“These [Expletives] Always Get Away”: George Zimmerman “Gets Away” With Gunplay Yet Again
Once again, a 911 call to police involving George Zimmerman sends chills down the spine. This time it’s Shellie Zimmerman, calling the cops on her estranged husband, the killer of Trayvon Martin who was acquitted of second-degree murder charges in July. And if you have followed the Zimmerman case as closely as I have the five-minute call and the aftermath will give a sickening sense of deja vu.
“[H]e’s in his car,” Shellie tells police. “And he continually has his hands on his gun and he keeps saying, ‘Step closer.” He’s just threatening all of us with his firearm — and he’s going to shoot us.” She tells the dispatcher that George “accosted my father” and “punched my dad in the nose.” In addition, he “took my iPad out of my hands and smashed it.”
As scary as that sounds, it’s what Shellie says next that is frightening. “I’m really, really afraid,” she said. “I don’t know what he’s capable of. I’m really, really scared.” At one point, she yells at her father to “get back inside; George might start shooting at us.”
Listening to the call, my thoughts went to Witness No. 9 in the Zimmerman case. She was the relative who called the Sanford Police Department just days after Zimmerman killed Trayvon on Feb. 26, 2012. During the call, she accused Zimmerman of being a racist she said, “He would start something. He’s a very confrontational person. It’s in his blood. Let’s just say that.”
The punch to Shellie’s father’s nose reminded me of the altercation between Zimmerman and Trayvon. Remember, Zimmerman said Trayvon “sucker punched” him in the nose before the tussle that led to the unarmed 17-year-old’s death. And George’s counter-claim that Shellie was the aggressor today at her parents’ home in Lake Mary, Fla., is a near-replay of what happened in Aug. 2005. Back then, Zimmerman’s former fiance sought a restraining order against him because of domestic violence. So, he sought a restraining order against her in return.
Since Zimmerman was acquitted in July, he has been in the news for touring the headquarters of the manufacturer of the gun he used to kill Trayvon and for two speeding violations. He was let off with a warning each time. Today, Zimmerman was not arrested today, but he was questioned by police. And because Shellie and her father have declined to press charges against Zimmerman, he was free to go. “We have no victim, no crime,” Lake Mary police chief Steve Bracknell said.
The night Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon he called the non-emergency line at the Sanford, Fla., police department. “These [expletive], they always get away,” he said. Just a little bit of history repeating, I suppose.
By: Jonathan Capehart, The Washington Post, September 9, 2013
“Out Damn Spot, Just Go Away”: George Zimmerman Is Enjoying His Celebrity Post Acquittal Victory Tour
As Trayvon Martin’s parents headed to Washington for a protest commemorating the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom, their son’s killer was touring the factory that produced the gun he used to kill their son, and posing for celebrity photos while he was there. Fittingly, celebrity gossip site TMZ broke the news of George Zimmerman’s visit to the Kel-Tec factory last Thursday. Trayvon Martin’s killer is clearly enjoying his post-acquittal right-wing folk-hero status.
Meanwhile, his brother jumped on the bandwagon of white grievance-mongers playing up the alleged racial angle of the murder of Australian baseball player Chris Lane, who was killed by three young men, two black and one white. “Mainstream media is side stepping the fact that one of the alleged murderers openly professed on social media to ‘hate’ white people,” Robert Zimmerman told the Daily Caller. “Which one of these three teens looks most like Obama’s theoretical son?”
I’m sorry, America, we’re stuck with the Zimmermans. They won’t go away. Rather than recoil from his status as the man who shot an unarmed 17-year-old, George Zimmerman is enjoying his celebrity, while Robert Zimmerman continues to collaborate with the right-wing media-entertainment complex to make his brother out to be the real victim in Sanford, Fla., last year – the victim, first, of “thuggish” Trayvon Martin, and then of civil rights leaders like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, as well as Martin’s parents.
Somewhat surprisingly, Zimmerman’s attorney Mark O’Mara released a statement criticizing his client for his gun factory visit in harsh and vivid terms. “We certainly would not have advised him to go to the factory that made the gun that he used to shoot Trayvon Martin through the heart,” Shawn Vincent, a spokesman for attorney Mark O’Mara, told Yahoo News. “That was not part of our public relations plan.”
