Both times I went through Minnesota carry permit training, I had\u00a0to absorb a massive amount of information, much of it potentially life-or-death.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the big ones, both times?\u00a0 Using a firearm in self-defense, even if it’s utterly justified in every way, is the second-worst possible outcome to a bad situation, at best.\u00a0 <\/em>The worst, maybe, is that you die – and\u00a0if you shoot an innocent person while trying to defend yourself, that’s even worse.\u00a0 Armed self-defense is incredibly fraught – legally and morally.\u00a0<\/p>\n And that’s if you do absolutely everything right<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n There was little to cheer about Saturday night at 9PM Central, as the jury announced its “not guilty” verdict.\u00a0<\/p>\n For Trayvon Martin’s family?\u00a0 Having your child come to grief for no good reason is one of every parent’s worst nightmares.\u00a0 I’ve spent many a sleepless night wracked with worry about my own teenage kids.\u00a0 There but for the grace of God go many of us.\u00a0<\/p>\n And that’s even if you leave the racial element out of it.\u00a0 Which I will do – because so did the prosecution in the Zimmerman trial.\u00a0 If it never came up at trial, it’s not an issue.\u00a0 It’s a mind-warping tragedy – but not a racial incident.\u00a0<\/p>\n As to George Zimmerman?\u00a0 Even if you leave out all the threats against his life – most of which can be discounted as easily as testosterone-driven chest-pounding, but by no means all of it – his life is never going to be the same.\u00a0 It’s a rare, sick person that doesn’t feel some intense remorse over ending another human life, even if they did everything right<\/em>.<\/p>\n As, as the court acknowledged, he did.\u00a0<\/p>\n So I’ll pray for both Zimmerman’s and Martin’s families, and Zimmerman himself; the horror of this incident likely isn’t done spreading its destruction and misery.\u00a0 I urge you do to do the same via whatever means your worldview acknowledges.\u00a0<\/p>\n If you believe the court verdict – and in our system, we are supposed to – then Trayvon Martin made a very bad choice, resolving whatever issues he had with being followed by attacking Zimmerman, who in turn chose to defend himself, because it was reasonable to assume that had he not, he’d be the dead one today (unlamented in the media).\u00a0 This fear he proved reasonable to a jury.\u00a0 You can second-guess it, but it’s all wind in sails.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other people and institutions made choices – none of them of direct life or death import, but with implications that bear more directly on most of the rest of us who weren’t party to that shooting a year ago last spring.\u00a0<\/p>\n Never Waste A Dead Kid<\/strong>:\u00a0 Barack Obama and his administration distinguished themselves by the depths of their cynicism.\u00a0 They politicized this case before the blood was dry – and they did it entirely to cement black support in the 2012 election.\u00a0 Is there a worse word than “cynicism?”<\/p>\n The Media<\/strong>:\u00a0 The mainstream media did, almost universally, an unforgiveable job in “covering” the case.\u00a0 They served as vehicles for the Administration’s narrative (NBC’s editing of Zimmerman’s 911 call to falsely make it sound racist), the prosecution’s disinformation (reading Zimmerman’s 911 call text as an angry outburst, where it was in real life more a resigned head-shake of disgust), and were universally as incurious about telling an accurate story as they were eager to exploit the tragedy into ratings (and political brownie points).\u00a0<\/p>\n Ask yourself this; how many media and leftyblog sources did you see refer to Zimmerman carrying his firearm with the “hammer cocked and the safety off?”\u00a0\u00a0 Zimmerman’s pistol had no safety; either does any revolver, or any of the Glocks your local police probably carry.\u00a0 And there’s no hammer to cock.\u00a0 And yet many media reports included that bit of tough-sounding but meaningless reporting.<\/p>\n Too gun-geeky?\u00a0 OK – how many times have you seen the media refer to this trial as a racial incident?\u00a0 Ask them – where in the case did the prosecution introduce race into the case?<\/p>\n They never did.\u00a0 Either, naturally, did the defense.\u00a0 It was a non-factor.<\/p>\n But that’s not sexy enough for the media.\u00a0<\/p>\n