The Armed Citizen

Can you hear and do you care and
Can't you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in
Make a world that we can live in
--Teach Your Children, CSN&Y
___________________

Since we are in Florida and guns and police are occasional topics, Ranger will address the furore surrounding the 26 Feb 12 death of a 17-year-old black youth in the central Florida town of Sanford.

First to the hagiography of Trayvon Martin and concomitant vilification of his killer, Zimmerman. [Anything that follows is not to justify murder, if that needs be said.]

An associate of Ranger's in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) commented this morning to him that Trayvon Martin's police file has been sealed. We know that Martin was in Sanford because he was expelled from his South Florida school for as-yet unverified offense(s). So what we do know is, both participants in this engagement had rap sheets. Neither were lily white when it comes to their experience with the law.

Another fact is that thousands of black / white /brown /yellow people shoot and kill thousands of other black / white / brown and yellow people every year in the U.S. Can they all be hate crimes?

The exact statistics are hard to come by; a rough estimate is 30,000 firearm deaths in the U.S. per year, with almost half of those being suicides. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC),the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) all release their own stats; the FBI also tabulates justifiable homicides separate from murders. For instance, in 2005, there were 337 justifiable, fatal shoots by the LEOs and 143 by private citizens.

Since this is a criminal investigation, the general public can have no idea into which category this killing falls. It doesn't make anyone smarter or more liberal to side with the black youth over the late 20's Hispanic in the absence of all the data. However, it does appear to make some people feel better to slot themselves with one over the other. Why would that be? Do liberals suffer a higher collective guilt over past treatment of black people than we do over the treatment of Hispanics? If so, why is that?

We suggest if you really sympathize with the plight of blacks, you back it up with equal concern over every blight facing the black community in America, namely:

• What are you doing about the disproportionate rate of sexually transmitted disease (STD's) -- especially AIDs -- in the black community? According to Zack Burgess of the Philidelphia Tribune:

"African Americans represent one-half of the new HIV infections, those living with HIV and those who succumb to it each year in the United States. We also have higher rates for other STDs. Not to mention that Blacks represent 50% of the 2.8 million new Chlamydia infections and our infection rates for Gonorrhea and Syphilis are 16 and 23 times those of whites respectively."

"Nowhere is this impact greatest than in young people, especially young women. A recent CDC study estimated that 48% of black adolescent girls in the United States had at least one STD. Moreover, many are unaware of it."

• As of 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Justice estimated there were over 846,000 Black men in prison, making up 40.2% of all inmates in the system at large. More black men are now in prison than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.

• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 2010, 25 percent of all students and nearly 40 percent of black and Hispanic kids fail to graduate on time; the dropout rate is slightly higher for Hispanics than for blacks.

• About 25% of the U.S. Army is black (though a much smaller percentage join front line combat units.)

• Black women have the highest teen pregnancy rates of any demographic @ 117 per 1,000 women aged 15–19 -- over twice the rate for non-Hispanic whites (46 per 1,000)

• African Americans have 2.4 times the infant mortality rate as non-Hispanic whites. They are four times as likely to die as infants due to complications related to low birth weight as compared to non-Hispanic white infants.

• In 2004, the homicide rate among black victims in the United States was 18.71 per 100,000. In comparison, the overall national homicide rate was 4.86 per 100,000 and the national homicide rate for whites was 2.97 per 100,000.

• While African Americans comprise 13.5% of the U.S. Population, 43% of all murder victims in 2007 were African American, 93.1% of whom were killed were African Americans (Black on Black Crime Coalition.)

Do you know these statistics? Do you care? If you think Trayvon is some kind of aberration, than you do not, and your wailing and gnashing of teeth is fallow and will flame out once the next new outrage is fed to you. If you do not care about the reality girding this discrete episode of violence, you can save your bile.

