Obama Weighs in on Murder of Unarmed Black Teen in Florida

By FRANCE 24 (video) News Wires (text), March 24, 2012

REUTERS -

President Barack Obama weighed into the controversial killing of a black teenager in Florida in very personal terms on Friday, comparing the boy to a son he doesn’t have and calling for American "soul searching" over how the incident occurred.

Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, dressed in a "hoodie" hooded sweatshirt, was shot dead a month ago in Sanford, Florida by a 28-year-old white Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer who said he was acting in self-defense.

"If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon," Obama said in his first comments about the shooting, acknowledging the racial element in the case.

"Obviously, this is a tragedy," Obama told reporters. "I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids."

The case has galvanized the nation and prompted rallies protesting the failure of police to arrest the shooter, George Zimmerman, and more broadly, a pattern of racial discrimination that black leaders cite in Sanford and elsewhere in the country.

Obama, the first black U.S. president, made his remarks at a White House event to announce his pick to lead the World Bank, waiting briefly after the announcement to take a reporter’s question about the incident.

Martin’s parents thanked the president for his words.

"The president’s personal comments touched us deeply and made us wonder: If his son looked like Trayvon and wore a hoodie, would he be suspicious too?" they said in a statement.

Florida’s "Stand Your Ground" law allows people to use deadly force in self-defense.

Similar laws are in effect in at least 24 states including Florida, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Calls are mounting to repeal them. Earlier this week, a Florida state senator said he was drafting new legislation to drastically change the law in Florida.

A South Carolina state representative said on Friday he had introduced a bill to repeal his state’s law.

Racial divides

Bakari Sellers, a black Democrat and gun owner, said he wanted to prevent an incident like the Trayvon Martin shooting happening in his state. "I’m six-five and a black guy," he said. "I just know that it could have been me."

Obama said the "Stand Your Ground" laws should be studied.

"I think all of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen. And that means that we examine the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident," he said.

"Every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together - federal, state and local - to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened."

Obama, the son of a white mother from Kansas and black father from Kenya, does not comment frequently on race, a sensitive topic in the United States, which still grapples with a legacy of slavery, segregation and discrimination.

Early in his White House tenure, Obama inflamed another racially tinged incident by declaring police had « acted stupidly » when arresting a well-known black documentary filmmaker, Henry Louis Gates, after an altercation at his home.

Obama later invited Gates and the white police officer, Sergeant James Crowley, to the White House, where the men shared a drink in what became known as the "beer summit."

In Sanford, Norton Bonaparte Jr., the city’s manager, acknowledged tensions between the black community and police "go back many, many years."

"The trust that existed is gone, so we have to start from ground zero," he said.

Sanford’s police chief and a Florida state prosecutor overseeing the case stepped aside on Thursday as criticism grew over police handling of the investigation.

The state’s new special prosecutor, Angela Corey, arrived in Sanford after Gov. Rick Scott appointed her on Thursday night.

"We appreciate that an investigation was already done. We are going to review what was done. We are going to continue to investigate and then we’ll proceed from there," Bernie de la Rionda, an assistant state attorney with Corey’s team, told reporters outside the police department.

Suspension, history

The U.S. Justice Department is also investigating. Senior officials from the department met with the Martin family in Florida on Thursday, along with their lawyer.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said early in the week that they must collect evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was or was not intent to violate civil rights laws.

And a Florida college announced it had suspended Zimmerman’s enrollment.

Zimmerman was working toward an associates degree in arts at Seminole State College in Sanford. He previously earned a vocational certificate in an insurance field, the school said.

"Due to the highly charged and high-profile controversy involving this student, Seminole State has taken the unusual but necessary step this week to withdraw Mr. Zimmerman from enrollment," a statement dated Thursday said.

Zimmerman has not commented publicly about the shooting and his whereabouts are unknown. His father has said he is being unfairly vilified.

On Friday, Florida court records reviewed by Reuters showed Zimmerman was involved in at least two previous legal incidents, including a 2005 domestic violence case with his former fiance.

Zimmerman, who at the time worked at an insurance agency, and his ex-fiance both sought restraining orders against each other after getting into a pushing match. In her complaint, Veronica Zuazo said the two had been involved in two physical fights in 2002 and 2003.

Zimmerman was also arrested and charged with resisting a law enforcement officer with violence in 2005. The case was eventually dropped after he completed a program to avoid being formally charged.

