Some dads need to know when to shut the heck up.
I’m sure Robert Zimmerman is a good dad. He might be a great dad.
And I’m sure he loves his son, 28-year-old George Zimmerman, very much.
But Robert Zimmerman needs to know when to shut up. Or when not to deliver letters to the editors of certain newspapers.
Last Thursday, March 15, Robert Zimmerman hand-delivered a letter to the Orlando Sentinel. It was about his son, George Zimmerman, who has admitted that he fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on the night of Feb. 26.
The shooting happened in the town of Sanford, Fla., but has since gone national. And for the reasons you might expect.
Martin was black. Zimmerman was identified in initial news reports as white. Daddy Bob tried to clear up that little matter: He said son George identifies himself as Hispanic, and isn’t a racist.
As if there are no white Hispanics. And as if George Zimmerman being a racist were the main issue here. It isn’t.
It’s whether George Zimmerman is a cowboy, in the worst sense of that word.
George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch captain for a gated community in Sanford. Tracy Martin, Trayvon Martin’s father, lived in that community.
On the night of Feb. 26, Trayvon left his father’s house to walk to a nearby 7-Eleven. He bought Skittles and an Arizona iced tea.
As Trayvon returned to his father’s house, George Zimmerman noticed him walking in the ‘hood. A black teen wearing a hoodie.
Definitely a suspicious character, the nonracist, Hispanic, nonwhite George Zimmerman apparently thought.
George Zimmerman called 911 and reported Trayvon as a suspicious character prowling around the ‘hood. But George Zimmerman did more than that.
The Sanford police 911 dispatcher asked George Zimmerman if he were following Trayvon. When George Zimmerman answered, “Yeah,” the dispatcher told him, “OK, we don’t need you to do that.”
In the letter he gave to the Orlando Sentinel, Robert Zimmerman wrote: “At no time did George follow or confront Mr. Martin.”
That contradicts, directly, what George Zimmerman told the police dispatcher in the 911 tapes. At this point, George Zimmerman could well be thinking, “Please, Dad, don’t help me.”
But George Zimmerman might not need his father’s help. That’s because, 25 days after he fatally shot Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman has yet to be charged with a crime.
He claimed self-defense in the slaying, and Sanford police bought his story hook, line and sinker.
I’m a staunch defender of the Second Amendment and support right-to-carry laws. I believe in self-defense, both in theory and practice.
But when the self-defense involves a grown man armed with a 9 mm handgun versus a teen armed only with a box of Skittles and an Arizona iced tea, I figure something doesn’t quite pass the smell test somewhere.
Fortunately for George Zimmerman, Sanford cops have liberally interpreted Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense statute.
Under the law, “a person in Florida is justified in using deadly force against another if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of forcible felony,” according to CBSnews.com.
Florida state Rep. Dennis Baxley introduced the law, but his comments in a USA Today story indicate that it might not apply to the Trayvon Martin case.
Baxley told USA Today that “the law wasn’t written to give people the power to pursue and confront others.”
There exists a 911 tape in which George Zimmerman admits that pursuing Trayvon Martin is precisely what he was doing. How does Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law apply in this case?
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
