George Zimmerman has been acquitted and justice has been done.

Yet the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman issue tells us much about the left’s agenda to “fundamentally transform” America.

First, in a fundamentally transformed America, only government agents will have the right to use firearms.  To repeat, it isn’t just that citizens will no longer be permitted to carry firearms; they will not even be permitted to own them.

The Martin shooting is just the latest nationally recognized shooting that the Second Amendment deniers have sought to exploit for the purpose of disarming law-abiding citizens. Potentially, the deniers promised to gain far more traction from this shooting than from, say, the shooting in Sandy Hook or that of Gabbie Giffords, for in both of these instances, the shooters in question did not own their guns legally.  Moreover, both the shooters and their victims were white.

Zimmerman, however, who was initially thought to be white, was licensed to own and carry his weapon.  Yet if it could be proven that he abused this right, and abused it by, of all things, hunting down and murdering a young black male, then both the Second Amendment and the American majority would reveal themselves to be no less deserving of condemnation for their recklessness—and their “racism.”  Better yet, the Zimmerman case could enable the deniers to forge an inseparable link in the popular imagination between the Second Amendment and white racism. 

In putting Zimmerman on trial, the deniers finally had their opportunity to try the old America.  In the leftist’s mind, the old America—the as-of-yet-to-be transformed America—consists of a bunch of John Wayne wannabe white guys, Bible thumpers who cling bitterly to their guns and religion and routinely deploy both to subjugate and oppress anyone and everyone who isn’t like them.

Ironically, though he looks more like one of the millions of “undocumented workers” who the Gang of Eight wants to call forth from “the shadows,” the brown-complexioned face of the multi-racial Zimmerman (who is white, Hispanic, and black) has been made into that of the old America.  The face of Trayvon Martin has become a proxy for the minority oppression that the old America has perennially perpetuated.

This brings us to a second point.

It isn’t just that the Second Amendment deniers are in cahoots with the agents of the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC).  Often, the two groups consist of the same people.  What little difference exists between the two lies in this: deniers use race to disarm law abiding Americans while RIC agents seek to disarm law abiding Americans, most of whom they know are white, because they want to advance their racial agenda.

Though he is a person of color, Zimmerman has been made into a symbol of white America—i.e. white oppression.  By hook or by crook—by “whichever means necessary,” violence, intimidation, humiliation, etc.—this is an America that must be relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced by a new land of the left’s imaginings.

And into what kind of new place will the old America be fundamentally transformed?

As was already noted, the citizens of the new America will not be permitted to defend themselves with guns.  However, if possible to imagine, it gets even worse.

The new America will be devoid of all institutional buffers—those “little platoons” as Edmund Burke referred to them—that lay in between the individual and the government.  We already see the extent to which, say, Obamacare is weakening the premiere buffer, religious institutions.  Our local neighborhoods are nearly as important as the latter, for it is from our communities that the identity and meaning of our lives is gotten—a fact to which Zimmerman serves as a standing testimony.

The neighborhood watch to which Zimmerman belonged is the penultimate emblem of the integrity, the health, of the community that its members sought to preserve.  From her beginnings and throughout her history, America achieved distinction as a liberty-loving nation precisely because her citizens relied less on government and more on contributing to and benefitting from their “little platoons.”

Far from showing that he was a “wannabe cop,” whatever this could mean, that Zimmerman voluntarily enlisted his time and energies into the service of protecting his community establishes his good citizenship.

In bringing the full weight of the government down upon his neck, it isn’t just Zimmerman’s whose head the fundamental transformers sever: it is that of America’s as well.  The long-standing American tradition of localism and limited government is now imperiled, for the persecution of Zimmerman can’t but make many an American think long and hard before involving themselves in local affairs, in helping out their fellows.

Zimmerman has been treated outrageously.  But so too has the America of which the fundamental transformers have taken hold.

 

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