The State of Florida vs George Zimmerman: The Trial

the feds just released data showing that in the two years 09-10 22,000 people were homocided by gun but 38,000 took advantage of the availability of guns to off themselves.

when Obama stated he could had been that young hoodlum 35 years ago I went into shock...

At the heart of this maelstrom — in which the thorny issues of race and justice have surfaced as themes — is a boy who dreamed of becoming a pilot and liked to work with his hands.

After taking an airplane ride two years ago, Trayvon decided he wanted to learn to fly, his uncle Ronald Fulton said. The teen attended a Miami aviation school part time and was studying to be an engineer, a path to realizing his ambition, Fulton said.

Math was Trayvon's favorite subject.

He liked to tinker, and he was good with his hands. He once took apart and repaired a broken scooter, Fulton said, and he liked to construct model cars and airplanes and draw pictures of things he wanted to build.

"He was extremely creative," said Michelle Kypriss, Trayvon's English teacher at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in Miami. "He just loved building things. He really was intrigued by how things worked."

She described Trayvon, a junior, as an A and B student who majored in cheerfulness.

His uncle said Trayvon was still a typical kid who loved sports, music and was just feeling the first flush of youth. "He was trying to start driving. He was just finding out about girls."

Trayvon was close to his 21-year-old brother Jahvaris, also of Miami, and assisted his uncle, a quadriplegic, on outings to University of Miami basketball games.

"He used to help me," Fulton said, voice breaking.

Trayvon — who was known as "Tray" or "Slimm" — played youth football during his early teens and helped his father coach Little League baseball, said Fulton, whose sister, Sybrina Fulton, is Trayvon's mother...

"Trayvon was not a violent or dangerous child. He was not known for misbehaving," the teacher said...

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-17/news/os-trayvon-martin-shooting-tension-20120317_1_shooting-death-english-teacher-uncle

So 38,000 would have been killed if they hadn't used their guns. Could you give a link to those statistics, please?

38,000 took advantage of the availability of guns to off themselves. the benifits of having guns around clearly trumps the costs...

there seem no reason to assume that the availability of guns or lack of guns are an important factor in suicide rates.

So, suicide tops homicide by nearly two to one in the gun-death business. What the heck is going on?

Since the NRA has steadfastly stood against learning anything systematic about this well-documented phenomenon, we don’t really know what’s happening and why. But I will venture a guess or two.

Guns make death easy. That is, it’s not technically hard to pull a trigger. A law abiding citizen in despair chooses not to kill the object of his anger (the wife run off, the humiliating plant manager, the rival for the girl’s affection, the gods themselves for ruining the harvest) and instead turns his anger inward. What means does he have? Poisoning (horrible, painful), vehicle into tree or off cliff (no guarantee of results), knife in the belly (that’s for Samurai), overdose (maybe, but, again, no guarantee), jump off a high place (takes a lot of nerve), suffocation (on yourself? really?), and gunshot.

Gunshot to the head is nearly foolproof, with in-the-mouth the method of choice. I’ll wager that most of these self-inflicted gun deaths are done with a handgun, which is easier to wield. However, for those with access to only a rifle, there’s always removing your shoes, placing the stock on the floor, leaning over the barrel, and working the trigger with your toes.

It’s just one quick moment of decisiveness, and you’re done.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2013/01/22/who-knew-the-leading-cause-of-gun-death-is-suicide/

Those who oppose the use of firearms for self-defense have for fourteen years quoted a study by Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay published in the June 12, 1986 issue of New England Journal of Medicine (v. 314, n. 24, p. 1557-60) which concluded that a firearm in the home is "43 times more likely" to be used to kill a member of the household than to kill a criminal intruder. This "statistic" is used regularly by anti self-protection groups which surely know better, and was even published recently without question in a letter to the Ann Arbor News. Representative Liz Brater cited this "43 times" number in a House committee hearing just a year ago. Thus the original study and its conclusion deserve careful analysis. If nothing else, the repeated use of this "statistic" demonstrates how a grossly inaccurate statement can become a "truth" with sufficient repetition by the compliant and non-critical media.

The "43 times" claim was based upon a small-scale study of firearms deaths in King County, Washington (Seattle and Bellevue) covering the period 1978-83. The authors state,

"Mortality studies such as ours do not include cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm. Cases in which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house known to be armed are also not identified…A complete determination of firearm risks versus benefits would require that these figures be known."

Having said this, these authors proceed anyway to exclude those same instances where a potential criminal was not killed but was thwarted.

How many successful self-defense events do not result in death of the criminal? An analysis by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, v. 86 n.1 [Fall 1995]) of successful defensive uses of firearms against criminal attack concluded that the criminal is killed in only one case in approximately every one thousand attacks. If this same ratio is applied to defensive uses in the home, then Kellermann's "43 times" is off by a factor of a thousand and should be at least as small as 0.043, not 43. Any evaluation of the effectiveness of firearms as defense against criminal assault should incorporate every event where a crime is either thwarted or mitigated; thus Kellermann's conclusion omits 999 non-lethal favorable outcomes from criminal attack and counts only the one event in which the criminal is killed. With woeful disregard for this vital point, recognized by these authors but then ignored, they conclude,

"The advisability of keeping firearms in the home for protection must be questioned."