Maybe it is just like those adverts for the World Health Organizations that solicit funds for children with bloated bellies. Kids are cute and we feel sorry for them. We would turn away if the ads featured adults with festering sores and vermin surrounding them. It feeds our egos to have the little picture in our wallet of "our" Third World kid"

Ditto the way the press is marketing the Martin-Zimmerman fight: We see the latter's mug shot, but the former's smiling, pre-17-year-old face. We envision laughter and Skittle-eating Trayvon, and the lurking vigilante, Zimmerman. We do not see the scowling, hooded Trayvon or the one sporting his gold rack, because that would plant a seed of doubt in our minds, and the press and your ego trafficks in simple black and white.

Outrage can feel cathartic, but to what end?

Next: The Armed Citizen II: Race in America

Whassup?

This year I'm not getting involved in any
complicated issues. I'm just voting my
regular ethnic prejudices


"Cause of Death: Hooked Nose"
--Heinrich Boll short story

I'm not a Roman, mum, I'm a kike,
a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose,
I'm kosher, mum,
I'm a Red Sea pedestrian and proud of it!
--Life of Brian (1979)

There is nothing more painful to me
at this stage in my life than to walk down the street
and hear footsteps and start thinking
about robbery -- and then look around
and see somebody white and feel relieved
-- Jesse Jackson
____________________

Greetings from the Gunshine State!

What's all this about Trayvon's killing being racially-motivated? We do not have the facts, yet the liberal blogosphere has been crying for vengeance since Day 1. Do you know why? Because a man named "Zimmerman" in a gated community shot a young black man.

Let's go straight to the presumptions:

Black people don't get to live in gated communities. Zimmerman must be a card-carrying member of AIPAC, and since they all hate the poor Palestinians it's just a hop, skip and a jump to hating blacks. That's what stoked the fire before any news beyond name and race of the deceased was known.

None of this is true, of course, but depending on your political skew you rushed to your own judgment.

Do you know how many good liberals will admit that this was their first conclusion? Precisely "zero", because it does not groove with their self image of being for the underdog. They will not admit their presumption of Zimmerman's ethnicity, which is every bit as odious as any other stereotype.

What is fascinating is that the family of the neighborhood watch shooter (Zimmerman) was quick to point out he was himself Hispanic -- a man of color. In other words, he could not have harbored the malevolent intent that surely a white would feel toward a black youth in a gated community. Moreover, we now know Mr. Zimmerman attended Catholic school and was an alter boy. Does this imply the Catholic religion was to blame for leading him astray?

And yet, blacks attend Catholic school, too. We visited Ranger's old neighborhood in Cleveland, and many of the dioceses were almost entirely black. So it can't be his religion that is the problem.

Nor can the problem be that only black people are shot unjustly for being in the wrong neighborhood. As a white person, it would not be wise to walk after dark in certain parts of, say, Southside Chicago. For some reason, such a shooting would not raise our national hackles; he had it coming to him. Because, you know, walking in that neighborhood would simply be folly.

If a white person walked at night in certain neighborhoods he would surely be presumed to be looking to score drugs or a hooker, and we don't have much sympathy for that behavior, being the good moralists we are. Such a murder would be a sad story, but one only read between the lines as it might only appear in the obits. If it had a special edge, like say the victim was feeble minded and had recently escaped his group house, then it might get some ink, just for the oddity of it all. Otherwise, no. Expected.

What's the not-too-veiled subtext with Trayvon's shooting? White people should control themselves better than blacks. If he were walking in Southside, it wouldn't make the news sidebar -- and yet, it would be the SAME event ... to use the liberal's term, "Walking while black"!

I would argue, all people should control themselves better, and nobody should shoot anybody. Fat chance that, right.

My deeper implication is rarely addressed: We are racist in that we EXPECT black people to go for their nine. That that behavior is neither shocking nor rare is what we should be addressing before, during and after the tragedy of Trayvon, because then you would be approaching a real solution rather than a cathartic feel-good chest-beating.

