Zimmerman into the ground (an illegal and lethal action). If that is the truth then no matter how foolish we think Zimmerman was for following Martin, Zimmerman was jjustfified in using lethal force to stop the attack.

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[Tweaker]

A perfect distillation of the facts as we know them at this point Mama Bear.

Ignint' idjits looking for trouble found each other. A match made in (NAACP) heaven.

/thread ova.

[WRW]

@ Tweaker. Given the witness reports of possibly two shots and the police report of only one shot fired, I'd give your friend's friend less credence than a Black Panther.

An echo could account for the perception of a second shot.

[ Post made via Mobile Device ]

[Tweaker]

Entirely possible. I have not seen a police report. Has it been released?

Peep his mad grill, yo!
http://steelturman.typepad.com/.a/6a00d ... 970c-450wi

[justsomeguy]

If this new wrinkle is accurate, then this is not stand your ground at all but rather straight up self defense. If agent A engages in non-lethal threats (following someone) and agent B responds with lethal force (punching someones face into the ground) then agent A is justified by responding with lethal force. Now I still say Zimmerman should not have under any circumstances followed him on foot. Not smart, not smart at all.


But this does explain why he was not arrested immediatly.


Additionally I find it amazingly disingenous that the media keeps showing what looks like a line up portrait of Zimmerman and a 5 year old picutre of Martin looking like an angel. How about we get two reasonably recent pictures of each of them.

[ Post made via Mobile Device ]

it would and wouldn't be self-defense. this is why stand your ground is tricky, and imo the most moronic law ever crafted. i've read the comments talking about zimmerman following trayvon, and that right there would have given trayvon the right to exercise his stand your ground rights against zimmerman.

you do realize that two people engaged in an altercation both have stand your ground rights when there is no clear-cut premeditated act of violence. meaning, it's my opinion that stand your ground makes perfect sense when confronted by a mugger, or someone following you, but it makes no sense to just act on emotion and fear. we're dealing with two people, trayvon and zimmerman who both saw each other as suspects, but only one of them had a logical reason for that feeling: trayvon. it's like one person having a suspicion that their spouse is cheating on them, and another person walks in on their spouse cheating on them. two different situations.

case in point, i remember when i was walking home from class in chicago one night, and i noticed a man following me. i even had that feeling too that "hold on am i being followed?", and i felt uneasy the entire walk, and i was carrying something cumbersome, which made me look like an easy target. so sure enough i turn around and there's a guy standing behind me. thankfully, it was just some homeless man asking me for change, but i was afraid.

under stand your ground that could have ended tragically for that homeless man, but had he been a mugger it could have ended tragically for me too. nonetheless, stand your ground was made for situations like that. someone was following me. i was afraid, and if i had had a gun i could have used it to STAND MY GROUND. however, the scary part is since it was just the two of us, how would anyone know who was the attacker and who was the defender? see the problem. dead men tell no tales.

i said before, i'm not a gun owner, but many of you on here are, and are you telling me that if george zimmerman or any other stranger had approached one of you (legal gun carriers), tried to question you (not as an officer of the law), and began following you that you wouldn't have attempted to use some method to stop him once he found his way to you? this is a community of gun owners. now change the situation to a 15 or so year old kid who wasn't armed, and who is legally unable to carry. a strange man approaches him. the kid manages to walk away or get away some how. BOOM that should have ended it. for one thing, had trayvon been armed he would have had the legal right to shoot zimmerman when zimmerman left his vehicle to approach the boy. however, once both men went their separate way the situation was over. the situation was reignited when zimmerman decided to follow trayvon<<< THIS IS BAD FOR HIS DEFENSE, and this takes away zimmerman's stand your ground rights, imo.

anything that did or didn't happen to zimmerman after he chose to follow trayvon should fall within trayvon's stand your ground rights. zimmerman had the gun. he should have walked away. trayvon is dead because he didn't have a gun to eliminate his own perceived threat. last man standing wins wherever this law is present.

