Saturday, July 20, 2013

Trayvon Martin Was Not Responsible For His Own Death


Here's my opinion on the topic of the moment (and I will leave the issues of racial profiling and conceal-and-carry out of it):

If you call the authorities to report a "suspicious" person, and if the dispatcher specifically tells you not to further pursue that person, you need to do just that.  You need to let the authorities take over at that point.  This is obvious.

If you choose to ignore what you are told to do and instead decide unilaterally to continue to follow that person, the result of which is that the person you are following dies, to my mind you are morally responsible for that death.

George Zimmerman was not attacked before or during the point that he was told to stop pursuing Trayvon Martin, so the fact that Mr. Zimmerman used deadly force after that point is ultimately the result of one decision on his part:  ignoring what he was told to do.  Despite what Mr. Zimmerman's apologists insist, Trayvon Martin is dead because of Mr. Zimmerman's awful decision, not because of anything that Trayvon Martin did or did not do.

Mr. Zimmerman's actions have been interpreted as being legal in the state of Florida, but I believe that those actions were also morally reprehensible.  I think that most people of good will would have a tendency to view this horrible event along similar lines.

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