Is the "Black Community" making a political mistake by alienating themselves from the "Hispanic Community"?

While there might be some issues between the two groups, somehow I fail to see this as causing voters to vote for republicans because neither party views the democratic party as the party of the black community or Hispanic community. edit Thus causing them to vote republican out of spite.

Or in other words, republicans still treat minorities like shit and probably won’t vote for them even if they aren’t always getting along.

They are already less relevant. Since their hero became president, the unemployment situation for blacks has gotten worse. So do they think their situation will be worse with an R in there? No way to tell but republicans in general are not attracting black voters now or probably ever. They have a slim shot with the Hispanics, maybe, not not the blacks, ever.

I concur with @LKidKyle1985. I am hispanic and would never vote for a republican. But your question does answer one thing for me. I heard that the Koch brothers paid for Zimmermans defense. I wondered why they would being they are Right Wing all the way. Now it makes sense. What better way to ensure that at least a democratic minority doesn’t get to be president again. Make sure Zimmerman wins and there is discord among the minority’s.

No it may not cause them to vote republican, but it make deter the democratic party from ever putting up another minority up for presidency, or at least kill the will for the opposite race to even bother to vote. And that will give the republicans a foot in the door again.
Smart move Koch brothers. The old smoke and mirrors routine. Look over here people so you don’t really see what we are there. @josie, Great question.

but it may deter

@Pandora That’s because this case has become a “wedge” issue that drives voters to the polls. I think from a Koch perspective, it rallies the 2nd amendment voters. Remember, this case hit the headlines during an election cycle, in Florida, and as a bonus also sets a precedent for the “stand your ground” law in Florida which, has been vaguely defined and applied previously.

However, in my own opinion, it did a better job of underscoring the injustices of the judicial system in America. I am not arguing that Zimmerman is necessarily guilty or not, I didn’t really follow the case, but I know a lot of people without money, without support, with darker skin have gone to jail for a lot less. It’s too bad the argument isn’t being framed like this, it would have more traction I think.

@LKidKyle1985 This story went to court before the Zimmerman case and I thought they followed the letter of the law. She left and then returned and so she could not show clear and present danger. But the Zimmerman case was identical in that he was not in danger when he called 911 and told not to go after the young man and he did it anyway. In my eyes and in many others, he should’ve been found as being guilty as well.

Marrissa Alexander got 20 years and she only shot warning shots and no one got hurt. Zimmerman chased this boy down and then shot him and he walked?? He had the chance to walk away and let the cops handle it. In his brothers words. He was being a vigilante. Stand your ground does not mean, chase and kill. I always thought that was murder in this country. I guess not.

I find it less than credible that Al Sharpton’s reaction to the Zimmerman case, be it right or wrong, is part of any master plan to divide and conquer the USA with less than 12% of the vote.

I will say that back when the black churches were absolutely united in gay bashing and spreading homophobia I thought that they, of all people, should know what it is to be the oppressed and would do themselves more good if they became the champion of all oppressed minorities. Hispanics are set to become a majority in the not to distant future, but for now, blacks and hispanics are both oppressed minorities and would benefit from watching each others back.

@Pandora I don’t disagree, but it just goes to show what money, influence, and the color of your skin can buy you, which is the point I was making earlier. The law is applied differently based on these factors and that’s why I’m surprised the left is making this out to be a Race thing rather than a call for Social Justice. But hey, no one asked me for advice so what ever. lol

*edit: I guess it is about race a little bit (because people think so), but not, hey Zimmerman should or shouldn’t go to jail but rather, why do all these other people go to jail IF Zimmerman doesn’t. Lets not forget OJ got off the hook too so it’s not just about the color of your skin, I personally think it has more to do with wealth.

I think it is a mistake to turn the Zimmerman case into something of one ethnic group against another. The case is about an amateur gun lover being empowered by an incredibly stupid law called “stand your ground”. All the unarmed innocent people are threatened by this, whether white, brown, black or green. It it takes is a perceived threat.

@mattbrowne
The ‘Stand Your Ground law is a distraction. It was not part of this case. The defense was a pure self defense case. Every state in the union has the same criteria for self defense and in fact it has been codified in common law since the Roman empire. Self defense requires a resonable belief that you are in danger of great bodily harm and that you take reasonable force to defend yourself.

We can disagree on what was reasonable but nothing in the ‘Stand Your Ground law’ has any impact on this. It is a distraction that Holder is using to draw attention away from his inability to prosecute under federal law. Appease the masses by railing against that law until they forget this case. As always, if they are showing you thier right hand, pay attention to the left.