[Tweaker]

so...much...fail

[justsomeguy]

so...much...fail

if you're referring to my post, i would like to hear your opinions about why i fail? if someone walks up to you and questions you, and you walk away thinking it's over, but they continue to follow you what would you do? trayvon didn't have a gun, so he used whatever he could to defend himself from a perceived threat. even if he was hiding and he got the jump on zimmerman, thus turning the tables on zimmerman, making zimmerman feel threatened then it was justified (imo) assuming that trayvon saw zimmerman as a threat. but no one will ever know how it played out because dead men tell no tales.

the problem with stand your ground is that when asked "what would you do?"most people could see themselves doing what both men did in the final standoff: if someone is following you, you might decide to stand your ground and fight like trayvon, and if someone was on top of you, you might decide to use your gun (assuming you had one) like zimmerman did. the question at hand is which one was justified? and i don't believe zimmerman was. he placed himself in that situation to become a perceived threat in trayvon's eyes (and in most reasonable people's eyes imo). zimmerman had no logical reason to perceive trayvon as an initial threat. trayvon was just a young man walking down the street. do you think trayvon would have been wrong to perceive zimmerman as a threat?

[mamabearCali]

If all we have heard is accurate then, neither of them had committed a crime. Walking through a neighborhood is not a crime, watching someone you don't know walk through a neighborhood is not a crime. Neither of them had committed a crime until one of them attacked the other. Actually it was Martin that began some of the escalation when he according to the g/f version of the story engaged Zimmerman by asking him "why are you following me?". Zimmerman followed with "what are you doing?".

Funny you should ask me what I would do in the situation of having somene follow me through a neighborhood at night cause I have had that exact thing happen. I did not turn around and try to engage the fellow, I ran as fast as I could to the nearest place with people and called the police. (the guy killed a girl the next week!)

You stated basically that because Zimmerman followed him Martin should be free to stand his ground and attack Zimmerman, and Zimmerman should let himself be beaten to death. Following someone is not a crime as long as you don't follow them into private property. Is it suspicious, yes, but if Martin was afraid he had a phone he could have called police just as I did. When that happened to me I was 19 years old...not much older than Martin and a whole lot smaller. If you construed following a person through a neighborhood as a threat it certainly would not rise to the level of a lethal threat. So if a person shot another person following them they would be in big big trouble.

Now on the other hand bashing a person's head on the ground is a lethal action (and a criminal one to boot) so if Zimmerman was the one who was physically attacked and had not been the one to start the physical altercation, then it would seem to me (a generally reasonable person) that he could answer lethal force with lethal force.

Now should Zimmerman have stayed in his car. Yep would have been better off for him for sure. But Zimmerman committed no crime in following Martin, was he stupid, yep, but not criminal.

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[Chasbo00]

i said before, i'm not a gun owner,...

Why are you here on The Virginia Gun Owners' Forum then?

[WRW]

@ justsomeguy. sorry you did all that typing to condemn something that does not mean what you think it means.

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[Tweaker]

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/tra ... irt-759832

Pretty generous with the term cracker IMO. Does that mean us honkies are also "beaners?" If so, dibs on wise Latino moniker!

A certain segment is not exactly engendering itself to what is soon to be a massive constituency in America; Latinos.

[justsomeguy]

i said before, i'm not a gun owner,...

Why are you here then?

i'm here because this case, in fact, does hurt responsible gun owners, and i as a non gun owner wanted to chime in with my perspective and to say that i support gun owner's rights. one of my good friends is very pro gun, and supports many other opinions that i do not share, but he is a very good friend. i also have a friend who was in the military who purchased a handgun for his home. recently, i have also thought about purchasing a gun for home protection. i'm also not someone who likes to hear people reinforce my own beliefs. i enjoy hearing multiple sides of an argument. either way, i don't think it's healthy discourse to just dismiss people because they don't share your opinions.