In making this statement the authors have demonstrated an inexcusable non-scientific bias against the effectiveness of firearms ownership for self defense. This is junk science at its worst.

This vital flaw in Kellermann and Reay's paper was demonstrated clearly just six months later, on Dec. 4, 1986 by David Stolinsky and G. Tim Hagen in the same journal (v. 315 n. 23, p. 1483-84), yet these letters have been ignored for fourteen years in favor of the grossly exaggerated figure of the original article. The continual use of the "43 times" figure by groups opposed to the defensive use of firearms suggests the appalling weakness of their argument.

But there's more. Included in the "43 times" of Kellermann are 37 suicides, some 86 percent of the alleged total, which have nothing to do with either crime or defensive uses of firearms. Even Kellermann and Reay say clearly

"…[that] the precise nature of the relation between gun availability and suicide is unclear."

Yet they proceed anyway to include suicides, which comprise the vast majority of the deaths in this study, in their calculations. Omitting suicides further reduces the "43 times" number from 0.043 to 0.006.

"Reverse causation" is a significant factor that does not lend itself to quantitative evaluation, although it surely accounts for a substantial number of additional homicides in the home. A person, such as a drug dealer, who is in fear for his life, will be more likely to have a firearm in his home than will an ordinary person. Put another way, if a person fears death he might arm himself and at the same time be at greater risk of being murdered. Thus Kellermann's correlation is strongly skewed away from normal defensive uses of firearms. His conclusion is thus no more valid than a finding that because fat people are more likely to have diet foods in their refrigerators we can conclude that diet foods "cause" obesity, or that because so many people die in hospitals we should conclude that hospitals "cause" premature death. Reverse causation thus further lowers the 0.006 value, but by an unknown amount.

In conclusion, if we use Kellermann's data adjusted for reality, a firearm kept in a home is at least 167 times more likely to deter criminal attack than to harm a person in the home. This number is some 7000 times more positive than the "43 times" negative figure so often quoted. Should groups and individuals that knowingly perpetuate a figure that is at least 7000 times too large be given any credence at all?

With two million defensive uses of firearms each year, both inside and outside the home, the value of protection against criminal assault provided by firearms vastly exceeds any dangers that they might present.

David K. Felbeck
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Director, Michigan Coalition for Responsible Gun Owners
http://www.mcrgo.org

The former information technology director for State Attorney Angela Corey is suing for wrongful termination.
Ben Kruidbos sued Corey’s office Thursday saying he was illegally fired in June after he testified that prosecutors did not turn over all information to George Zimmerman’s defense team in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
He is asking for $5 million or more in damages and his job back.
The lawsuit states Kruidbos could not be fired for testifying in a judicial proceeding in response to a subpoena. It also argues that the firing was retaliation for his testimony in the Zimmerman case.
“It’s important to understand that we’re not just saying my client was wrongfully terminated,” attorney Wesley White said. “We’re also saying that the state attorney broke the law.”


Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/crime/2013-08-01/story/former-it-director-sues-state-attorney-angela-corey-wrongful-termination#ixzz2aogOVRy7

In order to get those results they needed to consider a sexual assault as happening any time a boyfriend whine to have sex when the woman was not in the mood for example.

George Zimmerman had been elected and deputized by his racially-diverse community to enforce their collective right to home security and property protection. He was put on trial for the shooting death of a black 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin on the evening of February 26th, 2012.

The moment America got the false impression that Zimmerman was “white” and probably a Jew, the very same racial racketeers who had raised full-throated “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” defenses for John White, a black man who shot to death an unarmed 17-year-old white boy in Miller Place, New York back in 2006, were suddenly denouncing Zimmerman as a “cop wannabee” who should have stayed in his truck. [see my essay Before Trayvon Martin]

The notorious Al Sharpton, who is now what passes for a journalist on MSNBC, spent his on-camera time trying to drum up a lynch mob against Mr. Zimmerman, using racially inflammatory rhetoric and biased imagery. It didn’t trouble MSNBC that Sharpton was playing both sides of the camera as both a newsman and a newsmaker. MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines embraced Sharpton’s activism declaring, “When Rev. Sharpton joined MSNBC, it was with the understanding that he would continue to do his advocacy work. We’re fully aware of that work . . . It’s because of this work and his decades of activism that Rev. Sharpton brings such a unique perspective to our lineup.” ..........

Firefly is either 100% in her own separate reality or is a professional propagandist of some sort like Tokyo Rose or Axis Sally.

While John White had cited “racial memory” as a defense for his behavior, the past experiences he alluded to had happened long ago and far away and to other people and before John White was born – they were his grandfather’s experiences. [see my essay Before Trayvon Martin]

George Zimmerman’s “memory” is personal and up-to-the-minute. George’s 260-unit townhouse community is the target of relentless predation. From January 1, 2011 through February 26th, 2012 (421 days) the homeowners in George’s community summoned the police 402 times. During the eighteen months preceding the February 26th shooting of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman had made seven non-emergency calls to the police to report suspiciously behaving men in the area, never mentioning their race until prompted by the police dispatcher. In the year prior to Martin’s death The Retreat at Twin Lakes had been the target of nine thefts, one shooting and eight burglaries.....