Homeowner shot a 14-year-old during burglary attempt. The 5 other teens with him were charged with m

You think Zimmerman is blameless after he stalked this kid in the rain and in the dark? You must be a real man. Yeah. That's it.

 

T-Bones could have simply went to his relatives house and called the cops like most rational people would have, he chose to attack the wrong person and paid with his life. Why am I supposed to feel bad about that?

 

I don't blame the homeowner, he has every right to defend his home. Charging the other kids with murder is stupid.

 

Why? It's called Felony Murder............

 

There was a case in Georgia where a group of men broke into a T-Mobile and an officer who was 3 exits away heard the call turned on his lights and started flying towards the T-Mobile. He had an accident and died and the Prosecutor tried to add murder to the docket, but the Judge threw it out due to the simple fact that their actions played no role in the officer's death.

 

In our Judicial system we don't determine if they are "blameless" we determine if they are guilty of a crime. Zimmerman was found not guilty on ALL counts.

 

Margot -- You're obviously a compassionate person -- would that everyone were like this -- and you try to see the world from the point of view of the 'Other'. That's also a commendable attitude and, believe it or not, it's a military virtue as well. You don't have to be 'soft' to see that this is a useful skill. (How does the other guy think? What's he likely to do next?) And if only our foreign policy makers could have this quality.

But with all due respect, I think you don't fully understand 16-year old American boys, of any race, when it comes to manhood issues.
This young man had grown up in America, and in my part, the South.

Now it's an unfortunate fact of life, that Americans, of every race, don't react the same way to young Black males as they do to, say, young Chinese males.
You probably know the famous quote from Jesse Jackson, about how ashamed he felt when, hearing footsteps behind him one night, he turned around and was relieved to see that it was whites, not Blacks, making those footsteps. He is an honest man.

It wasn't that long ago -- within my lifetime in fact -- that it would have been the other way around, at least in the South, where even if a white-attacks-Black event went to trial, the all-white jury would have voted an aquittal within two minutes and then bought the defendants drinks and, grinning, asked them to go on, now tell us what you really did to that n****r. Wiki has a whole page devoted to lynching in Florida . That's the world Trayvon grew up in and don't think he didn't know that history in one form or another. Blacks will forget it when Jews forget the Holocaust. And the Nazis didn't systematically rape their Jewish victims either, which is a big issue with males. Imagine, three hundred years of not being able to defend your women! (Sorry to get all non-PC here, but you can't fool life. We're just like that, Margot. Even the California Board of Education won't be able to change that, without surgery.)

Diversion: When I was doing voter registration work in Tennessee during Freedom Summer in 1964, my partner and I were on our way back to where we were staying (with a Black family), having been to a rally at a Black church. It was dark -- for some reason I have always believed that nights in the country in my native South were always darker than up North, maybe it's due to the earth's tilt or something -- , we were on a little lonely country road, and ... we had a flat tire. They went flat almost immediately in those days.

Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner , doing similar work not too many miles from where we were, just over the state line in fact, were still missing. (They were dug up from where they were entombed later, and there is a story about how the FBI 'persuaded' a white man with guilty knowledge to reveal where their bodies were buried, for another time.)

Well, I was in the process of making the fastest tire change in history, only slowed by copious perspiration, when a car drove past, slowed down and pulled to a stop. I can still remember how those brake lights looked, the crunching of gravel as it rolled to a stop fifty or so meters in front of us, the dead night-time silence as my partner and I stared at it. We were unarmed (then) and could do nothing -- maybe we should have run away (as I had to do a few weeks later), but we may have been gripped by what the psychologists, referring to the counter-intuitive passivity of passengers on some just-crashed airplanes, call "negative panic" In any event we just stood there as that car's doors opened, some figures got out ... and walked towards us. I don't how Trayvon Martin felt, but 'scared to death' would have been a very accurate description of me, and probably of my partner. They walked up to us and .... thank Christ, they were Black!!!!! "Y'all need any help?" I think they had to shout to overcome the sound my heart was making thmping against my rib cage, but maybe that's an embellishment. We just asked them to stay with us until they had finished, which they did. I didn't see any guns, but I wouldn't have bet against there being one or two in their car. Southern Blacks were not big fans of gun contol then -- the original Colt was called 'the Great Equalizer' and that phrease applied in the rural South. Now, in 99.999 percent of all other cases where that scenario might be repeated, that would not have been mine, or any other person's -- certainly not any other white person's -- response. But context is everything.

Now, imagine the world Trayvon grew up in. Pretty quickly you learn, probably from the age of 12 or 13, that white people -- even nice white liberals -- don't respond to you they way they respond to white boys. Liberals will talk down to you. Other whites, depending on where you are, will keep an eye on any loose property. Humans are very good at reading faces and body languae, and the signs will be obvious.

