Mark Greene believes Americans need to rely less on guns and more on situational engagement.
There has been a lot of discussion online about George Zimmerman, the Florida man who is on trail for allegedly shooting and killing unarmed black teenager Trevon Martin. In those online discussions we often hear talk about the need for home defense and maintaining a high level of “situational awareness.” In an article written in 2007 by Stratfor, a subscription-based provider of geopolitical analysis, situational awareness is defined as: “the process of recognizing a threat at an early stage and taking measures to avoid it.”
Situational awareness theory first arose out of air combat training during the Korean War. In air combat, pilots make split second decisions by which they determine and counter a range of variables and threats. Situational awareness is crucial to effective decision making in such circumstances. Since the military first framed the theory, it has been applied to everything from commercial pilot training to professional sports. When trained properly, human beings can dramatically increase their ability to react and respond to events around them. It can be a so-called “hard skill.”
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“Your Last Line of Defense”
With the proliferation of right to carry laws in many states including Florida, handgun training has become big business. And handgun training often includes situational awareness training. A cursory Google search for the phrases such as this brought up from a site which offers the following class for $25:
Personal Safety and Situational Awareness Training:
You are your first and last line of defense!
Expect the unexpected!
Do you know someone who has been robbed, stalked even killed? What if that happened to your family? What if it can be prevented? It can be!
And herein lies the problem. Situational awareness training in combination with gun ownership has become the panacea for creating a sense of security in many American households. It has encouraged people to believe that by suspecting the worst of everyone we meet, we can insure our own safety. But the fact is, this over-emphasis on self defense and situational awareness can lead to the very outcomes it is supposed to protect against.
In the article above, Stratfor notes that “Denial and complacency… are not the only hazardous states of mind. Paranoia and obsessive concern about one’s safety and security can be just as dangerous.” Stratfor goes on to note that “Situational awareness, then, is best practiced at a balanced level referred to as ‘relaxed awareness,’ a state of mind that can be maintained indefinitely without all the stress associated with being on constant alert.”
In essence, if you are on combat patrol in hostile territory, a near-obsessive focus on the expectation of being attacked is probably valid. But if you live in a gated community in Florida, it can be a recipe for overreaction, miscalculation and disaster.
A prolonged elevated focus on tracking potential threats can lead to faulty decision making and bad interpretation of facts or events. Moreover, the tendency will exist to filter out non-threat signals and dramatically reduce their importance, especially when interacting with groups perceived as threatening. Gestures of friendship, offers of communication, moments of connection; all these things are marginalized in deference to the primacy of tracking threat signals, real or otherwise. Meanwhile, no bridges are built. No connections made. And the likelihood of a bad interaction increases.
Situational Engagement
Imagine instead, deciding to mindfully track and encourage subtle gestures of social connection. Situational engagement, as per Dr. Saliha Bava, is the process by which we can choose to track and engage human connectivity. When practicing situational engagement, there are two levels of proactivity. The first level is to track and respond minute gestures of social connection. The second and more advanced level is to initiate those gestures.
Dr. Bava, a couples and family therapist in New York City and an associate professor at Mercy College, believes that the best way to manage our fears is to lean into them through situational engagment. This engagement strategy can be applied to a wide range of personal and professional relationships.
“When we encounter anything that is dark or shadow, anything unfamiliar to us, we seek to push it away or pull ourselves out. That is the fight or flight response. We can instead choose to connect with the unfamiliar. Engagement or leaning in is one of the first steps for connection.” Bava says. “This process of engagement creates a third option. Now instead of just fight or flight, we have flow. This flow comes from being curious and open to the unknown instead of taking predetermined negative expectations into the dialogue.”
Fight or flight keeps us in our fear while engagement or flow helps us see opportunities to connect. Is our fear coming from a real threat or simply from an irrational response to what is unfamiliar to us? This leaning in or engagement is the only way to accurately see past our fears. Engagement is the only way to determine if we are really seeing a tiger. And on an even more transformational level, the tiger may simply be someone else’s fight or flight response. Engagement can create a relational moment and remove the tiger.
Bava’s point is not to blithely seek out tigers. Her point is to engage our fears, and in those moments, discover valuable social connections our fears may be isloating us from. It is about choosing to create the kind of life you want to live. It is about empowerment.
Weaving the Social Fabric
Like situational awareness, situational engagement requires a significant degree of focus and effort. In order to successfully create opportunities for situational engagement, one must be mindful that there are often local cultural gestures that are unfamiliar to us, such as a slight head tilt with no eye contact as a form of initial greeting. In a situation where others’ social nuances are different from our own, our willingness to learn these gestures is what creates a bridging moment. This moment of learning is how we indicate our willingness to enter other cultural spaces in ways that create the possibility for mutual respect.
