In February, black Florida teen Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in a shooting widely suspected to have been motivated by racial bias. This week, two men in a white pickup truck shot five people in one of Tulsa's predominantly black neighborhoods in a possible act of retaliation for the murder of one of their fathers by a black man.
Suggested Reading
Reflecting upon these two cases, Slate's Emily Bazelon talked to an expert who says that gun laws like "Stand your ground" encourage vigilantism in a way that constitutes a "racial tax":
You can think, then, of legislation like Floridaโs Stand Your Ground law โ which makes it all too easy to escape a murder conviction, or even charge, with a claim of self-defense โ as imposing what [Stanford Law Professor Richard Thomas] Ford calls a โracial tax.โ He says, โWe can predict that the vigilantes these laws encourage are more likely to be reckless, incompetent, and frankly, racist, than the police.โ
Oklahoma has a Stand Your Ground law as well, passed in 2006. Mediaite speculates that itโs because of that law that Pernell Jefferson wasnโt charged with shooting Carl England. Iโm not sure thatโs right, but it seems plausibleโand it suggests that what weโre seeing in Tulsa is how Stand Your Ground laws not only get vigilantes off the hook but fuel the anger that drives them to begin with.
One of the fears in the wake of Martinโs death has been that people in Sanford will take justice into their own hands to avenge the teenagerโs killing. Now in Oklahoma, in the person of Jacob England, we could be seeing just such an avenger. Itโs scary enough to know that there are vigilantes in our midst. Itโs scarier still to think that our public policy encourages them.
Read more at Slate.
Straight From
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.