@mamabearcali

following/walking behind someone is not a crime, but following someone after an initial encounter could be perceived as stalking, and under stand your ground following and or stalking can be met with deadly force if you perceive the person following you as a REAL or PERCEIVED threat.

also, your own story about your experience supports trayvon martin's actions. how was he supposed to have know what zimmerman's intentions were? they had an initial encounter, zimmerman continued to follow (by his own account), and martin somehow decided to engage this man following him. in your example, you were a smaller woman and chose to flee. martin was a bigger young man, and decided to stand his ground. if you had shot and killed the man or beat the man who later killed a woman, you would have been justified in doing so. you also bring up an interesting point: stand your ground is biased toward gun owners. you're saying i can't use my fists or another weapon to incapacitate a perceived threat, but i can shoot them as many times as it takes to stop their advance? the law conflicts with other aspects of non gun based deadly force, like going above and beyond with respect to a beating. it's possible to take someone down with one punch, but it's not guaranteed, and if i'm not mistaken stand your ground doesn't dictate how much gun force you can apply. so i don't see why it should dictate how much physical force you can apply to stand your ground. it's very tricky.

[mamabearCali]

@justsomeguy

Ummm, well I would not want to be the test case on that one. I think a grand jury would be unlikely to see simply following someone as a lethal threat.

From my understanding stand your ground must means you have no duty to retreat from a place you are legally allowed to be if attacked. Martin might have been unnerved by being followed (and could have called the police) but unless that person did something beyond following him, then he had no business attacking Zimmerman.

Unfortunatly it was a lethal confluence of stupidity on both of their parts and possibly criminality on Martins part (if indeed he was the one that attacked Zimmerman physically), that cost Martin his life, and has at minimum threatened Zimmerman's life.

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edited after your edit

I was justified in my fear, but I had nothing other than my spidey sense to justify my fear. If you think you can shoot someone/beat someone to death just because your spidey senses are going off then you need to reconsider. If Zimmerman had actually attacked Martin, or if he held Martin at gunpoint, or if Zimmerman had attempted to hold Martin for the police, then I would say, yes he could and should have defended himself, and I would be all over Zimmerman. As it stands now that does not seem to be the case.

[mk4]

Now should Zimmerman have stayed in his car. Yep would have been better off for him for sure. But Zimmerman committed no crime in following Martin, was he stupid, yep, but not criminal.

[ Post made via Mobile Device ]

this!
mbc hit it on the head!
the operative word in "neighborhood watch" is, wait for it, "watch".

whether zimmerman or martin were: right, wrong, criminal, negligent, can be debated here ad nauseum. was zimmerman doing anything more than "watching" and reporting ill-advised or, dare it be said, idiotic, while martin had done nothing felonious (at least that has been reported)? yep, hands down.

there's a lot of "stupid" in this world. there ain't no real cure and it ain't illegal.

[SilentServiceVet]

In the interest of fair reportage, my evenings guest, whose friend is Broward SWAT, stated that Hermano Zimmermein was quite the cop fetishist. Failed multiple times the polease psych, physical and intellect qualification exams for the police academy. Furthermore, he supposedly emptied 9 rounds from his firearm, 4 of which entered Barak Jr's body.

/Alleged hearsay off

None of this changes my previous statements regarding waiting for proper evidentiary protocol before fashioning a noose, or what does or does not constitute an assault.

Thanks for stating that was hearsay. The reported "facts" don't jive with what you heard, and Mr. Zimmerman's public trial is already painting him as a racist. Add what you wrote about hearing he was a failed, wanna-be LEO, and he'll get convicted before he steps foot in court -- if the Trayvon Martin fanatics get their way.

According to the police report, only one round was fired and that the next round did not enter the chamber. Plausible explanation is that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the gun while he was being assaulted by Trayvon (eyewitness confirms Trayvon was on top of Mr. Zimmerman pummeling him), and that Trayvon had grabbed it when it was fired, keeping the slide from cycling and loading the next round. This taken from Massad Ayoob's blog:

"The death weapon was a Kel-Tec PF9 semiautomatic 9mm pistol. It has been reported that the gun was recovered with a full magazine and that only the chambered round had been fired. This is a condition we associate with something preventing the gun from cycling a fresh round from the magazine into the chamber after the shot was discharged. One thing that can cause that is another man’s hand wrapped around the pistol, retarding its slide mechanism."

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/

We don't know the facts still, but that won't stop the public from trying to lynch Mr. Zimmerman.