According to communication theorists and social psychologists, this process of mutual coordination is how we create relationships and move forward to weave a social fabric. It’s more than simply signalling and receiving a message.
In the practice of situational engagement, we seek to focus on the “we” instead of the “me”, and in doing so, we create something new between individuals and their respective cultures. The “me to we” way of thinking comes from Taos Institute founder Ken Gergen’s Constructionist Theories. Gergen believes we are relational beings rather than individual beings. That the way we know we exist, is in relationship to those around us. We are defined by the “we” not the “me”.
Gergen’s lifetime work has been to redefine what he sees as the central fallacy of psychology, which locates understanding of human behaviour as an internal process. Instead, Gergen believes we are located in the relational spaces between ourselves and others.
How we define where we are located, in turn shapes the lives we create. If we locate ourselves internally then security is something we seek to create though steps we take in relative isolation, but if we locate ourselves socially then protection and security is something we create through purposefully expanding our relationship to others. The very survival we seek to insure, is born out of our ever expanding social connectivity.
We all practice situational awareness. Ignorance or denial of potential threats is not an advisable way to live in the world. In fact, it will probably get you killed. If you don’t think so, just close your eyes and step off a curb. But an over emphasis on situational awareness without adequate social connectivity is creating a new set of challenges for American society.
Put simply, we have lost many of our community-building and engagement skills. Skills that were crucial to our survival a hundred years ago. Our public discourses are moving into increasingly binary cultural, political and racial silos. These silos limit opportunities to empathize with our neighbors, our co-workers and any others who might be different than us. This increases the likelihood that when we do make contact across barriers of race, religion or culture, tensions will flare up and potentially trigger dangerous conflicts.
We have all been hurt at one time or another by persons who are not like ourselves. Whether that difference is race, gender, religion or otherwise, it creates a fight or flight response, wherein we continue to see these “others” as the enemy and continue to react negatively. This fight or flight mindset plays directly into the mantra of threat tracking, and can come to permeate all of our interpersonal dynamics.
The moment of courage comes when we make the conscious choice to not let negative events close us off from a lifetime of positive opportunities. Because if we do, we isolate ourselves and weaken our society further.
Courage and the Social Unknown
Situational engagement then is a strategy for purposefully growing community. It is the choice to intentionally track gestures of friendship, offers of communication, and moments of connection, however minute, ESPECIALLY among groups that may not be directly in connection with us by virtue of race, class, gender, religion, politics or culture.
And this requires courage; courage to lean into the questions and the unknown; to engage people and ideas that are different, with the expressed goal of eliminating the isolation and anxiety that can otherwise cause us to put our faith in only in guns. It takes real courage to connect across racial or cultural boundaries but the benefits are both liberating and life expanding.
By engaging opportunities for connection across cultures, we broaden our community and free ourselves from the cultural and racial silos we can become trapped in. When we do that, our threat tracking scales back to a level that represents what Stratfor calls “relaxed awareness.” Moreover, we begin to form the varied and diverse relationships that we need to truly make our communities and ourselves more safe.
Ultimately the question is this. We should take steps to keep our family safe from threats, but what are we creating if we stop there? America is afflicted by a constant low level fight or flight response that is haunting our national culture. And its a lonely, unhealthy way to live life.
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George Zimmerman had a range of choices he could have made that night in Florida. The tragedy that occurred may well have been the result of too great a focus on home protection and situational awareness and too little of a focus on meeting and connecting with people who are not like ourselves. When we live by the mantra of threat tracking, we create a world in which too few connections get made. In which, fear, anger and aggression are the default responses because we don’t actively seek to be situationally engaged with cultures, races or religions outside our own.
There are always some people who might wish to cause harm to us. But if we cede the battle to them, by virtue of making our lives about trying to spot them only, we fail to form the larger and more diverse communities on which healthy societies are based. And without those communities, our nation is in great danger of losing the social cohesion that truly keeps us all safe.
About Mark Greene
Naaaaah! Screw that noise. You’re Americans. Shoot first and ask question later. That’s the way it was done in the old west, so it should work perfectly fine now. To hell with the dead black kids.
I’m just repeating what I’ve read on the Internets from your fellow Americans. Glad they aren’t running around in my city with guns!
The Wet (not American) One
Trayvon Martin was a reasonably smart kid who was flirting big time with the gangsta lifestyle. He had gotten a suspension from school for being in possession of a sack containing a big screw driver and a lot of womens jewelry. It is very unlikely that he had only done that once and then got caught.
