By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
It’s been an impressive week for news watchers, with inflammatory speech and action apparently an acceptable new norm here at home. Meanwhile, eyes still turned toward the Olympics in Asia, we find Cossacks wielding horsewhips and pepper spray in Sochi, and Kiev going up in actual flames. The Dark Side is really pulling out the stops to herd us back into our previous sleepy submission — working non-stop at several low-paying jobs, shopping ’til we drop from anxiety over rising costs and issues of survival, and shrugging our shoulders about political maneuvers that we don’t have time or energy to address — but it doesn’t seem to be working. The world is watching like never before, witnessing a kind of emotionally-wrought overkill that seems almost fictional in its scope.
This month’s chapter in the ongoing saga of sanctioned death of young black men in Florida offered a hung jury in the Michael Dunn murder case. Dunn shot numerous rounds — three separate volleys — into a car of teens attempting to flee after he complained of their loud music at a gas station. Seventeen-year old Jordan Davis died in the assault, the gun Dunn accused him of carrying never found. While side-stepping the obvious question of premeditation, Dunn was still found guilty on several counts of second-degree “attempted murder” and will likely die in prison.
Although Stand Your Ground wasn’t specifically mentioned in this case, it was the elephant in the room, tying this kind of armed overreaction with the Zimmerman/Martin case and reminding others of the Colorado case of a “threatened” former policeman shooting a young father for texting his baby-sitter in a movie theatre, putting a round through his wife’s hand on his chest and killing him after he threw popcorn. It should be noted that the Stand Your Ground law works best for white people, with less than one-percent of black citizens finding it a useful plea. One also has to wonder what would have happened in any of these cases if the principals were not carrying lethal weapons.