Tag Archives: Trayvon Martin

A Collective Psychosis

There are now nearly 300 million guns in the United States. Forty-seven percent of all murders in the U.S. are committed with handguns. According to the Washington Post, the U.S. ranks number one in the world in guns/per capita with 88 guns/100 people–far exceeding the second country on the list, Yemen, at 54/100.

Eighty percent of all gun deaths in the 23 wealthiest countries in the world occur in America and 87 percent of all kids killed by guns are American kids. This is over 42 times greater than the rate for all the other nations combined. When viewed from any other civilized society on earth, gun violence in American life seems to be a symptom of collective psychosis.

Drill down a little further in the statistics and you find that 46 percent of American men own guns compared to 23 percent of women. Men commit 91 percent of domestic murders, and 88 percent of these murders involve guns. Thirty percent of urban households have at least one firearm. Despite much lower crime rates, this figure increases to 42 percent in the suburbs and 60 percent in the countryside.

So why are Americans––and men in particular––so prone to gun violence?

One could argue that it’s a result of the sheer number of handguns available and the easy access to them. Others might argue, particularly after what occurred in Florida between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, that the proliferation of “Permit to Carry” and “Stand Your Ground” laws have contributed to increasing gun violence.

Those in favor of permits claim that carrying a gun actually lowers the crime rate––though there have been no studies that I’m aware of correlating “Permit to Carry” legislation” with lower homicide and crime rates. In fact, states with more liberal gun policies such as those in the Deep South, have much higher homicide and crime rates that states with tougher laws regarding guns––though again, correlation is difficult to prove.

In June of 2003, prior to the “Permit to Carry” legislation in Minnesota, 73 people in the state were granted permission to carry. By June of 2013, that number had exploded to 147, 957. In the suburban county where I live, 7354 permits to carry have been issued. So why is it that so many men feel the need to carry a handgun in public, particularly in a place where gun violence occurs about as often as a 90-degree day in January? “Because they can” is too simplistic an answer. Something is driving this apparent need.

What about other countries with high gun ownership rates, such as Switzerland and Finland, which rank number three and four in number of guns per capita, and in Canada, France and Norway, which also have high gun ownership rankings? Homicide rates and gun violence rates are much lower in these countries than in the U.S.

Something about the American male psyche appears to be much different than the psyches of men in other western societies that have high gun ownership rates.

The first step is to admit we have a problem. The second is to begin talking about it. Restricting handgun access is certainly worth discussing. But until we start talking seriously about the male psyche in our society, we’re going to continue to experience high levels of gun violence.

Top U.S. Crime Stories of 2012

I wrote the following words three days ago. With twenty-one days left in the year, here’s my list of the top crime stories in the U.S. in 2012. They are in no particular order. Here’s hoping that we have a peaceful ending to the year.

Unfortunately, the year would not end peacefully. Today, 20 year-old Adam Lanza opened fire inside an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut killing 26 people, including 20 children, making it the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, second only to Virginia Tech, which claimed 33 lives. Lanza also killed his mother and then committed suicide, bringing the death toll to 28.

Dressed in full assault gear, James Holmes opens fire in a crowded movie house in Aurora, Colorado last July, killing 12 and wounding dozens. Holmes faces 166 counts of murder, attempted murder and other charges related to the shooting.

Former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky is convicted of molesting 10 boys over 15 years in a scandal that destroys the reputation of legendary coach Joe Paterno, who fails to notify the police when told Sandusky is seen molesting a boy in the campus showers. Sandusky is sentenced to 30-60 years in prison.

George Zimmerman stalks and kills a young unarmed Trayvon Martin in February and then claims “self-defense” invoking Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law.

Seventeen-year-old Austin Sigg is charged with murdering ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway and dismembering her body near Denver, Colorado.

Michael Page opens fire at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in a Milwaukee suburb, killing six people and wounding four others. He then commits suicide.

Pablo Hernandez confesses that he murdered six-year old Etan Patz in May of 1979. Hernandez tells the New York Police Department that he used a can of soda to lure the child inside a bodega, strangled him to death and later disposed of the body in the store’s garbage. The crime mesmerized the country 33 years ago.

Former police officer Drew Peterson is convicted of murdering his third wife Kathleen Savio in March of 2004 in a case that was originally ruled an accidental drowning. Peterson is charged after his fourth wife Stacey Peterson vanishes in October 2007. Savio’s body is exhumed and declared a homicide “staged to look like an accident.”

Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher guns down his girlfriend, and then commits suicide by shooting himself in the head at Arrowhead Stadium in front of Coach Romeo Crennel and General Manager Scott Piloi.

Babysitter John Burbine of Massachusetts is indicted on 100 counts of charges related to the rape and sexual abuse of more than a dozen young children in their homes. Burbine videotaped himself as he raped and sexually abused 13 small children through a child care service operated by his wife.

Serial killer Israel Keyes commits suicide in an Anchorage, Alaska jail after confessing that he murdered eight people across the U.S.––though he’s suspected of killing as many as twelve. He was facing a March trial and federal murder charges in the kidnapping and death of eighteen-year old Samantha Koenig, who was abducted from an Anchorage coffee-stand in February.

An Excuse For Murder

As a mystery writer, I spend a lot of my time planning fictional murders, murders that my protagonist, Homicide Detective John Santana––and my readers––have to solve. Unlike a mystery writer, I’m sure you don’t spend your time planning the perfect crime, though I’ll bet that many of you––at least at some point in your life have thought about it.

But imagine for a moment that you wanted to murder someone. And imagine that you lived in a state such as Florida that has a Stand Your Ground law, considered one of the most sweeping in the nation. The law legalizes the use of deadly force by anyone “who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be. The law adds that a person “has no duty to retreat, and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force 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 a forcible felony.”

So far so good, you think. But it gets even better, because the Florida statute immunizes the person who uses deadly force from civil or criminal liability. Under the law, you could acquire a handgun or use one you already own, wait for an opportunity when there are no witnesses, cold-bloodedly murder someone, and then claim self-defense. Sounds more like fiction, you say. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

One doesn’t have to be a mystery writer to imagine George Zimmerman’s thought process before he murdered Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, black, teenager. Martin was talking on his cell phone with his girlfriend, when he was followed and confronted by Zimmerman, then fatally shot in the chest. Zimmerman knew, as everyone in Florida who has contemplated murder knew, that he could use the law to try and escape prosecution. Given the outrage, the supposition that this was a hate crime, and the mounting evidence against him, George Zimmerman may have figured wrong. One hopes so.

Thirty-one states now have some variation of the Florida Stand Your Ground law. While it’s unlikely that few on either side of the highly charged debate will be swayed by the killing of Trayvon Martin, it is likely that more innocent lives will be lost under the guise of “self-defense.” And that isn’t fiction.