Given this background, he must have known what a neighborhood watch guy was, that they were active in his temporary new place (because there were signs everywhere), and that they were never armed (because wanna be burglars care about that). If, as looks really likely, he was in the mood for delivering a good beat-down to a white authority figure, it is easy to see why George Zimmerman was chosen. Situational awareness is taught in every CHL course I know about. Also, that the only thing worse than pulling the trigger is getting killed or maimed yourself. And that the problem with retreating, avoiding, or trying to hide – all of which you should always do in a dicey situation – is that doing that can trigger a predatory/kill response from an aggressive minded criminal who responds to displays of weakness, then you need a weapon or you will get seriously hurt or killed.. GZ was retreating when TM attacked him.
No. Just a plain old, straight up, no. To all of this.
Mark,
You don’t find it a tiny bit ironic that you just wrote a whole piece about “making connections” with people who may be of different “politics or culture” and then you immediately pass up an opportunity to hear out someone who disagrees with you and forge a connection over why they disagree?
I’m asking in all seriousness, because I find this to be the biggest problem I have observed when trying to understand those I disagree with.
I genuinely try to forge connections. I spend time finding out what people who disagree with me think, and why. I’ve done this since college, when I decided to take courses in departments like ethnic studies, despite being an econ major.
What I’ve found, time and time again, is that the very people who preach about “forging connections” are also the least willing to do so. In their minds, forging connections is for *the other guy* because they’re already open minded enough. Believe me, I would give anything to see a bunch of gender studies majors take an econometrics class; but this is never going to happen, to them “greater understanding” is only ever going to mean me trying to understand them, but not the reverse.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your post. I wrote an article about connecting across cultural silos. I did not write an article about George Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence. Yet, Rum skipped what I was writing about and instead posted a lot of stuff about Trayvon Martin that frames him as an aspiring criminal. To me, his position is pretty clear. Rum’s not here to discuss my article. He’s here to do one thing. Attack Trayvon Martin.
For the record, I have already written on this site that I don’t know what happened that night. That law enforcement officials with a lot more savvy than I have will determine what went on.
You write: “You don’t find it a tiny bit ironic that you just wrote a whole piece about “making connections” with people who may be of different “politics or culture” and then you immediately pass up an opportunity to hear out someone who disagrees with you…”
What’s to hear out? Seriously, Mike, tell me what nuanced bridge building dialogue does Rum want to have with me? Or for that matter, when you say people like me are “preaching” what dialogue do you want to have? (…Serious question.)
You go on to say: “What I’ve found, time and time again, is that the very people who preach about “forging connections” are also the least willing to do so. In their minds, forging connections is for *the other guy* because they’re already open minded enough.”
What about Rum’s post shows him being a good candidate for connecting with? Point the part out to me where he, once again, reached out to an inflexible liberal? I mean, really. Please, show me.
Making connections isn’t about being a doormat. Its about looking for signs that someone WANTS to connect. Not seeing that with Rum.
Mark,
To begin with, I strongly suspect that you very well know groups of people who disagree with you (after your piece on Roger Ailes, regular viewers of Fox News come to mind). I want to know what you are doing to try and understand their positions and hear them out. Because looking at your other work, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of that going on, just a lot of identifying people you disagree with, and then calling them out for it.
That’s the same thing that happened here with respect to Rum’s comment.
Rum clearly wants to have a dialogue of some kind. He posted an entire paragraph which included references to facts from which he was drawing his conclusions.
Important questions you could ask him might include why any “flirtation with gangsta lifestyle” should even matter within the frame work of discussing situational awareness, or if burglary even requires an armed response in the first place.
Instead you just called him out as wrong…again.
It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of connecting going on from your end.
Look Mike. I’m happy to talk about your or my world view. But Rum wants to tell me what Martin’s world view was. Do you see the difference? I do.
What. The. Hell. Dude. Are you from Mars?
It sure looks to me that not one responder in this blighted little corner of the blogosphere has any remainlynstrenthnto
++A
Yes, my own lack of remainlynstrenthnto++A has caused me many a sleepless night.
Well, here’s a case where people did not rely on guns. Just, you know, good old nec Hercules contra plures.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/matthew-owens-beating-hate-crime-trayvon-martin-alabama_n_1452096.html
In the early days of the Duke Fake Rape Case, a vast amount of comment was generated about the topics of race, class, sexual power, campus culture and so on – all predicated 100% on the notion that some kind of rape had occurred. IMHO, those are worthwhile things to talk about, just not in the context of deciding the fate of some young men who in real life were guilty of nothing except perhaps being too trusting of authority.
The real lesson, imho, from the Duke cases is that there are human predators (individuals and mobs) out there who cannot be stopped by persuasion after they have chosen their prey..
