It Starts with Me
On February 26, 2012, in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, a 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin got in a scuffle with a 28-year-old neighborhood watch member named George Zimmerman. A single shot was fired, and the teenager died. The circumstances of the shooting--the apparent racial profiling of a teenager who was visiting relatives in the mostly-white community, the "stand your ground" aspects of the incident, Zimmerman's pursuit of Martin, and the Sanford police department's initial decision to release Zimmerman without charges--turned it into a national news story. Zimmerman was ultimately charged with and, last week, acquitted of second degree murder in the shooting. In the wake of that decision, there have been demonstrations across the United States. Some have rightly wondered why this story continues to be special when Martin was just one of 85 children killed by firearms every day in 2012. Others have complained that his skin color gave him some kind of sp...