idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
There are plenty of situations where I may be justified to call the police. There are far fewer situations where I'm justified in confronting someone, with a loaded gun.
Whether he had a loaded gun or not is irrelevant to his justification though. I think that's a point many people fail to get about concealed carry. Your rights don't change because you're carrying a firearm. Zimmerman has exactly the same right to confront a suspicious person in his neighborhood whether he is carrying a gun or not. If you want to make the argument that Zimmerman was (legally) wrong (or lacked justification, although I find that to be too subjective a term) to do what he did, you have to leave the whole "carrying a loaded gun" part out of your argument.
We might call what Zimmerman did foolish because he ran the risk of getting into a physical confrontation with the person he was following, but he has every right to do so. In the same way we might call a woman walking alone down a dark alley late at night foolish for risking being assaulted or raped, but we'd never say that she somehow deserved to be assaulted because she made that choice. And no one would argue that she was guilty of a crime because she chose to carry a concealed weapon on her in order to protect herself on the off chance someone did attempt to assault/rape her. We correctly place the blame on the person who carried out the assault, not on the person who made the mistake of encountering that person.
And at the end of the day, Martin was not shot because he was walking in the rain. He was not shot because he was wearing a hoodie. He was not shot because he had skittles and tea on him. And he wasn't shot because he was black. Martin was shot because he was straddling Zimmerman, pinning him to the ground, and punching him in the face. He chose to do that. If we want to avoid outcomes like this in the future, the correct lesson to learn from this is to *not* do that. Blaming the guy who was on the ground getting his face punched in because he should have known better than to follow the suspicious teen running through his community is completely insane. Worse than that, it perpetuates the very problem that caused this in the first place because it increases the odds that the next young black man who thinks someone might be watching them or reporting them to police will resort to physical violence.
We need to teach people not to do this, not scare them into thinking that it's their only option.