The analogies between the Duke case and this one are multiple; right down to the fate of the errant prosecutors. Look at the Alan Dershowitz interview from a few days ago where he says bluntly that they better lawyer up and worry about jail time for themselves if they continue the case without any evidence. Which they have admitted they do not have.
Honestly, who are these paranoid freaks who can’t leave their homes without strapping on a gun?
And how can a man with this mentality consider himself manly, courageous, adult even?
Seems terribly cowardly and insecure to me to have to lock and load just to leave for work in the morning. If that’s your mindset, move to Wyoming or someplace where there are few people, take a few deep breaths when you get there, and relax. You need the rest. Society is clearly too taxing for your intense manly courage to handle on a daily basis.
In a case I linked a white man was beaten up almost to death by 20 blacks. A gun would really help him out since, you know, he was attacked by a mob in his own house. Would you call him insecure ? The truth is, a weapon, especially a firearm, is often the only and last line of defense of most people; I mean- how can you defend yourself with your own fists against 20-1 ?
Did you even read the article you posted a link to? The man who got beaten up is described below:
“The mayor of Mobile, Ala. said Tuesday that the brutal beating of Matthew Owens was not a hate crime, as new details emerge implicating the victim as the instigator.
About 20 African American adults beat Owens into critical condition on Saturday night after an argument between the victim and some kids at a local basketball court, witnesses said.
One person claimed that Owens spewed racial slurs at the group and even pulled out two knives, according to WPMI.
“It was like kitchen knives,” witness David Dinkins told the station. “They were long.”
Another witness, Lemicka Whisenhunt, quoted Owens as saying “he’s going to lynch all the black kids, he hates black n—ers, he hates that we moved on this street.
Owens reportedly has a long rap sheet in the area, the station reported. He’s been booked on charges of assault, domestic violence, harassment and public intoxication in the past.”
This guy sounds like he has zero situational awareness. But if he’s the guy who’s story you’re going with, well, good luck getting sympathy for him. And your facts seem a little strange. Beaten at his own house? What, does he live at the basketball court? Do facts matter at all here?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/matthew-owens-beating-hate-crime-trayvon-martin-alabama_n_1452096.html
How is that not a hate-crime?
You mean, the people who nearly killed him said he had two knives right ? And that he threatened their kids (no one was hurt or anything) so instead of calling the Police they ganged up and did their best to kill that guy ? How is that not a lynching and a hate crime ?
So… a black mob gangs up on a guy.
Black mayor says it was not a hate crime.
Reverse races and guess what liberals would say.
So, what you’re saying is the following. If a black man approached a bunch of white people and their kids and started yelling, “I hate your white kids and I want to kill them,” and got beat up for his trouble, that would be a hate crime? I seriously doubt it.
By the way, you guys REALLY REALLY REALLY need to write an article for the Good Men Project. Cause you want very badly to talk about the events around Trayvon Martin’s death. More than you want to talk about what I wrote about.
No.
A bunch of kids accuse a man of threatening him and then a mob comes to his house and nearly kills him. Sounds nice ?
I think it’s important to compare apples to apples. “got beat up” doesn’t really describe getting beaten almost to death by 20 people.
Re: Trayvons mind set.
Trayvon was an eager user of social media. The PR firm hired by his family managed to delete his entire Facebook presence but 100s of his twitters were found, along with realistic recent pictures. Not the one all over the newspapers that was taken when he was about 12. Anyone genuinely curious can find them online and form ones own conclusions. A good place to start is The Last Refuge blog.
I hate to speak ill of anyones dead son. But it is pretty clear that TM was seriously out of control and primed to get into real, life ending trouble. Or do you think that choosing the nym “No Limit Nigga”, having lots of tats, and gold teeth are nothing to worry about? At 17.
I really do not know what the answer is. I scared myself when I was 17 and my son scared me when he was that age. But we both had fathers that would have stomped hard on running loose on the streets right after getting a 2 week suspension from school; following 2 previous suspensions. His parents would rather that no one focus on that.
To me, the grimmest part of this whole story has been the number of commenters all over the web who have claimed that, according to how they see it, GZ following Trayvon and showing suspicion was a behavior that justified a physical, possibly lethal, response by Trayvon and that by so doing TM was just standing his ground and acting the way they would expect someone to react.
Wow.
That sold another million Glocks.
Not for nothin dude but if someone follows me down a dark alley at night and runs up on me, I feel completely justified kicking the crap out of them. Lesson: don’t run up on people in dark alleys.
Jimmy
No one has suggested that pursuing and trying to corner a stranger at night is a good idea. However, the only reason that you or anyone else thinks that is what happened in this case is because of the efforts of the PR firm hired by the Crump law firm hired by the Martin family. Not even the special prosecutor handling the case even alleges it in the charging affaidavit. Actually listening to the entire 911 tape produces the opposite impression.
