Right-wingers -- for instance, the folks at the Wall Street Journal editorial page -- are looking at the shooting of a young Australian named Christopher Lane, allegedly by three teenagers who didn't know him, and are asking why the people who were outraged at the Trayvon Martin case aren't equally outraged now. Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald and Gawker's Tom Scocca make the obvious point: the cops made arrests in the killing of Lane, and there's no controversy about that. Scocca writes:
Here's what happened in Oklahoma: a young man was shot to death. The police investigated it as a crime, arrested suspects, and charged them with murder.I want to make an additional point here. It wasn't merely that George Zimmerman wasn't arrested at the scene -- it was that the decision not to arrest him was an implicit endorsement of what he did that night, a way of arguing that he'd been deputized by society to do what he did. It said that we have no problem with regarding a self-appointed para-cop as a person entitled to make life-or-death decisions -- or at least we don't have a problem if he shoots someone in a certain category of persons. And, of course, "stand your ground" laws exist precisely to deputize, as momentary citizen cops, large swaths of the population.
No one is on the other side of this case. No one is disputing the principle that people who murder other people should be arrested and tried for it.... everyone agrees that the killing of Christopher Lane was a terrible crime and that the perpetrators should be punished.
The reason the killing of Trayvon Martin became a national scandal was that even though an unarmed young man was shot to death, the local authorities decided not to treat it as a crime. That was why it was a major news story. It was not the fact that a person of one particular race killed a person of another particular race; it was how the police and the justice system decided to handle that killing after it happened.
Not everyone, of course -- there's a significant racial disparity in the treatment of white-on-black and black-on-white shootings in "stand your ground" states:
{According to] a study by John Roman of the Urban Institute ... [i]n states with stand-your-ground laws, the shooting of a black person by a white person is found justifiable 17 percent of the time, while the shooting of a white person by a black person is deemed justifiable just over 1 percent of the time....The initial refusal to arrest Zimmerman, and his ultimate acquittal, were endorsements of his self-appointment as an officer of the law. By contrast, no one is treating the young men chaged with Christopher Lane's death as pseudo-cops. If we get to the point where elected or appointed authorities are arguing that white people should be shot under circumstances like this, for the good of society, then we'll have a comparable situation to the Trayvon Martin case. But nothing even remotely like that is happening in this case. Everyone -- everyone -- accepts that this was an awful crime.
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