America’s Wild West gun laws

By Bernd Debusmann

March 23, 2012

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The killing of a black teenager by a self-appointed vigilante in Florida has trained a spotlight on gun laws reminiscent of the Wild West in 24 U.S. states. Despite widespread outrage over the Florida case, gun-friendly senators in Washington want to make it easier to extend those laws to most of the country.

That would set the United States, where there are more firearms in private hands than in any other country, even farther apart from the rest of the industrialized world as far as guns are concerned. And it would mark yet another success for the National Rifle Association (NRA) in its long campaign against gun controls.

Before getting into the details of the planned legislation, a brief recapitulation of what happened in the Orlandosuburb of Sanford on February 26: Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high school student, walked to a family member’s home at night when George Zimmerman, a self-appointed “neighborhood watch captain” spotted him, deemed the teenager suspicious, pursued him and shot him dead with a 9 mm pistol after what he told police was an altercation that made him fear for his life.

Police questioned Zimmerman, a white Hispanic, accepted his account of the incident, and let him go, following the letter or a 2005 Florida state law that allows citizens to use deadly force if they “reasonably believe” they face harm. Unlike previous such cases, the teenager’s killing caught national attention, largely because social media served as a vehicle to carry charges of racism and unequal justice to a huge audience.

On March 8, Martin’s parents posted a “petition to prosecute the killer of our son” on the website change.org.

By March 23, after thousands of demonstrators in New York, Miami and Sanford demanded Zimmerman’s arrest, the parents’ petition had gathered close to 1.5 million signatures. Sanford’s police chief, Bill Lee, stepped down “temporarily” to let tempers cool, as he put it. In Washington, the Congressional Black Caucus, an informal group of African-American legislators, termed the teenager’s death a “hate crime.”

One might be tempted to think that the wave of indignation, steadily gathering momentum since February 26, might have tempered the enthusiasm of gun-loving Washington legislators for expanding controversial laws. But one would be wrong. And one would underestimate the clout of the NRA, considered one of the three most influential lobbies in the United States.

On March 13, less than two weeks after Trayvon Martin’s death, a Democratic senator from gun-friendly Alaska, Mark Begich, introduced the “National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2012.” Just another week later, SenatorJohn Thune from South Dakota introduced a bill “to allow reciprocity for the carrying of certain concealed firearms.” The differences between the two are minor and due to an arcane dispute between the NRA and the smaller and more radical Gun Owners of America. The NRA has asked its members to contact their senators and ask them to co-sponsor the Begich bill.

HAVE GUN, CAN TRAVEL

Both bills would force all states that issue permits to carry concealed weapons to recognize permits obtained elsewhere. States such as California and New York that have stringent regulations on who can carry a gun would be obliged to allow people with permits obtained from states with lax gun laws, such as Florida. Gun control advocates say that it is laws allowing citizens to carry loaded handguns in public that form the basis of additional legislation, Such as the Florida Stand Your Ground law that barred police from arresting Zimmerman.

As Alcee Hastings, a Democratic congressman from Florida put it: “This misguided law does not make our streets safer, rather it turns our streets into a showdown at the OK Corral. But this is not the Wild West. We are supposed to be a civilized society. Let Trayvon’s death not be for naught. Let us honor his life by righting this wrong.” Hastings, who is African American, called for a repeal of the law.

That is not likely to happen, and less so in an election year. President Barack Obama has stayed out of the debate on gun laws, which flares every time there is a headline-making shooting, and with few exceptions, lawmakers seek the gun lobby’s favor and the resulting votes. This is the chief reason why advocates of tighter gun regulations have had little success over the past two decades.

Another reason, according to Kristen Rand of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, is that most Americans are unaware of the number of people killed in incidents similar to the shooting of Trayvor Martin. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) does not compile statistics on such cases and most of them are never known outside the place where they happened.

“The average person has no idea of the scale of the problem,” said Rand. “If they had, things might be different.”

PHOTO: Demonstrators gather to call for justice in the murder of Trayvon Martin at Leimert Park in Los Angeles, March 22, 2012. Florida Governor Rick Scott appointed a task force on Thursday to investigate the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin as calls grew for charges to be filed against the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed him. Also, the state prosecutor who had been handling the investigation will step aside from the probe, Scott said in a statement. REUTERS/Jonathan Alcorn

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