Niquii77,
Her punch is on the video.
But you don’t get to choose how the person you assault reacts to that assault. If you break into someone’s house, you don’t get to argue that he should have defended himself with his great big fists, or that he should have called 911, or he should have run. In Florida anyway, the home owner has the right to shoot you. Dead. He doesn’t have to take the way of least harm, he doesn’t have to shoot to wound you, he doesn’t have to run away if he safely can. He gets to shoot you dead, even if you are a small woman or a 200 pound football player or a teenager.
The question will be, if there is a trial, does a person who is physically touched by a punch or a knee to the groin or an open slap on the face have the right to defend himself. If so, then it doesn’t matter if he punched her or slapped her or spit on her. The question will be does he have the right to defend himself.
Before that, you have to determine who started it. The police report is written in the manner that he started it. So that will be the first question.
Beyond that, it’s not just legal but ethical. Would you look kindly on someone who shot a running teenager in the back for trespassing? Sure, it’s legal, but it doesn’t mean it’s right.
I guess that is one way of saying it.
It appears obvious that she was attempting to keep him from reaching the spot at the bar vacated by the man moving away from the bar from right to left as the video starts. You can see him try and push past her, and see her continue slide to her left. Maybe she was trying to save a spot at the bar for someone else, who knows. He doesn’t “take the hint” as it were and she reacts violently, kneeing him in the groin and striking him in the face. She got a fat lip.
Both acted stupidly. But calling her a victim is taking political correctness way too far.
Unfortunately for the narrative here, there is video that shows the woman attacking the guy, so we don’t have to wait for the trial and forensic evidence to establish that Martin was banging Zimmerman’s head into the pavement when he was shot.
This is what I saw:
The man pushes his way up to the bar. The women turns over her shoulder to say something to the man. She steps to her left and sticks out her leg to prevent him from reaching the bar. At the same time, the man is pushing through another woman on the left. The man pulls forward to the bar moving her leg that she extended. Woman turns around and places left arm on man’s neck and has right arm raised from what it looks like pointing back towards the bar. Man grabs right arm and pushes woman back into men. Woman brings legs up pushing it against man. Woman pushes back against man releasing arms, kicks him, and punches him in the face with her left hand. Man has left hand on woman while keeping her away and punches her in the face with his right hand.
@dstark Because her “punch” was so poorly executed should it be referred to a closed-fisted swipe against the face?
Niquii77, I wrote what I wanted to write.
Unless you’ve done an economic study on what would happen if football were eliminated, you can’t make simplistic statements like that with any confidence.
An athlete from a low-income family would benefit if his best shot at paying for an education (granted an “education” that might not meet the standards of the average CC parent) were eliminated? Would the University of Alabama be able to offer all those academic scholarships if the football program didn’t generate such huge profits? For FY2014:
http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2015/02/alabama_athletics_profit_2014.html
As I said up-thread, like it or not, college football is big business in many places. If you eliminate it, the economic impact would be huge (possibly catastrophic) to the local population. You can’t just do away with something that generates so much revenue and pretend that everyone will be better off.
Not every SEC football player is an academic lightweight either. Even though they may be in the minority, there are those who do manage to get a quality education while excelling at football too. And it’s not like football players are the only college students in sketchy majors.
I’m upset with the state of college football but I am also pragmatic and realize that the horse has been out of the barn for a long while. Big money and it’s illicit influence on college sports is here to stay, but we should take steps to neutralize it. The extension of guaranteed scholarships is a good start.
As for players’ behavior, well there will always be some knuckleheads in the group. Again the lure of money that leads to treating these teenagers like monarchs corrupts the kids whom have a fragile social/psychological foundation to begin with. Knucklehead parents (and hangers-on) and permissive coaches make knucklehead kids worse.
While I believe that restoring the ‘freshmen not eligible’ rule would be helpful, that’s a no-go because of cost of fielding freshman teams in addition to varsity squads. These days big time schools are loathe to add costs; they are too busy cutting non-revenue sports. Is there even anything such as JV anymore at the FBS and D1 schools?