Dude, you have been lied to by some very professional liars.
This story is developing hour by hour. The instigators of this hoax are being tracked down as we speak. There will be dis-barments of lawyers and Zimmerman will be own NBC and a lot else.
The morals to take from this event should be drawn from what really happened; not what the Al Sharptons of the world try to sell.
No, actually the tragedy is this. That there are a lot of people who are automatically ready to assume that a black kid is a violent criminal wannabe. Your narrative implies that TM attacked GZ. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Did he do so in a way that qualifies as “possibly lethal”? Without a weapon? You’re stretching your argument as far as you need to in order to achieve your goal. You’re talking like a defense lawyer for GZ. And that’s happening all over the net.
I would appreciate it if you would admit that you’re making a case AS YOU SEE IT. Not speaking the truth from the mouth of god.
And as I stated above, I REALLY REALLY REALLY think you should write an article about what you think happened that night. Because that is what you want to talk about. Meanwhile, I’d rather talk about what I spent half a day writing. Which is that we all are living in little cultural silos that make it IMPOSSIBLE not to be biased against each other. Me included.
Mark
There is indeed an explosion of support for GZ. Maybe you have watched the Fox News interview with Alan Dershowitz. Professor Deshowitz was nearly unable to control himself. He was very, very angry at being having been lied to so thoroughly by the legacy media and the Florida Special Prosecutors. He was saying they should worry about going to jail themselves. He is generally quite liberal.
Of course we live in bubbles and make too many snap judgements about people who are obviously from a different bubble. I think that is always worthwhile to talk about. But GZ is looking at spending the rest of his life behind bars if the mob formed by Al Sharpton et al gets its way.
I was falsely accused of something bad once. I was triumphantly exonerated. However, I came out of it with a re-wired nervous system and a hyper-vigilant nose for prosecutorial bullshit and it started twitching violently around March 6th in regard to this case. That was the day the PR firm got to work. They are now saying, “We had no idea this would happen” in regard to the nationwide firestorm.
FWIW, pounding someones head on concrete is a very efficient way to kill them or leaving them on life support. This can happen without much visible on the outside. See it all the time in the ER where I work.
Hey Rum,
I appreciate your skepticism regarding prosecutors and the legal system. I get that. And I appreciate how you have hung in here and made me hear you without getting personal. So, thanks for that.
I want to be clear that I’m really not trying to make a case one way or another about these two people. Why? Because its the perfect case to drive people into binary polar opposite positions and create more divisions. I’m sick of these goddamn endless divisions. Really sick of them. And although a lot of folks are primed and ready to shoot people or pound their heads on the pavement, we have to take a longer view and figure out how to diffuse that shit.
I have seen bridges built between people of diverse cultures. With my own two eyes.
I’m telling you it can be done.
If I were to condense and re-phrase your article as if it were unconnected to this present case, I would do it this way:
“Profilling”, while necessary for basic street level safety, is inherently offensive and hurtful to everyone who is on the receiving end, whether they merit suspicion or not. This always frays the social fabric/social trust that we inevitably depend on for a large part of our safety. The solution, or at any rate the best option, is to deliberately learn more about the real life people we are likely to have to react to in scary situations and for them to get to know more about us. That would be a win-win. We would offend less often and deploy the necessary avoidance behavior more accurately when the time came to do that.
I could not agree more. It is a lot like community policing or even networking at the office.
Problem is, most people are not naturally very good at that sort of thing and rarely feel like they have the time, if they have a career and a commute.
Regarding Texas, anyone familiar with the deep history of the place knows that ethnic conflicts were grim and blood-stained and overt right up to the late 19th century in many regions. And there was never much in the way of legitmate law and order on the frontier for a long, long time. There was sometimes order without the law part. Some of the values are, a little bit still, from a more barbaric time. The real-life author of “Conan the Barbarian” lived in a small town in Texas.
A “Peacemaker” was a type of revolver.
When C. Whitman started shooting people from the Tower in Austin, it was merely minutes before returning fire from CIVILIANS was so accurate and intense that he could no longer hit his targets.
It is a place like many others; only more so.
This is why I study martial arts. Guns may be effective but they are too deadly. And they can be taken away from you.
Yeah, the can be taken away from you is a real concern. It happens to be a common way for cops to die in the line of duty.
The way I was trained, civilian self defense with a firearm is integrally built in with the notion of always de-escalate, always retreat, hide if you can, let them have all your furniture, and only when the bad guys have pursued you and/or cornered you do you send rounds down range. It is the soundest approach morally and legally. And this is easy to understand and to teach.