When a black shoots someone it makes metro news, maybe; if it's black-on-black, more likely it never leaves the police blotter. But ZIMMERMAN shooting a black youth? National, baby. There is some deep racism in this country among all races on a slow boil every day.

Geraldo Rivera was right when suggesting death by hoodie. When President Obama said that Trayvon could have been his son, I wonder if he would've allowed his son to walk alone in the wee hours to a convenience store and back in an unfamiliar community. I am not saying that activity is a crime (and we do not know the full details of that engagement) but I am saying if you look like you're in the wrong neighborhood, you will be noticed. To pretend otherwise is folly.

Is it fair to expect if I walk around in a Slutwalk uniform -- say, bra, panties and jackboots -- and want to enter a workingman's pub at midnight for a brewski, that I not get hassled? If you're high-minded and blissfully unaware of human behavior, you will say, "Of course it is!" No, it is not. That is not the world in which we live.

A parallel example occurred for me when I attended a black university for a semester (Florida A & M). I will relate but one example of the prejudice which I encountered as a white person on that campus.

Walking to my car, I noticed a FAMU patrol car pulled in haphazardly behind my vehicle, blocking its exit, ala Starsky and Hutch. I was then confronted by a black FAMU patrol officer with his 9 mm drawn -- yes! Not pointing at me, but drawn. I asked what was wrong -- NO LIE: He questioned the authenticity of my parking sticker, and accused me of forgery!!!

You must understand that Florida State University and FAMU had full reciprocity on matters such as parking, library privileges, etc. This was so surreal that I smiled and asked, "Are you serious?" Thank god it was daylight, and he did not have an itchy trigger finger. Sullenly, he holstered the gun and said, "I've got my eye on you." It was pure, unjustifiable harassment.

The terror only hit me as I entered my car and made to drive away, shaking and weak. As an older adult, I am outraged at that inappropriate threat of force. I was a small white woman burdened with an armload of books approaching her 17-year-old Volkswagon. What insane bullying, and if I had known better or had support, I would have brought that matter to my local representatives, at the least. I did not know better, and just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge.

That said, I met some very fine and welcoming people at FAMU, as well. BUT, those introductions were usually facilitated by a black friend; unaccompanied, I was suspect. I was told by a black male study partner that he wished he could introduce me to his fiance, but that she would be antagonistic to my whiteness. (I later encountered them in a store and he looked away.)

I was enthusiastically asked by members of my African-American Lit class after I'd made a presentation of Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" -- how I could possibly have understood the trials of a black woman so well, they asked. I quoted Sojourner Truth ("Ain't I a Woman?) And so it goes.

That is the measure of the prejudice in your nation: Black-on-black -- or at least, dark-on-dark crime -- is permitted. It's expected; it is as old as the hills. All suspect all.

So, what do we call it when blacks murder blacks? We don't seem to call it anything. How about if a black person murders a white -- it does happen, you know? Are those racist occurrences, or simply pathetic and tragic murders?

The liberal pack is calling for everyone's head, but in order for the police to arrest a suspect they must have a court-issued probable cause warrant. Zimmerman is not a flight risk; he had called the police prior to the shooting event. He tried to coordinate with police, and they displayed negligence and a negative attitude by not responding.

This should be a problem of concern: Many police department are suffering budget cuts and a shortage of officers. Maybe several of them are on duty in Afghanistan. There was clearly a problem in the neighborhood. Zimmerman was following Florida Rules of Engagement as opposed to Afghan rules.

My main point is obvious: We all come with preconceptions and fears, founded or un-, and how to countenance that is our mission. If all followed the rule of law and respected his fellows, and expressed honestly and clearly at the first sign of feeling threatened in the spirit of seeking consensus, we wouldn't have these shootings, would we?

Is this our country as you know it? Is this your house, as you know it?

Per Trayvon, we should suspend judgment until the facts are known.

For now, we can call it, "Death by Hoodie", and should consider all which that entails.

[cross-posted @ BigBrassBlog]