@mattbrowne & @Jaxk It is also interesting that in adding its “Stand Your Ground” law, Florida brought its previous laws regarding the use of deadly force in self defense away from now deprecated English Common Law and more in line with the laws of most of Europe, including the UK today. English Common Law originally required that in a violent confrontation, you attempt to slowly retreat, and only if your protagonist pursues you and continues the attack AND you have good reason to fear that this attack will result in great bodily harm or death to you can you use deadly force to stop the attacker. The problem is that in a street brawl, this just isn’t very practical. In fact, follow that advice in such a fight and it ups your chances of getting killed or maimed, because your attacker thinks they are winning and they have you off-balance backpedalling. Most European nations now recognize your right to stand your ground so long as it isn’t clearly you who provoked the fight to begin with.

Depends what exactly “provoking a fight” technically means I think. Does following a person do that? With some people it might. Does looking provoke a fight? It will with some people trust me. Does talking or questioning do it for you? Some think it does. If they can’t prove that Zimmerman put his hands on Martin first then it’s going to be a stretch to say he met the standard of provoker. There has to be a standard otherwise any excuse could be used to get something going. Insulting one’s mother although provocative might meet street definition for starting it, but I think we are glad that standard is a no-go in a real court.

We should put Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other provocateurs on a rocket to Jupiter and watch how things settle down more. These people want trouble to stay hot. It gives them the only purpose they will ever have in this life. Replace them with people of the likes of Bill Cosby and give them the hard truth. They may not like what they hear at first because they have had Sharptons pap squeezed into their heads for way too long. But it will be what they need to hear.

@woodcutter It’s often not possible to establish who provoked a fight, but when you are going to allow concealed carry and use of firearms in fights, it’s important to at least have a provision on the books that deals with who started it. Remove that, and any antisocial sort could get a CCW, go out and start fights with any social group they hate; whites, blacks, gays, straights, women, men… They could then let the person they provoked into a fight win for a while before summarily executing them for being an undesirable sort of humanity in their view. And this would be perfectly legal.

@ETpro You give anyone a bit of freedom and no matter what the good intent of it was there are going to be a tiny fraction who abuse it. It happens because we are trying to put the human animal to rules, and vice versa. We all need to keep this in context, and it will be hard to do that because of how news and events are distributed. Thousands of people every year stop a dangerous event from happening to themselves with their firearms most of the time no shooting happens. We never hear of them do we? Thats a lot of lives saved going unnoticed. Those lives may not seem important to those who never knew of them but trust…they are plenty important to their inner circle and of course, themselves. Now take the miniscule amount of times the self defense incidents get dicey using SYG as reasoning. We have seen these few get blown up into a national catastrophe of epic proportions thanks to the news orgs, ideologues, and talking heads going on and on about each one having the effect of counting each one a thousand times. This SYG serves to protect the good guys…you and me from becoming a victim twice if we find ourselves in such an unfortunate and unenviable place. Who really wants to trade the almost uncountable times the law is abused for the times when it came in handy. Even if the law is taken away can we really assume that people protecting themselves will find some other way to stop an attack? I won’t make such assumptions because when it comes right down to it ,a person protecting their family isn’t going to give two shits if he gets sued for shooting a bad guy before they cause harm. All it will do is make criminals out of perfectly good people for trying to survive an assault. And leave the doors wide open for the relatives of wounded or killed scumbags to literally take everything the victims have in a frivolous lawsuit. Take away those victim protections and I predict you will see more brazen attacks happening possibly for the sake of suing people for getting hurt…while trying to hurt them in the process. It might just well be worth the risk for some. There’s your more realistic danger to society… not the small number of questionable shootings.or other shootings planned by diabolical murderers setting people up for legalized murder. The incidences of those happening still will never come close to the justified uses of guns for self defense. We are wringing our hands for stuff that statistically seldom happens.

I do not accept your premise that there are only a tiny number of people who would abuse the law of you were set free to start fights, then end them by shooting the person you picked on. We have among us Black Muslims, Muslim extremists, skinheads, white supremacists, KKK members homophobes, etc., etc. All of these and many more would be delighted to have our laws changed so that they could legally go out and pick a fight, then summarily execute the person they picked on. It already happens even though it is against the law. How much more would it happen if you made it perfectly legal. What compelling social interest does making such naked aggression legal serve?

You want to deal with some truth, @woodcutter? Here is a fact about how much safer you are thanks to having lots of guns. If you are white in America, you are 5 times more likely to die from a gunshot you aim at yourself as you are to be shot by someone else. If you are black in America, you are 5 times more likely to die from being shot by someone else than to die using your own gun to commit suicide.

That’s not the white community’s fault today, it’s a symptom of centuries of slavery followed by another century of Jim Crow. It is a symptom of inequitable education and opportunity in the two different racial communities. It is a cancer on the brain of what hopes to me a multicultural nation. But it is a stone cold fact.