Most street crimes can be foreseen if you keep your head up. If a strong guy jumps you when you are not looking you are probably going to get seriously hurt if he wants to hurt you, carrying or not. Even if you are in LE. So keep your head up.
This summer, or some summer, a gang of youths are going to be out flash mobbing and trap someone and get carried away and stomp him her to death right on youtube. Or that person empties a clip into them.
Either way, that will be Very Hard to Un-See.
Here’s the main point I disagree with your article:
If you don’t know what happened with Mr. Martin and Mr. Zimmerman (who is claiming self-defense) than using Mr. Zimmerman to illustrate your point in a way in which you presume a whole boatload of crap about him ( you don’t know what Zimmerman was trying to do, you don’t know the circumstances under which he had the physical altercation with Martin, and you don’t know who attacked first) is obnoxious and prejudicial.
I wrote a post on the Duke Rape Case for this site:
http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/duke-lacrosse-metanarratives-the-telephone-effect-and-the-falsely-accused/
I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t write another one like that about this case, because even though the “tone” of the articles on this site is decent, there’s still lots of misinformation floating around about it on the various posts here, particularly the earlier ones, and yet I’ve yet to see anyone retract a single darn inaccuracy.
Clarence, we would love to have you write another post like your previous one. Thanks for thinking of it.
Lisa:
I will admit to being rather flattered that you even noticed. I’ll think about it. Please understand the process of getting the links together for the Duke post was almost two days. It’s much easier to state that so-and-so did such and such, relying on no proof other than prejudice and supposition. It’s much harder to disprove. The amount of misinformation (stuff that can already be disproved or the media has had to retract) out there about the Zimmerman case is already astounding, and that’s without even having the autopsy or other forensics available yet.
Hi Clarence,
I agree that it seems like it would be impossible to state anything as fact at this point — other than that Trayvon was shot and killed and Zimmerman owned the gun that killed him.
But if you would like to write a post on how you see the situation and how we collectively got to where we are now with the “dueling narratives” we will publish it.
Lisa:
What I could do and would be safest would be to simply debunk a few of the lies and errors that were and are commonly put out about this case. If I start examining the “competing narratives” at this point, I’d be adding some illumination but only at the cost of some heat and I really want to be fair to both the living and deceased in this case, so don’t think that would be appropriate. I’m not a big fan of the Martin families lawyers or the PR firm they have hired to push their particular narrative in this case, though they did do one useful thing in making sure the case got investigated even more thoroughly, even if I think the “racial” angle has been deliberately overplayed in this case. I suppose if I do write I’ll state my own position with a caveat that it could change as more facts come in. Right now I’m leaning on Zimmerman being acquitted on 2nd degree homicide and, unless the autopsy contains some shocker, I don’t think a charge of more than negligent manslaughter was fair. In short, this trial is already politicized with the lead prosecutor in the case probably acting more to prevent riots than anything else. Who knows where this will go?
Heh.
I should add there’s still a possibility this case will not go to trial as it could be dismissed at the upcoming hearing if they convince the Judge of “Stand Your Ground”, or there could be a plea bargain.
See how easy this is? People are already in this thread (including me in a moment of sloppiness) assuming there already is or will be a trial. There might not be.
Clarence, that sounds very reasonable. thanks.
Ok, I’ll write the post.
You’ve certainly given me enough attention! lol
I’ll aim for Tuesday or Wednsday if that’s good for you.
Hey Clarence,
Just for the record, I’m speaking about a group of people I grew up with as a native Texan. I am speaking about that group here, IE gun rights supporters who live from a situational awareness, home defense perspective. If you have evidence that George Zimmerman is not thinking in those general ways, please let me know.
Mr. Greene:
“George Zimmerman had a range of choices…”
You don’t know that, at least insofar as the actual fight was concerned because you don’t know what situation he was facing, so all you have is speculation.
Of course you also don’t know what might have caused George Zimmerman to be suspicious in the first place, and without knowing that you can’t even fairly judge his decision making process.
It’s not George Zimmerman’s job to prove his innocence and it’s not my job to prove his state of mind. This post has some good points, but you chose to illustrate those choices using a man involved in an on-going legal case where all the evidence hasn’t even came out. You did so because you have convicted him in your mind based on your own generalizations about gun owners in Texas. Those generalizations are on you to defend, not me to defeat, and really, they probably have nothing to do with Mr Zimmerman who is a Floridian and whose culture and experience concerning guns is almost certainly different in some ways, possibly very important ones.
In order to judge a man’s choices so as to use him as an example, esp when it comes to issues involving life and death it’s rather important to know the situation he faced and the information he had.
Insofar as the fight was concerned. Yes. But that night? Zimmerman had many many choices. Starting with whether to arm himself and patrol.
