Can anyone look at the picture of George Zimmerman entering the courtroom for his bond hearing and not believe that his life lies wasted? Zimmerman may well be the most hated man in America—and that picture seems to show that he knows it—all because he believed a lie. The lie was that a gun would make his life safer, and that he was entitled to use it to that effect.
Trayvon Martin is gone forever; his parents’ lives are devastated. Who can argue that Zimmerman accomplished something good, either for himself or society? The person who can do that is a dangerous fool. Zimmerman may well know that now, but now is too late. Death can’t be undone and neither can the destruction the shooter has wreaked on his own existence.
We might take a lesson from history, but Americans aren’t very good at that. We glamorize the evils of our culture. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral has become a cliché, a tourist attraction, because that’s what we do with the past. However, the reality was far from glamorous. In 1861, a series of events occurred in Tombstone, Arizona that created years of ongoing suffering. As with the Florida shooting, the circumstances involved a proliferation of guns and a defensive free-for-all.
The now-famous Earp brothers tried to disarm a group of stage-robbing cowboys, who openly carried guns into town. Their efforts were met with death threats, followed by the actual gunfight in which three cowboys died, and then assassination attempts and vendettas by both sides for a full year afterward. Some who survived the fight were left to struggle with lifelong wounds.
That’s the scenario that Stand Your Ground laws set up: threats and counter-threats, killings and vengeance. Just like in the Wild West, one man thinks he is justified in shooting another, only to find that he becomes the hunted one. Zimmerman isn’t a hero. No one is thanking him for what he has done. He has apparently received plenty of death threats, and now there is no safe place for him to hide. It’s hard to imagine that he won’t be vilified for the rest of his life. In one instant of misjudgment, he murdered his own future as well as Trayvon Martin’s.
‘Guns don’t kill, people do,’ goes the mantra of the National Rifle Association. Funny, I’d take the odds of going up against an unarmed man over the odds of confronting an armed one any day. Apparently, there are a lot of people in this country who refuse to see the logic of this. Nor can they see that the NRA agenda isn’t about ‘protecting rights,’ or helping people ‘protect’ themselves. It’s about selling guns—about creating outrageous profits, the real American dream.
The NRA has gone a long way toward turning Mexico into the Wild West for the sake of the huge stacks of money that gun sales generate for its corporate sponsors. Last year, Mexico’s President Calderon said, “I accuse the U.S. weapons industry of [responsibility for] the deaths of thousands of people that are occurring in Mexico. It is for profit, for the profits that it makes for the weapons industry.” The same influences are at work in the United States. Gullible fools like George Zimmerman are buying the lie of ‘protection,’ not realizing that the NRA is encouraging them to throw away the quality of their lives for the sake of gun manufacturers’ profits.
Still thinking about supporting Stand Your Ground laws? Take a good look at George Zimmerman’s face. You, too, can ‘Stand Your Ground’—and become one of the walking dead. All courtesy of the greedy liars behind the National Rifle Association.
