The defensive turn

One of the things I try to do in my sociology courses is disrupt students’ normal way of looking at the world to show them that things are often not as simple as they seem. From this perspective, one of the most interesting things about the Zimmerman trial to me was his claim that he was defending himself after he actively pursued Trayvon Martin. As President Obama noted in his recent speech on the case, the idea of Stand Your Ground laws are complicated by the difficulty of telling who is on the offensive and who is on the defensive. Obama stated:

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? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

While my fighting experience is limited to being punched twice in the face (on separate occasions), it seems that in most fights both parties are on both offense and defense. In this case, the fight between Martin and Zimmerman could have easily started because Martin felt threatened by the man who followed him first in his truck and then on foot. In the event that somebody is pursuing you, defending yourself seems like a reasonable course of action. As soon as the fight started, though, Martin’s defense would be perceived by Zimmerman as offense and Zimmerman may have felt that he was defending himself. The cliche that the best defense is a good offense is based on the complicated interplay in situations like this.

The idea that fights like this are either/or affairs where one person is attacking and the other may be “standing his ground” could use a good dose of disruption. Situations like these are the perfect time to commit sociology for the greater good.

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South Park on standing your ground

In 2005, Florida passed the “Stand Your Ground” law that George Zimmerman and his defense team used to justify the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, which ended yesterday with an acquittal. The available evidence suggests that these laws may lead to more deaths and that the results are racially biased, since white-on-black homicides are considered to be “justified” over 350% more often than white-on-white homicides in states with Stand Your Ground laws, as seen in this table from PBS:

In 1997, the third episode of South Park was unfortunately prescient  in how the Zimmerman trial ended up. A clip of the relevant portion of the episode can be seen here. In the clip, Stan Marsh’s uncle Jimbo takes the boys hunting, explaining the technicality that allows him to shoot anything he wants:

“You see, boys, the Democrats have passed a lot of laws trying to stop us from hunting… they say we can’t shoot certain animals anymore, unless they’re posing an immediate threat. Therefore, before we shoot something, we have to say, ‘It’s coming right for us!'”

This is, essentially, George Zimmerman’s entire defense. Despite the fact that he was told not to pursue Martin and despite the fact that he did so and then shot and killed the unarmed teenager, because there were no witnesses who could contradict Zimmerman’s argument that he felt that his life was in danger it was impossible for the jury to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman’s version of events did not occur. It appears that the evidence in this case was applied in compliance with the law, but the graph above (and the case of Marissa Alexander, who was not allowed to claim that she was “standing her ground” because she went back into a house where her attacker was in order to get her car keys and ended up being sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing warning shots that did no harm to anybody) shows that these laws are not applied equally across racial lines and need to be changed.

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