[Today’s run: 15 miles]
I have been following some of the George Zimmerman trial in Florida online. I was trying to find a website that gave a map of the housing development where Zimmerman and Treyvon Martin had their altercation and found this one.
I don’t have any special insight into what happened. But I do think this map has some problems. On a dark, rainy night we have these two guys traversing 100 feet in about 10 seconds. That is some pretty quick running for someone who wasn’t particularly in shape. I could be wrong, it just seems like a stretch to me.
2 replies on “Running trial”
That was interesting – such a small area. With linear streets, a few cameras permanently posted would have been good for neighborhood crime watching. I hadn’t been paying attention to the trial but heard about the verdict and read this morning about Oakland dntn being vandalized a bit last night (owing to rowdy folks thinking a garbage can through a window effects progressive change?). In Oakland we have people getting shot all the time (the city has “shot-spotter” system to listen and triangulate location in real time) but the related criminal trials do not make the news here, certainly not nationwide. Maybe that’s because it is generally black-on-black. If bystanders are shot in the crossfire then it _may_ make the news locally – then forgotten.
Yes, I don’t think that design of having a sidewalk down the middle of the
backyard space is really so good security-wise.
I am generally a pro-gun-rights kind of guy, at least in theory. The
gang/criminal shooters will have the guns either way. The issue is whether or
not it will increase the number of people involved in the cumulative shoot-out
activity rate.
But the general meaning of having more guns in more hands is that
you have to more-or-less assume everyone could pull out their pistol
and stop aggression. That’s the point of having more guns out there,
but also means more people get shot in circumstances which might have
previously been low-level crimes.
We had a story in the paper from Jackson about a guy shooting someone who
was breaking into his car. Killed the guy, 20 years old. They think
he may have been on a bit if a spree breaking into cars. But the MS
law says your car is part of your defensible space, so if someone
breaks into your car in the driveway you can plug him. And the homeowner
did it and was not held to any other standard. Before, it
would have just been “boo-hoo, call your insurance”, etc.
With the Zimmerman case, I think the guy probably was in the clear doing
what he did. But also I think Martin was poorly served by whoever told
him that going MMA on a stranger was an OK thing to do.
Another angle of it is that felons can’t have guns. So there is a bit
of bias against the folks in society who tend to trip into a felony
at one time or another, big or small. Seems like they could
put a time limit on previous felonies when it comes to some of these
things. Smoking weed in 1973 shouldn’t carry that kind of weight, IMHO