As for my article, I said all of five sentences about Zimmerman. Your choice to ignore the thrust of my article and make this about Zimmerman is just that. Your choice. Zimmerman is an example of choices going on all over this country. He’s fair game to start a bigger discussion. I don’t accept your premise that I don’t have that right.
Mr. Greene:
I’ll be nice.
No, he wasn’t on patrol that night according to the city of Sanford. And no, you don’t know if he didn’t store the gun in his truck, rather than deliberately take it from his home and store it on his person, but if I wanted to be unfair I could probably see you imagining him strapping on holster and putting on a cowboy hat.
But you are right. He could have made different choices. So could Mr. Martin. If you believe in free will, you pretty much have to give them the ability to make different choices.
Alas, at this point we don’t even know what those choices were, nor do I see what George Zimmerman necessarily has to do with your thesis. As I said, in order to tie him in you need to know the situation, information, and motivations he had that night and I really don’t think you can know those things at this point in time.
And maybe I wouldn’t have even said anything if this guy was not a defendant in a criminal trial. After all, had you picked another example of a person to use in your post (let’s say as an example Winston Churchill) and that person turned out not to be a good match for whatever reason, it’s unlikely I would have cared. But this guy is involved in a criminal case , and I viewed your remarks as prejudicial.
Thanks for meeting me halfway, Clarence.
I want to be clear that my view isn’t that GZ is guilty of murder. George Zimmerman is part of my thesis because he does something MOST of us don’t do. He arms himself on the street. He loads a chamber and confronts someone he doesn’t know based on his observation of that person and the assumptions he came to based on that observation. And he didn’t just call the cops. He got out of his car and confronted someone. At the most basic level, that makes him part of my thesis. No choice he made beyond that is known to me.
My view is that if half the population of this country goes out expecting to need a gun on the street, they will view the population on the street through a very specific lens. THAT LENS is prejudicial. THAT LENS is what I want to talk about. And THAT LENS isn’t just from the side of GZ or the home defense crowd. People of all races and cultures are always at risk of adopting a narrow prejudicial lens, unless they actively seek to do otherwise.
I think your role in making sure that GZ or anyone else is treated fairly is admirable. But my role in asking how we get to this point is also fair. Zimmerman has a LOT of powerful people on his side. These people are doing all they can to prove the shooting is a clean one. Great, then we have clean shootings. Is that as far as we’re planning to get as a species. Clean shootings?
Mark
I appreciate what you are trying to do. FWIW, I know a lot about Texas.
But there is a problem here that is exactly the problem with so many of the “conversations” that so many wanted to have around race, class, etc. during the critical phase of the Duke fake rape case – If no rape of any kind had occurred, there would not have been any reason to have them; therefore, calling for such conversation presumed on some level the guilt of those 3 guys. And all this was being put on in full view of the jury pool but ,more importantly, it was put on in front of a corrupt and opportunistic DA who was calculating his chances with that jury pool.
See the problem?
Lots of DAs are corrupt and opportunistic.
The pressure created by the clamor in this case brought about charges when there is no legal basis for sustaining them. The prosecutors have admitted as much. And they have also admitted, under oath, that they are not really doing any investigation. Just like M. Nifong who never interviewed “his victim” for like 8 months or never wanted to formally check out anything else of substance. They need to be able to plead ignorance for what they see coming next- the bar complaints and the law suits. Plus, in NC and Florida they must turn over everything to the defense and they know that everything they nail down will hurt them and help the defense. Or do you have a better explanation? A prosecutor admitted under oath that they have not even looked at the Medical records in this case and have obtained no evidence regarding whose voice is screaming on the 911 tape. Because they cannot afford to officially know about it. They would never have willingly gone down that road if not for an ill-informed mob.
Rum,
I get what your saying here, but I’m not talking about race and class. The issue isn’t injustice for me. I think I know which “conversations” you are talking about. You are talking about people framing the Duke Rape Case as proof of injustice against poor folks. I get that.
(Jesus H. Christ, now you have me talking about THE case that proves your point about guys like Al Sharpton. Terrific. You see how this process works?)
I am saying that we as Americans are too ready to view things through a lens that is prejudicial in all cases and across all cultures. If we don’t make a conscious effort to connect across all these cultural barriers and learn that things are not so simple as good guys and bad guys, the only lens we’ll have left is arming ourselves. And I guarantee that choice, in isolation, is a recipe for disaster.
