Seventeen years ago, in Springfield, Oregon, a local mechanic went into a fast-food restaurant, walked up behind a man eating lunch, and shot him to death in the back of the head.
A local grand jury refused to indict the shooter. There had been no altercation, no sign that the man shot was carrying a weapon. But the shooter believed that the victim had threatened his daughter. And the dead man was, in the words of the local district attorney, “a violent man, a drug dealer by trade.”
Maybe the shooter should have left it to the police, the district attorney said, but the victim should also have “moderated his behavior.”
I offer this tale as background to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and the ensuing debate about self-defense law. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer, thought the black teenager was a suspicious presence in a gated neighborhood. Disregarding police instructions, Zimmerman pursued and confronted the young man minutes before killing him.