Another story, now that I have your attention. A few years ago I did an informal mini-speaking tour in California, and had just finished a talk at a meeting of the Libertarian Party in the public library in Ventura. A couple of dozen people were in attendance, all white. Towards the end of the talk, a young Black man came in, and sat down in a chair in the last row, crossed his arms, and scowled through the rest of my talk. When I finished, there was a brief question-and-answer session, and then a few Libertarians came up to the podium where we continued talking. The young Black man got up, and began to walk towards us. I remember looking at my laptop computer on the podium -- is he going to snatch it and run? -- but he just come up, listened to the conversation a while, and then interjected something after he couldn't stand it any more. I had been arguing with a Libertarian about how bad it was in the US -- he maintained it was practically a dictatorship, with the income tax, gun control, etc. The young man's interjection was something like this ... "You say this country is a dictatorship. Man, you don't know what dictatorship is ... where I come from, now that's a dictatorship. You're living in paradise". It turned out he was from Liberia, and was working as a digital film animator in Hollywod. A very amiable person. But ... social reality dictated my inital response.

Imagine how that must feel, day in, day out, for your whole life.

Trayvon was no saint. Many teenage boys are not saints. When I was a teenager, by his age, I had committed two headline-making felonies and one serious misdemeanor. (No one was hurt. It was all in the cause of making life uncomfortable for white segregationists. One of the nice things about being on the Left, as I was in those days, is that you can engage in criminal behavior and feel self-righteous about it. Stalin got his start robbing banks for the cause.)

My closest childhood friend joined the Marines because the alternative, as a nice judge explained, was five years in the State Penitentiary at Huntsville. He was a good-looking young man and made the right decision. Later in life he became a photographer and documented the struggle of the UFW to organize the farmworkers in the Valley, then worked as a social worker with juvenile delinquents [he was good at that, I suspect, knowing just where they were coming from, and being a former Marine didn't hurt either] and after that taught ecology at a junior college. But he could have ended up dead on a homeowner's floor if one of his teenage burglaries had gone wrong.

So there's Trayvon. Walking to his uncle's home. And suddenly, a voice behind him, or he heard footsteps. He turns around, and ... there's a Mexican. (Zimmerman, despite the name, looks very Hispanic.)

Now, Lefty romanticism to the contrary, Blacks and Hispanics are not natural allies. I can just imagine Trayvon thinking, "This is MY country ... where does this Mexican get off, telling me where I can walk in my own country?"

And here is where Hollywood should take it's share of the blame. I call it the 'quiet manhood-assertion one-liner'. A single statement that is an understanded assertion of your maleness -- something that 3 million years of cruel natural selection has implanted in every male brain. It's just the way we are, Margot. It got us here. It's especially appealing to young men who may not fullfil all the required malehood attributes of being large and tough.

Here's a brilliant example, from when the Italians were teaching Hollywood how to make Westerns that were works of art as well as good tales. Every male reading this (if anyone is) will appreciate that final line by Charles Bronson.

No young teenage male who has seen this scene, or a dozen like it, can forget it. And here was Trayvon's chance!!! His own, "You brought two too many." His line: "Well, you got one now." (Perhaps if he had lived, he would have ended up as a scriptwriter for Hollywood.)

Maybe we can do something about this, and I have made a suggestion about how might be achieved elsewhere. Comments appreciated.

 

For a number of years I lived in a gated community on the bus line. Lots of young Blacks and Asians rode the buses to school or work and they all wore hoodies and talked on cell phones at all hours and in all kinds of weather.... just as I did. I walked every day even in bad weather and most of the year I wore a hoodie. Zimmerman was a stupid coward pretending to play cops and robbers.

 

And if you had been walking back to your home there one night, had heard footsteps behind you, turned around ... and saw it was three young Asians rather than three young Blacks... would your response have been like Jesse Jackson's, relief? Hand on heart, now...

 

There were often young Blacks or Asians around me or behind me in the dark.. You say "good evening".. You don't act like some demented, gun toting vigilante ..

 

Yes, but in the circumstances I described ... wouldn't your reaction have been like Jesse Jackson's? (And like 100% of everyone else in North America, save a recently-arrived alien from the planet Gork?)

 

If I was in a bad part of town, yes. But, I have no cause to fear Black teens in my neighborhood. I always spoke to them.

