What No One Will Tell You About The George Zimmerman Case Jul 23rd 2013, 08:43
Trayvon Martin's parents, Sybrina Fulton (2/L) and Tracy Martin (3/L) listen as the Rev. Al Sharpton speaks during a rally to mark the death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
The George Zimmerman trial is over, and a jury declared him not guilty by reason of self-defense. But now the emotional aftermath is presenting a rare opportunity to address a set of facts President Barack Obama would rather not have as part of the conversation.
President Obama said, "There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they are shopping at a department store—and that includes me."
If this is a national problem, given today's technology, can't the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice use cell-phone videos and other camera footage to document and, when possible, bring charges against those who are harassing others because of the color of their skin? As this is a remnant of a very real and painful racially divided past, shouldn't we bring it out in the open and heal the wound as best we can?
The Justice Department has indicated it's investigating to see whether Zimmerman can be prosecuted for hate crimes already. A Justice Department press release says, "Experienced federal prosecutors will determine whether the evidence reveals a prosecutable violation of any of the limited federal criminal civil rights statutes within our jurisdiction, and whether federal prosecution [of Zimmerman] is appropriate in accordance with the Department's policy governing successive federal prosecution following a state trial." So they have time to investigate Zimmerman. What about the national problem President Obama highlighted?
But instead of calling for such a national campaign to end racial profiling, President Obama offered a different solution. He said, "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?"
Actually, The Daily Caller has reported that "Black Floridians have made about a third of the state's total 'Stand Your Ground' claims in homicide cases, a rate nearly double the black percentage of Florida's population. The majority of those claims [55 percent] have been successful, a success rate that exceeds that for Florida whites."
So, as blacks seem to be benefiting from the ability to defend themselves outside their homes, is the president simply practicing political opportunism by using a crisis to push his preferred policies? The president says racial profiling is to blame, but the facts show that most blacks killed today are killed by other blacks (93% of the time). He says we need to reduce the rights of law-abiding citizens to carry firearms even though most of the murders today are taking place in areas where handgun ownership is either banned or severely restricted.
Maybe it's time the president notices that inner-city gun laws aren't being adequately enforced. For example, in 2012 Chicago was the murder capital of the U.S. Incredibly, also in 2012, Chicago ranked dead last when it came to enforcement of federal gun laws. Out of 90 federal jurisdictions in the country, Chicago ranked 90th. David Burnham, co-director of Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, determined that according to case-by-case U.S. Justice Department information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by TRAC, there were 52 prosecutions in Illinois North (Chicago) in 2012, or 5.52 per million in population. By this measure, compared with the 90 federal judicial districts in the U.S., the prosecution rate in Chicago was the lowest in the entire nation even as the city's murder rate was the highest.
Meanwhile, criminals who try to buy guns aren't being prosecuted. According to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), in 2010 of the 6 million Americans who attempted to buy a gun about 76,000 were denied. Of those, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) referred 4,732 cases for prosecution. Of these, just 44 people were prosecuted and 13 punished.
What this means is that people with criminal records in Chicago are not only aware that the chances of being prosecuted for having an illegal handgun are low, but they also know they likely won't be prosecuted if they pay someone who has a clean record (a straw purchaser) to buy a handgun for them. This is the real moral issue that needs to be addressed. Blacks are being killed almost every day in Chicago. To save lives in the inner cities, gun laws need to be enforced.
Next Next, law-abiding citizens need the ability to apply for and obtain permits to carry concealed handguns. Instead of creating a class of victims while not arresting and prosecuting the bad guys enough, how about allowing good citizens to utilize their Second Amendment rights?
This debate has historical context. In the Supreme Court decision McDonald v. Chicago (2010), Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion noted that "after the Civil War, many of the over 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union Army returned to the States of the old Confederacy, where systematic efforts were made to disarm them and other blacks. The laws of some States formally prohibited African Americans from possessing firearms. For example, a Mississippi law provided that 'no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife…."
In fact, Justice Alito wrote: "Throughout the South, armed parties, often consisting of ex-Confederate soldiers serving in the state militias, forcibly took firearms from newly freed slaves. In the first session of the 39th Congress, Senator Wilson told his colleagues: 'In Mississippi rebel State forces, men who were in the rebel armies, are traversing the State, visiting the freedmen, disarming them, perpetrating murders and outrages upon them; and the same things are done in other sections of the country.'"
Congress attempted to fix this problem by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, but Congress passed it again, this time with a veto-proof majority. Section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 guaranteed the "full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens."
In McDonald the Court noted that one of the "core purposes of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and of the Fourteenth Amendment was to redress the grievances" of freedmen who had been stripped of their arms and to "affirm the full and equal right of every citizen to self-defense."
After the Civil War, Congress ultimately found these legislative remedies to be insufficient, so they decided that a constitutional amendment was necessary to provide full protection of rights for blacks. "Today, it is generally accepted that the Fourteenth Amendment was understood to provide a constitutional basis for protecting the rights set out in the Civil Rights Act of 1866," ruled the Court in McDonald.
In fact, when debating the Fourteenth Amendment, Senator Samuel Pomeroy said, "Every man … should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his homestead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete."
The majority opinion in McDonald also mentioned Chicago's murder problem: "[The] number of Chicago homicide victims during the current year equaled the number of American soldiers killed during that same period in Afghanistan and Iraq … 80 percent of the Chicago victims were black…. If, as petitioners believe, their safety and the safety of other law-abiding members of the community would be enhanced by the possession of handguns in the home for self-defense, then the Second Amendment right protects the rights of minorities and other residents of high-crime areas whose needs are not being met by elected public officials."
Understanding this period of history should make any honest person realize how appalling it is that today's inner-city neighborhoods, which often have the highest murder rates, have some of the strictest gun-control laws in the nation. Honest people in those neighborhoods are barred from defending themselves just as Southern blacks once were.
Wherever racial profiling exists it needs to be solved honestly and aggressively. But using racial relations as an excuse to reduce individual rights already has sad history rooted in racism. However someone views the verdict in the Zimmerman case, this tragedy shouldn't be used as an excuse to reduce the constitutional freedoms of law-abiding citizens.
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