@ETpro & @woodcutter

I think you guys are forgetting the ‘reasonable’ part. It is not sufficient for you to think your actions are reasonable, they must be reasonable for an average person in that circumstance. So if I say ‘Your mother wears combat boots’, would an average person respond by cutting my throat? Would an average person feel thier life was in jeopardy?

The reasonable standard is intentionally vague but used quite often. It is better than trying to define every possible situation. And that is what a jury is supposed to decide.

@ETpro Be honest, do you personally really care if people you never have met commit suicide with a gun ? Or, any other method they figure out? Or is it the gun part that offends? Granted it’s bad but that 60% sure likes to find its way into the crime stats because killing oneself is technically against the law? Over 60% of all gun deaths are from suicide. Who cares? Thats on a different scale. Totally separated from violent predatory killings you worry over.

You don’t accept my premise? That is your opinion. And unless you have aspirations of truly being king of everyone that’s all it will ever be. And by the way, it’s not my premise. It’s what we don’t see…that is, people setting up victims wholesale to hide behind a law. Thats just an anti -gun excuse for a talking point. Don’t listen to them man. You are saying that because it’s possible for someone to bait someone it is going to happen often. Do you simply have a severe distrust of people you dont know so err on the side of caution just in case you’re right? The burden of proof is high enough that it actually is hard to justify shooting someone and get away with it. You are trying here, to make it seem like it is so easy to trick investigators into believing there was just cause. These set ups don’t happen in enough numbers to warrant changing the laws back..Its the same old theory of allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Nothing is perfect.

@Jaxk Yes, the law does require a test as to what a reasonable person would do. I was reacting to @woodcutter‘s suggestion that it should be OK to deliberately pick fights knowing that with your concealed weapon, you can almost certainly win. I really don’t think reasonable people would do that, and therefore I don’t think @woodcutter had reasonableness in mind.

@woodcutter I only pointed out a verifiable fact about guns and who ends up getting killed with them. I’m not anti gun, nor pro gun. I am pro truth and sensibility. I’m for the freedoms guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, but also the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution itself and the other 26 amendments to it. I think I have the freedom to live my life without fear of being shot by someone who just doesn’t like my kind. So I want our laws such that they address all those competing freedoms as well as possible. Making it legal to deliberately provoke a fight so you could then have the “right” to assassinate someone when they retaliate would NOT take us closer to that goal, but further from it.

@ETpro I have a challenge for you. Find where I have indicated where it is OK to deliberately pick a fight you can win because you can win with a gun. My, My, MY. I must be really racking up quite a reputation here.

If you can’t point this out, then you have to accept that you are a slanderer and a liar and forfeit all integrity in future discussions. You saw how I handed @tom g his ass for doing that. Don’t be that guy.

Yes, self defense has been codified in common law since the Roman empire, but later lawmakers added the principle of proportionality. Threatening words or threatening gestures do not automatically lead to pulling out a gun, aiming for the head or heart, and pulling the trigger.

Proportionality has been discarded in Florida when amateur gun lovers are allowed to shoot someone based on a hunch.

@mattbrowne That was a patently unfair assessment of this whole mess. You should stay away from the ramblings of the Al Sharptons in this country.

Woodcutter, Go back and reread this reply of yours and this one of mine. I was trying to establish with you a principle of law that provoking a fight has consequences. Your subsequent replies seemed to suggest you did not accept that principle.

@mattbrowne & @woodcutter Florida’s stand your ground law actually brought US self defense law more closely in sync with the law in much of Europe now. I think that in a land with as much deadly violence as we have, it makes sense to establish as a point of law that if you are an otherwise law abiding citizen and someone is threatening you with great bodily harm or death, it is not a crime to answer the threat with deadly force. Before the stand your ground law, it often was a crime to defend yourself.

SYG is mainly an after incident protection for crime victims who are forced into a corner to eventually kill their tormentor. The popular expanded version allows victims to do the same thing when outside their homes now. Why should a fundamental human right be forfeited just because we venture outside our homes? It shouldn’t be. Repealing SYG is not going to make anyone stop and think about the consequences of going easy on the person they are defending against. Its not some conspiracy to give people the perfect cover to commit murder. Every single shooting is investigated after, so it’s not an open and shut case. Most times even if the shooting is blatantly justified the defender has their weapon confiscated as evidence just the same. And it might take months or years to get it returned, if ever, so much that using a lawyer is impractical because the cost of doing that is more than just buying a new weapon. These cases are rare but because the media bombards the airwaves for the high profile cases, and give the impression to low information people, to include Europeans, they are rampant. Never are the cases publicized where it (the law) was used as intended. Because doing that is considered taboo.