 

Yes, I understand that. An acquaintance of mine, who lived in New York City, where the 'bad part of town' gets to the 'good part of town' very easily -- who had a would-be visiting friend raped in the stairwell up to his flat -- put it like this:

How do you know if you're a racist? If you're in the elevator of the building where your apartment is, going down, and it stops and two young Black males get in, if know them because they're the sons of your neighbors and you still feel alarmed, you're a racist; if you don't know them, and you don't feel alarmed, you're an idiot.

This is just the ugly reality. We'll be over it some day, but probably not in the lifetimes of anyone reading this. The Irish used to be treated the same way.

Zimmerman didn't know Trayvon. Trayvon had not been to the school training course I have suggested. So we had a tragedy. The way to prevent it is not to lecture the Zimmerman's of the world to be Politically Correct Virtue-bearers, but to make sure no one like him gets on Neighborhood Watch duty (what are the qualfications, if any?), and more importantly, to implement something like my training course idea and have the future Trayvons take it. Instead of trading barbs with the conservatives here, why not have a look at it and tell me what you think? You might have good contributions to make, then we could write a joint document, one liberal and one conservative, see if we can get it published somewhere -- I propose City Journal which I know is read by some important people, and we'll be doing something positive to keep a tragedy like this from happening again.

 

They were acting as a single unit.

 

They didn't kill the teen who died.

 

They were responsible for it. If you plan to do a felony, and somebody dies as part of it, it's murder on the part of all who were committing the felony. Also, IMHO, had they left their buddy on the lawn, instead of putting him in a car and driving away at high speed, he would have had a better chance of surviving.

 

You're comparing an accidental death with one where all were present at the time of the death committing a crime? You must not understand the Felony Murder Law. In this case their actions played a prominent role in the death.

 

Here is an update on the case =

Officials indicate murder charges against 5 Chicago teens could be revised after investigation into Lake County shooting is completed
SEP 05, 2019 | 3:06 PM
The group of teens, dubbed the “Lake County Five” by some activist groups, is now scheduled to appear for preliminary hearings Sept. 19, after Lake County Associate Judge Paul Novak granted Thursday’s continuance by agreement of both prosecutors and defense attorneys.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/subu...0190905-fou35yqufvcctg57nddkyarjcq-story.html

 

Robert Blake said it best on the old Beretta TV show. "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time........."

 

"What is Felony Murder?

Felony murder is a legal rule that expands the definition of murder. It applies when someone commits a certain kind of felony and someone else dies in the course of it. It doesn’t matter whether the death was intentional or accidental—the defendant is liable for it."

 

I don’t know, maybe I’m experiencing a big guy privilege (in contrast to white privilege) bet every time I encounter a black man (one or group) they end up smiling and saying hi to me. I have quite a few black families in my neighborhood and every time even a group of them walks in my direction looking all tough, as soon as they make an eye contact with me they smile and say hi.

 

They were acting as a unit.

 

Lucky man. I look like a typical victim.

Ironic story: the only time I've every been attacked by young Blacks was when a comrade and I were attending the 1967 SDS convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We were walking together, at night, down a street in that town, when three or four young Blacks came towards us on the same pavement, and suddenly attacked us ... I happened to be carrying a knife, and I had surreptitiously withdrawn and opened it when I saw them coming (I was a Leftist but not a fool) and I jumped back and held it out rigidly in front of me -- probably just exactly the wrong thing to do, but it kept the one who I think had singled me out away from me. My comrade however got his glasses smashed and had a bleeding nose -- it just lasted a few seconds and then they walked on. Of course we didn't report it because, as my comrade said, it would have been very embarrassing.

In the same vein, I had another comrade who worked late in our office in New York City, but who lived across the river in New Jersey. He was one of the few Left-wing gun nuts I ever knew -- had been an armorer or some such in the Army in the early 60s and had been discharged when he joined the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance. [A real gun-nut -- did his own reloads, could talk in detail about what kind of bullet could pierce Kevlar, even wrote an article about it once in national magazine.] Anyway, according to his girlfriend, he used to take the subway or train home to his place in mixed-race neighborhood, and would get out one or two stops early, late at night, and walk the rest of the way home. What he was hoping for was a mugging attempt, because he was carrying. He must have given off "Don't Tread On Me" vibes, however, because he was always left alone. He was not a big guy, but did look sort of scary.

He never did get to kill anyone, except that once, when he and his girlfriend were ordered by the Party (as we called our group) to move across the country to work in a different city, and they couldn't bring their two cats, he took the unfortunate felines out into the country and executed them with his .38. He was a nice guy really, and became a kind of mini-expert on that American eccentric, Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico during their Revolution, even going so far as to travel there and dig where he thought Bierce's grave was. But he was a chain smoker, sadly. More about him here, if anyone is interested in the characters that made up the American Far Left long ago.