I am a little tired of those who would have us believe that George Zimmerman was just doing his job as a member of his neighborhood watch. They would have us believe that neighborhood watch members normally carry firearms, and make a habit of confronting individuals they consider to be suspicious -- and that is simply not true.Most neighborhood watch individuals are not armed, because it is not their job to approach or apprehend anyone. Their job is to notify the police, and then back off and let the police do their job.
Let me say at this point that I am a big supporter of neighborhood watch, and their cousin Citizens on Patrol. That is because my life was saved by a member of Citizens on Patrol, when I was shot by a carjacker. This wonderful gentleman called an ambulance for me, and then later testified at the criminal trial (because he had seen the perpetrator driving away in my car). He was a true hero, and he did not need (or have) a gun.
The truth is that Zimmerman violated the rules of neighborhood watch when he approached and tried to apprehend Trayvon Martin. Once he called the police, his job was over (unless he was needed to testify in court later). And he was even told that by police when he called them. If he had done his job, no one would have died. He approached Trayvon because he was a macho prick who thought he was invincible because he had a gun.
And he was a coward. Too many people in this country think they can compensate for cowardice with a firearm -- and too often it gets someone killed unnecessarily (and many times it is themselves). And because he had a gun, Zimmerman turned a fistfight (that wouldn't even have happened if he had just done his job) into a shooting (that resulted in a death).
A fellow blogger that I respect, Jerome Doolittle at Bad Attitudes, has an interesting take on the shooting -- that it happened because of the cowardice of Zimmerman. And that this might have been realized if the jury had some males on it. His whole post is worth reading, but I especially liked his summation. He said:
It occurs to me, though, that the jurors’ decision may have been gender-influenced in an entirely different way. The six women would be unlikely to have much first-hand knowledge of contact sports and street fights. Male jurors might, though, and would have been less inclined to take Zimmerman’s plight seriously. They would know that scalp wounds tend to bleed out of all proportion to their severity — and Zimmerman’s were abrasions that hardly bled at all. They would know that finding yourself on the bottom in a struggle may be undesirable but is seldom fatal. They might feel scorn rather than pity for an older, heavier man who panicked after starting something that he couldn’t finish with a 17-year-old kid. Men might have found it beside the point whether Zimmerman felt his life was being threatened, which is the idiotically low bar set by Florida law. They might have found the more relevant and less moronic consideration to be whether he should have felt his life was in danger. Basically, male jurors might have asked, didn’t the kid die because Zimmerman was such a pussy?
