I don’t think Zimmerman had any option other than to pull the trigger.
I don’t think there’s a policeman in the world who wouldn’t have done the same.
I doubt there are very few people on the planet who would’ve done anything other than pull the gun and pull the trigger.
Zimmerman doesn’t need stand-your-ground as a defense. There was no place he could go.
The ONLY way Zimmerman could emerge from this having any real culpability at all, as far as I can see, would be if he started the fight.
You are missing my point.
The point is that many people currently start and end their reasoning from a point of view sympathetic to M. They do not take into consideration Z’s point of view. I am saying that for those people, a generally accepted standard reference model of behavior in similar situations would help. As of now, apparently, no such commonly accepted standard model exists, which leads to the kind of social whiplash that we are seeing now.
The existence and acceptance of a model reduces the amount of thought and process required to that of whether or not the model is accepted, and if so, whether or not the procedure followed adhered to a checklist developed from the model.
I am also saying that if such a model had existed, then there would have been general public and law enforcement acceptance that no trial would be needed in the first place.
I am addressing the larger social context outside this incident and outside of the trial, not the incident and trial themselves.