I rarely comment on politics these days, but I’m really shaken up by what happened recently in Florida. A seventeen year old boy walking back home from a local candy store was shot dead by a man with a gun. The boy was unarmed. The man was not arrested for killing the boy.
The reason the man was not arrested was that he stated that he had felt threatened by the boy. It seems that under current Florida law, making such a statement is sufficient grounds to avoid being arrested for shooting, and killing, an unarmed boy or girl.
If you are reading this, and you have a son or daughter, you might take a moment to consider that there are places in the United States of America today where a stranger with a gun can legally shoot your child to death while your child is walking down the street, even right in your own neighborhood.
Until these last few days, I had not known that. I’m guessing you had not known that either.
It is outrageous and a good reason to avoid visiting Florida Disney Resort.
What a total break from our society, eh? Whatever happened to Locke and the inalienable human right to life?
I think it does need to be said that the boy was black, because it makes this even more deplorable when you look at the history behind this fear of black people that is pervasive all over the West. There was a recent series in the Toronto Star that said that most likely, every single young black man in my city has been carded and profiled by the police. Every single one. My black friends (I go to a so-called “ghetto school,” so there are a lot of black people at my school and I talk to them a lot) are afraid to go out on the streets because they might just get carded or arrested. And if you try to defend yourself with your Charter rights, they only get more suspicious of you because you tried to “fight back” — in fact, experts recommend that you just go along with it and answer your questions.
When a whole huge group of people is being systematically carded like this — I mean, this is fascist territory here. And it’s not just in Canada, definitely not.
What a sad story. It’s so great that he was finally arrested, and I hope he is found guilty and spends the rest of his life in jail to think about what an awful person he is for shooting an innocent child.