I don’t recall O’Mara playing up the fact that the 17-year-old Martin was shot, at close range, “through the heart” during the trial, but maybe he thought the dramatic statement might help distance him from what could be his client’s post-acquittal victory tour. (I should note Vincent’s statement to Reuters didn’t include those words.) With Yahoo News, Vincent continued: “We are George’s legal representation, but I don’t think he takes our advice on how he lives his life or what factories he decides to tour. We represented him in court. We got the verdict that we believe is just, and the rest of George’s life is up to George.”
Translation: Don’t blame us for whatever Zimmerman does next.
Part of what made the Zimmerman acquittal hard to take was the shooter’s utter lack of remorse for killing Martin. Even if you believed every word of his self-defense claim, it had to be hard to imagine having no regrets about the death of a teenager. Even Sean Hannity, who normally appears conscience-free, asked Zimmerman if he had “regrets” about getting out of his car and following Martin, which led to their confrontation and the boy’s shooting. “It was all God’s plan, and for me to second guess it or judge it,” Zimmerman told Hannity, his voice trailing off.
That’s the kind of cluelessness that would lead a guy to tour the factory that made the gun he used to kill Martin, and to pose grinning with a star-struck factory worker like he’s Frank Sinatra visiting a local trattoria.
It’s particularly sad that Zimmerman’s visit came on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, which was commemorated Saturday by a civil rights convening that included Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon’s parents. The issues of racial profiling, stop and frisk and “stand your ground” laws are animating a new movement for racial justice, and Martin has become a symbol of the way young black men are treated at the hands of police as well as vigilantes like Zimmerman. “Trayvon Martin was my son, but he’s not just my son, he’s all of our son, and we have to fight for our children,” Fulton told the crowd.
But to Zimmerman’s defenders, Martin is a symbol of predatory young black men, and Zimmerman is the hero enacting “God’s plan” to fight back. Not surprisingly, his brother defended his gun factory victory tour. “George is a free man and as such is entitled to visit, tour, frequent or patronize any business or locale he wishes,” Robert Zimmerman told Yahoo News. So don’t expect Zimmerman’s victory tour to end any time soon.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 26, 2013
“Public Ninth Amendment Fund?”: Ohio PAC, “We’re Buying George Zimmerman A New Gun And We Need Your Help”
The Buckeye Firearms Association, an Ohio-based political action committee, has issued a startling statement in the wake of the George Zimmerman trial: “We’re buying ZIMMERMAN a NEW GUN – We need your help.”
The PAC is in fact not just buying Zimmerman a new gun, but asking the public for donations — “$100 … $50 … $25 … even just $10” – to fund the replacement of his “firearm, holster, and other gear.”
The statement even reminds readers that Zimmerman – who stood trial for the fatal shooting of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida – has “no current source of income.”
And last week, conservative author Brad Thor used Twitter to say that he would buy Zimmerman a new gun and “as much ammunition as he wants.”
The offers come after both Thor and the pro-gun group expressed their disagreement with the Department of Justice’s decision to put a hold on all evidence in the case, including the gun that he used to kill Martin, until it can determine whether or not to charge Zimmerman with violating Martin’s civil rights.
The Buckeye Firearms Foundation has now established what it calls the “Zimmerman Second Amendment Fund,” arguing that the fund is “about more than mere principle. …Gun owners must stand together and refuse to allow an injustice like this to go unanswered.”
The article also adds: “Zimmerman and his family now face daily threats on their lives. More than ever, he has a right to defend himself against those who would seek to do him harm.”
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a “Public Ninth Amendment Fund” to protect those of us who have to share the streets with a gun-toting murderer while still being told we have the right to life.
By: Elissa Gomez, The National Memo, July 22, 2013
“The Painful Paradoxes Of Race”: A History That Just Doesn’t Go Away
“In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” the young African-American man wrote. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall they follow me. … Black male: Guilty until proven innocent.”
“I have lost control of my emotions,” he declared. “Rage, Frustration, Anguish, Despondency, Fatigue, Bitterness, Animosity, Exasperation, Sadness. Emotions once suppressed, emotions once channeled, now are let loose. Why?”
The words came not in response to the George Zimmerman verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing but to the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King case. The author of the May 6, 1992, column in the Stanford University student newspaper: Cory Booker, now the nationally celebrated mayor of Newark and the frontrunner to be the next United States senator from New Jersey.