Yes, student-athletes have to be held accountable. College shouldn’t be a daycare center. Personal responsibility is essential for success in life. If some players are too dang hard-headed or narcissistic to wake up and grab the bull by the horns, well I’m uncertain as to what we can do about that.
As for FSU particularly, from the news reports it does seem that in the case of the freshman recruit, the woman at the bar was a bit of a hot mess and likely instigated the confrontation. Frankly, I am in the school of opinion that if anyone physically attacks you, male or female, you knock 'em silly if you can. De he have an opportunity to walk away before she gestured that she was going to punch him? I don’t know.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the dollars spent on football in some area would disappear from the area economy if football was eliminated, with devastating effect. But if you think about it for a minute, you realize the logical fallacy in that belief.
Suppose college football was eliminated. Would all the Alabama fans stop spending the entertainment dollars they used to spend on tickets, tailgating, food and merchandise? No, of course not! They wouldn’t stuff that money in a mattress. They’d spend it somewhere else: on professional sports, monster trucks, the opera, or whatever their second choice of entertainment was. The money wouldn’t disappear from the economy. Football-related businesses would suffer, but other businesses would reap a windfall, and the overall local economy would be about the same. There would be no economic catastrophe, just a routine reallocation of spending priorities such as happens all the time when tastes change.
To be sure, the few schools that actually make money from football would lose that money. You may think we ought to protect the revenue stream of those few colleges. I do not find that a compelling argument.
I think the good news is we are finally seeing Universities take some control of their football programs. This sort of behavior has been going on for years-what is different is that in the past the entire University/Big Time Sports system was focused on protecting the football program and the University by keeping this kind of stuff quiet. Paterno changed all that and the system to protect the athletes and football has broken down. No University President wants to be running a Florida State football type program so I am hopeful we are going to see some changes for the better.
You’re assuming that these football fans are all locally based. Many are not even in the state, so I don’t know how you can guarantee they’d spend it there. Look at the hotel rates for game-day weekends. Do you really think they could charge $300 a night for folks to come into town to see the University of Alabama Opera Theatre (the only opera in town)?
The money wouldn’t necessarily “disappear from the economy,” but it wouldn’t likely end up in Tuscaloosa or even Alabama. Like it or not, there’s a huge economy built around that football team, including Crimson Tide merchandise. The University of Alabama is the New York Yankees/Dallas Cowboys of college football. I think it’s terribly naive to think you could just eliminate that football program and everything would remain the same. I can’t even imagine how it would impact the university’s fundraising, which rises and falls with the success of that team.
Also, what professional sports are Alabamians going to spend their dollars on, minor league baseball? They’d have to travel to Atlanta to see Major League Baseball or the NFL. How does that benefit the State of Alabama?
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion. As the parent of a scholarship student, however, it’s pretty compelling to me.
@ 69,
You are not from the south are you?
People down South would not simply reallocate resources to other entertainment or nonentertainment activites. There would in fact be an economic decline because without football spending would go done and according to the economic multiplier model so would government tax receipts and so forth. The same thing would happen if the NFL didn’t play games because of a player strike. Sure, some of the dollars that used to spent on the NFL would go elsewhere but it wouldn’t be a simple reallocation of those dollars. There would be lots of spending lost and restaurants and hotels would feel it worse than other businesses.
In addition, the same jocks that screw up would still screw up in other ways and lots of jocks, without the structure of football and without their salaries and/or scholarships, would screw up even more.
No way on earth is anyone taking away Alabama football from Alabamans. Try again. Next argument. That isn’t going to happen.
This is simply untrue. There was a hockey lockout a few years ago. In Canadian cities, hockey is huge. But hockey fans did not sit home twiddling their thumbs on game nights; they spent their money on other options.
College football fans in the south would not sit on their couches, vacant and glazed-eyed, if football were eliminated. That’s ridiculous. They would, instead, do something else with their money and time. The money would still be spent, but it would be spent on other options. Some businesses would prosper, and others would suffer, just as happens all the time. It should not be a public priority to prop up football-related businesses in the south.
