Thursday, September 19, 2013

Delays

Meetings, no matter how important, sometimes get postponed. That's what happened to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin's confab with the mothers of two teens who were killed "in self defense." That defense, the "stand your ground" law was to be the topic of the discussion. These two women, along with a number of other experts in the field of firearms legislation, were scheduled to speak to a Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday morning. That hearing had to be called off, in part, because Lucia McBath's plane was delayed coming into Washington D.C. It was delayed because of a shooting in the Washington Navy Yard on Monday morning. That's some pretty thick irony they've got out there in our nation's capitol.
Still, it seems unlikely that the shooter in the Navy Yard attack is likely to use the "stand your ground" defense since he's dead. Aaron Alexis shot and killed twelve people before police returned the favor. No motive was made available initially, as if this sort of thing would be more understandable if there was.
Meanwhile, everyone's favorite non-convcited murderer George Zimmerman couldn't find his way out of the national spotlight. Since his acquittal in July, George has been busy: two stops for speeding, a cellphone photo of a smiling Zimmerman touring the Florida factory where the 9mm semiautomatic pistol used in the February 2012 shooting was made, and, last week, police dash-cam footage of Zimmerman kneeling in the street to be cuffed after an alleged scuffle with his estranged wife. It kind of makes me think about the old days, back when O.J. Simpson was still a struggling author with some debts he needed to settle.
It also made me think of all the victims of these crimes. It made me think of how my wife insists on forgetting the names of murderers, especially since history seems to encourage us to remember them without recalling the names of the people they killed. We don't often see lists of the survivors. All those people who are still walking around, having had their lives torn apart by some gun and the idiot pulling the trigger.
Sometimes justice is swift, as in the case of Aaron Alexis. Other times the wheels grind slowly, but eventually they catch up to you. Right George? 

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