Hey Everyone! You Are Not Qualified To Have An Opinion About Trayvon Martin

Or George Zimmerman.

By now we all know that Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. I don’t have an opinion about this yet because there’s still way too many missing and contradictory facts out there. But that hasn’t stopped people all over from letting selective facts and rumors combine with their biases into predictable outrage.

Martin was just an unarmed black teenager walking through a white neighborhood with Skittles and iced tea, but Zimmerman has not been charged with murder. So you’ve got all kinds of left-leaning folks, including celebrities, protesting for justice for the poor kid gunned down by the racist white (Hispanic?) man.

Then you’ve got Zimmerman claiming he was attacked first and an eye-witness that supposedly supports the claim and a police report that said he was bleeding. So you’ve got all kinds of right-leaning folks deciding that Zimmerman was just acting in self-defense against an assault and how dare the media and everybody else assume that he’s a guilty racist!

You’ve got Black Panthers offering a reward for Zimmerman’s kidnapping and Spike Lee tweeting the supposed address of Zimmerman’s home, which turned out to actually be the address of a now-terrified elderly couple. You’ve got Obama saying we need to ask ourselves how this happened and people penning heartfelt essays about how sad and tragic this is.

You’ve got conservative commentators wondering why the people all worked up about this don’t seem to care about the 93% of blacks who are killed by other blacks. You’ve got liberal commentators calling to repeal gun laws and left elitist Paul Krugman unsurprisingly blaming this entirely on the insane and dangerous Right, exaggerating a local pro-gun law and invoking a bizarre contradictory conspiracy theory about a prison industry that promotes laws that send less people to prison.

You’ve got people on the right focusing on irrelevant details and rumors about Martin’s history and character to make him look more like a criminal (He got suspended for marijuana! He wore hoodies!). You’ve got people on the left ignoring details and rumors about Zimmeran’s history that might make him look less like a racist Republican (He’s a registered Democrat! He was in a big brother program and mentored two black kids!).

You’ve got claims that the eyewitness was unreliable and that another witness says Zimmerman was on top of Martin. You’ve got arguments over whether Zimmerman called Martin a “coon” or a “goon” in audio from the 911 call. You’ve got arguments about whether the police video shows Zimmerman with none of the reported wounds, or whether it actually shows a cut and some blood, or whether it doesn’t show nearly enough blood to back up his story.

I think it’s safe to say that none of us knows what really happened yet, and none of us has enough information to form a qualified opinion about it. It’s not that we don’t have facts. It’s that we don’t have enough facts to draw consistent interpretations from many of the ambiguous facts that already exist.

But that doesn’t stop people from taking the facts and rumors they’ve heard and drawing concrete conclusions about whether or not George Zimmerman is guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin and what exactly that means for race and society and gun control and everything else.

I’ve learned that it’s good to wait at least 48 hours to take a stand on a new controversy, because new facts will come out and make you look stupid. But in this case, I might want to wait at least a month.