Booker pointed me toward his angry essay more than halfway through a late breakfast on a visit here last week. He spoke the day before President Obama went to the White House briefing room to issue his powerful reminder to Americans that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
In words that resonated with what Booker had said, the president noted that “the African-American community is looking at this issue though a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”
For his part, Booker didn’t start with the Zimmerman trial but instead spoke enthusiastically about a program he had established in cooperation with the libertarian-conservative Manhattan Institute to help men released from prison become better fathers. “The right intervention,” he said, “can create radically different outcomes.”
Booker knows about crime. He described his experience of holding a young man who had just been shot, trying and failing to keep him from dying in his arms. He returned home disconsolate and washed off the young man’s blood.
His account, and Obama’s later words, put the lie to outrageous claims by right-wing talk jocks that those upset over the outcome in the Zimmerman trial have no concern for what the conservative provocateurs, in one of their newly favored soundbites, are calling “black-on-black” crime. African-American leaders, particularly mayors such as Booker, were struggling to stem violence in their own communities long before it became a convenient topic for those trying to sweep aside the profound problems raised by the Martin case.
Booker fully accepts that there is a right to self-defense. “One of the things I learned from the good cops is that there were some times when they were completely justified in pulling their weapons and killing somebody,” he said. But those good cops, he insisted, also understood that their first obligation was “to defuse a situation,” to try to prevent violence. Discussing Zimmerman, Booker added: “This so-called community watch guy, having been told by the police to back away, had so many opportunities to defuse the situation.”
Why, Booker wonders, do we only have our famous conversations about race and fear “when things go terribly wrong”? Why, he wants to know, was it impossible for Zimmerman to look upon Martin “as someone he could have a conversation with”?
This shrewd politician is under no illusions that his questions have simple answers. Yet as we neared the end of the interview, he offered a thought you might hear in a church or synagogue. “Fear is a toxic state of being,” Booker said. “You’ve got to lead with love.”
Talking to Booker was a reminder of the bundle of contradictions that is the story of race in America, precisely what Obama was underscoring when he spoke of our progress as well as our difficulties.
The young man who protested against the need to prove his innocence had earned a Rhodes scholarship and went on to become one of the country’s most prominent politicians. He has won friends across the political spectrum (which makes some liberals nervous). Most of what he had to say to me was about practical things government can do to reverse rising inequality and battle child poverty. One of the central problems of our time, he said, is “the decoupling between wage growth and economic growth,” a development that feeds so many other social challenges.
We cannot give up on trying to solve these problems any more than we can blind ourselves both to the persistence of racism and our triumphs in pushing it back. That, I think, is the message of his old column. We have come a long way, and have a long way to go.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 22, 2013
“Making The Discussion Relatable”: Contrary To Right Wing Wishes, There Is No Such Person As “Race-Baiter In Chief”
President Obama joined the national conversation on race Friday, addressing the death of Trayvon Martin, the slain Florida teenager whose main offense seems to have been his skin color. After a week of protests in the wake of shooter George Zimmerman’s acquittal, some of which lamentably turned violent, Obama spoke of the pain felt in the African American community.
“I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away,” the president said. He continued:
There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.
And there are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.
And he posed this question to Americans who aren’t open to challenging the “stand your ground” law that let Zimmerman shoot Martin in self-defense:
And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these ‘stand your ground’ laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?
The Atlantic’s prolific Ta-Neshi Coates has written frequently on the Martin case since news of Zimmerman’s acquittal broke Saturday, including this must-read: “The Banality of Richard Cohen and Racist Profiling.” Still, it’s “The Good, Racist People,” an Op-Ed he wrote for the New York Times in March, that I can’t stop thinking about. In it, he details an incident that happened at his neighborhood deli in New York, where an employee accused Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker of shoplifting and then frisked him.
“In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist,” Coates wrote, arguing that we live in a society that targets black people with “a kind of invisible violence.” He goes on:
The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years. […]
I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.
It’s hard to read Coates’ Op-Ed without your heart rising into your throat. But we should read it, all of it. And we should appreciate that Obama, our first black president, has joined the conversation on race with such a personal and thoughtful statement. Here’s the full transcript.
Some accuse Obama of race-baiting and stoking racial tensions. But that’s not fair, and it’s not what he did. What the president did was make himself relatable, and then he used his position of power to suggest a path forward for a “more perfect union.”
The people who object to Obama saying that we need to “bolster and reinforce our African American boys” are just in the way.
By: Alexandra LeTellier, The Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2013
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