Bloodied But Unjustified
The defense has released photos of George Zimmerman with a smashed and bloody broken nose. Maybe Trayvon Martin hit him. Maybe Zimmerman can claim self-defense.
But here’s the problem. I am a trained martial artist. It’s been drilled into me for 20 years that if I respond with lethal force in excess to a situation, I will be held legally responsible. It will be a crime.
(All this, of course, avoids the issue of whether Christians should kill anybody or even defend themselves… fodder for another day!)
So George Zimmerman, driving a giant 4×4 truck, follows a skinny black kid walking in an unfamiliar neighborhood at night. Both men are scared. Words are exchanged. The kid punches Zimmerman in the nose. A broken nose, especially as bad as it appears in the pictures, is disorienting and hurts like hell. If you already feel threatened, perhaps your instinct is to shoot.
But a punch in the nose is not even vaguely lethal. If someone punched me in the nose and I killed him, I’d have to have a compelling reason. I couldn’t just claim that I felt “threatened.”
I am trained. I have the ability to control my escalation level. George Zimmerman had a gun. Guns don’t have an escalation level.
No Upheld Knife
I’m a Christian. I understand human frailty. I don’t assume terrible things about George Zimmerman. I’m a sinner, too; who knows what I would do in a similar situation? But the “Stand Your Ground” law passed by the Florida legislature not only put a gun in an untrained sinner’s hands, it absolved him of responsibility to use that gun wisely.
The law establishes a right to self-defense as a legal justification for use of force. It stands in contrast to “obligation to retreat” laws that emphasize de-escalation in a dangerous situation. While I agree that de-escalation is both morally and practically preferable to its alternative, it’d be nice to know that if I’m truly threatened, then the law is on my side if I defend myself. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an upheld knife.”
But there was no “upheld knife” here. This law left it to Zimmerman to decide when he was threatened. And that is an open door for tragic human error.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Gun
As a pastor, I don’t often come out on gun issues. I don’t want to curtail anybody’s Second Amendment rights, nor do I want to debate what those Second Amendment rights actually are. What I want to say, simply, is this. Everyone is a sinner and falls short of the glory of God. To put any kind of weapon in the hands of a sinner, and then to assume he or she is justified in using it unless proven otherwise, is to show a serious misunderstanding of human nature and a contempt for God, who calls us to responsibility.
What happened to Trayvon is horrible and unacceptable. By the “upheld knife” standard, Trayvon would have had a better “self-defense” argument than Zimmerman does. Unfortunately, he’ll never get to make it. My heart goes out to his family.
But I feel for Zimmerman, too. What are his choices now? Either he lives with the guilt of killing another human being pointlessly; or he lies to himself that he was justified in doing so, thus damaging his soul. There are other choices, but those are the ones that the law and public opinion leave him with.
It’s one thing for laws to allow people freedom at the risk of harming others. That is an inevitable consequence of liberty. But it’s another thing to make laws that justify people’s bad decisions and say they are actually good. This “Stand Your Ground” law implies violence isn’t the problem–it’s the solution. Is that the society we want to live in?