John Piper weighs in on the tragic slaying of Trayvon Martin, as he prepares to go to New York City this week for a public conversation with Tim Keller, moderated by Anthony Bradley, about the gospel and race. Piper writes:
What has enflamed this situation are the pieces that simply don’t add up. Zimmerman is a hundred pounds bigger and ten years older. He had the gun, not Martin. Reportedly he has been arrested before on assault charges. As he was following Martin in his truck, he called 911 and was told “we don’t need you to do that.” The police were on the way. But Zimmerman followed him anyway. His comments on the 911 recording (I listened to them) suggested possible racial frustration that “they always get away.” Martin’s call to his girlfriend suggested he was troubled by being followed. Not all the witnesses corroborate Zimmerman’s story.
In spite of all this, Zimmerman was never arrested, and is now in hiding. He was not routinely tested for toxicity. And there appears to have been little effort to discern if his self-defense claim is valid. The author of the stand-your-ground self-defense law in Florida said that the law was never meant to cover a situation where the assailant is being followed.
Read the whole thing. Piper is the author of Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian.
And below is a short promo for the event this Wednesday, March 28, which will also be live-streamed at this URL.