It is always tricky to dialogue about the meaning of an event when there is no agreement regarding what transpired. I do not think GZ did anything to “confront” TM. From the 911 tape (the unedited version which is online) and a look at the map of the complex GZ was at most trying to keep TM in sight from a distance. It would have been complete madness for him to have done more than that. TM was 5-6 inches taller and obviously much more athletic. Who goes looking for an ass-kicking? Concealed carry courses everywhere could not be more clear about the legal hazards of instigating anything while carrying. Statistically, the history of the incidence of that actually happening in real life could be rounded off to zero. And GZ knew the cops were minutes away, although TM did not.
The word “confronted” was used in the charging documents because it has no meaning in criminal law and so it cannot be defended against yet manages to suggest something evil that serves a PR purpose. I mean, following someone is to confront them if you want to put it that way. Or not. Was GZ closing in and attempting to confine TM? From the map, that is impossible.
The prosecutor admitted under oath that they have no evidence that GZ was the instigator and that subsumes the alleged phone friends story.
This whole thing is a man-bites-dog news story sourced from a PR firm.
This is very true. I can say this from personal experience. While I lived in public housing I was robbed 6 times in nine months. I am also an abused spouce. In spite of this I hit the road each day wondering what new friend I will meet. Oh, I’m not being, irrational. I’ll soon be getting a gun and concealed carry because of needing it between work and my ride.
But just because of having to work in a dangerous place doesn’t mean that I have to see danger all of the time. I usually drive old stuff and ocassional they breakdown. So here I am a white guy standing ofn the side of the road. Nice Benz roll by and never stop. But, an old black man gets her going again.
If GZ had been a well trained cop off duty instead of an insurance investigator who was driving to Target that night it is hard to see how this would have come out differently. He would have been carrying concealed, he would have profiled TM, called in about his whereabouts and activities, and he would have gotten out of his vehicle to keep him in sight while awaiting the uniforms. After being knocked onto the sidewalk by someone 5 inches taller than him and having his head repeatedly bounced off the concrete he would have remembered from his training that head-on-concrete impacts can easily be instantly dis-abling or fatal and that means its time shoot instantly, by practiced reflex, for their center of body mass.
Zimmerman is alive to tell a tale that Martin is not in a position to contradict, and he has every reason to lie about what happened. He may well have convinced himself of those lies are true. Since we are all the heros/heroines of our own little soap operas, there is a tremendous psychological pressure to recast the narratives of our lives to ensure that we remain heroic. Combined with firearms and shoddy training, as Mark argues, the results can be tragic. Situational engagement sounds promising not only as a means of building bridges between communities, but also as a means of teaching people to distinguish between being afraid and being threatened. Much as I appreciate you giving me carte blanche to shoot just about everyone, after all I’m tinier than almost everybody, I think that I’ll pass on that privilege.
Hey Rum,
First, let me say how much I appreciate your non combative tone. I am also fast becoming an admirer of your gift for making your case.
That being said, I must also say you’re a real test of all my binary debate triggers. LOL! One sign of a binary debate is that parties repeat the same points over and over again as if the facts are self evident. You are remarkably smooth in the way you pose seemingly open minded questions based on “facts” that you have already admitted remain impossible to know for sure.
But what most interests me is the way you choose not to address certain parts of the dialogue here. (Another sign of a binary dialogue.)
So, if you don’t mind, I’ll repeat this. Why don’t you write an article for the Good Men Project on the events of that night that you really seem to want discuss on my thread here (which, by the way, was never intended to discuss those specific moment by moment events). LOL2
The Good Men Project would welcome the article. But I really feel like your not respecting the thrust of my article here by returning over and over to conjecture about the specific events of the killing. So, I would ask that you consider writing a full article. Cause you’ve pretty much written it here, already.
Someday, maybe I will submit something to this site. If I were a good man…
But the m.f. iing truth is that I hate this whole subject. When MY SON was 17 he got into an equally stupid situation involving guns and mindless testosterone aggression but he somehow survived unscathed. Trayvon did not. Trayvon is dead,
I cannot find much there to rejoice in.
Back in the early 80s I kept a yatch on the Gulf coast. A lot of VietNamese refugees had just moved in. They were shrimpers by trade and by and by they built some boats and went out shrimping. They did not always follow the customary rules of bay shrimping. And a lot of them were ex ARVN and/or Viet Con; both, heavily equipped with American weaponry.
One day a red-neck shrimper lost his temper on a VN guy half his size because he was breaking the custumary rules of skrimping and proceeded to swing a tire tool at his head.The VN guy pulled out a 1911 M1A1 .45 ACP Pistol and shot him promptly dead. The guy had a wife and several kids. It was not a pretty picture.
But this is Texas so of course the VN guy was acquitted. And the judge spoke straight words to the court-room.
He said, Don’t go swinging a tire iron at another persons head!” “Just don’t do it.”
Court dismissed!!!
Powerful stuff, Rum. Glad your son didn’t get caught in the crossfire.