You’re probably right that it won’t happen. I just said that I thought it would be good for the schools and athletes.
LucieTheLakie, I understand that it’s a subject close to your heart, and my view that it would be better for kids in general and probably your kid also if we hadn’t gotten to this point is unlikely to sway you.
You say that like it’s a good thing. :-?
Whether people in Tuscaloosa, Columbus, Tallahassee or South Bend would spend their money on other options if big time football was not being played on Saturdays in the fall is not, in my opinion, the right question. Sure, the 97,000 people who showed up at the Shoe to watch the Ohio State spring game this year may still spend their disposable income on other things. But it likely will not be money spent at Ohio State, or by license from the NCAA. Virtually every other sport (excepting men’s basketball and maybe women’s) wouldn’t draw that many fans for a season, let alone for a practice.
At most schools, dumping football is probably a net financial positive, not least because those schools will immediately cut 85 female scholarships and a couple million out of their budget for women’s sports. So goodbye to fencing, waterpolo, women’s crew, field hockey, maybe baseball and softball. At the big schools we are discussing here not only do you lose all of those extra scholarships, but you lose millions of dollars getting spent in other places within the university.
And I at least never said that most players in the SEC are academic lightweights. I think if you saw a college football playbook you would understand that it takes at least as much intellectual wattage to master that as an intro to whatever class. What I am saying is that at many schools, including many SEC schools, the football players are athletes first, and students if and when it does not interfere with their athletic responsibilities. We should acknowledge that, and use some of the revenue these kids generate through their efforts to provide for them and protect them in the future.
Again, the players are getting exploited, and many people are getting rich. At the same time, some kid whose jersey sells in the college bookstore for $75 can’t buy a pizza, or put gas in his car. And yes, I understand that cost of attendance scholarships will help this. But it is a drop in the bucket.
And just because I am compelled to, @LucieTheLakie I understand that people in Alabama think that the sun rises and sets on the Bear, but Alabama is one of maybe ten-fifteen schools that are truly marquee programs. Certainly Notre Dame, USC, Ohio State, Florida State, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Michigan can make as good of if not better than claim as THE program based on history and tradition. It is why college football is such big business. If it was just about Alabama, no one outside the southeast would care.
On the contrary. I wish I lived in Utopia too, but there’s no such place! Look, I’m as big a bleeding heart as the next guy, but I’m also a realist and a pragmatist, and I guess by your standards a hypocrite. Unfortunately, I’m just not so principled that I’d sink my family into debt to provide my kid with a decent education.
And while you quote Upton Sinclair for me, are you equally outraged that the Ivies and their like continue to fundraise voraciously for their already HUMONGOUS endowments while barely increasing the size of their undergraduate student bodies? I could have scraped up the money to afford an Ivy (based on their net price calculators), but my high-stats kid just wasn’t Ivy material. We followed the conventional CC advice and sought out merit money, but I guess that makes us willfully blind in addition to being selfish. Would every decision you make in life meet Sinclair’s high standards too? To be clear, one can “understand” something and still feel he has few alternatives.
So move to the South (I’m assuming you’re not from there) and vote for the public priorities you think actually matter. I’m not sure what gives you the right to sit in your armchair and dictate what public priorities should be in states where you don’t actually reside.
That’s your inference.
I say it like it’s an economic reality. You don’t just do away with something that big and act like there are no repercussions.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here, @Ohiodad5. I don’t live in Alabama. I grew up in Philadelphia rooting for the Fighting Irish while my older brother rooted for the Crimson Tide. (He also rooted for the New York Yankees. For the record, we both despise the Cowboys. 
) I only root for the Crimson Tide today because the school has been so generous with my kid.
I also completely agree with you that student-athletes deserve better than what they’re getting today. The NCAA is one of the most corrupt organizations around, but I’m not sure what any of us can do about that.
So rooting for the Tide is like rooting for General Motors. 