What bothers me is the astounding number of conclusory statements in the affidavit with no factual basis documented in the affidavit: Zimmerman “assumed Martin was a criminal”. Martin “was profiled by” Zimmerman. Zimmerman “falsely assumed” Martin was going to commit a crime. Zimmerman “disregarded the police dispatcher”.

So, its a canard that the media has focused on the neighborhood watch thing. He was no more on a neighborhood watch than I was the other day when my vacationing-in-Florida neighbor’s alarm went off and I went outside to look.

There is no reasonable way to parse a statement “We don’t need you to do X” as equivalent to “do not do X.” The statement “We don’t need you to do X” means that it is not necessary to perform X, not that performing X is forbidden. Had the dispatcher wanted to instruct Zimmerman not to follow Martin, he would have used the simpler words “Stop following him.”

Despite this rather elementary grammatical fact, the media has repeatedly claimed that Zimmerman was disobeying the dispatcher’s instructions. The affiant, therefore, must not have been attesting to his own review of the evidence – he was just repeating the media take on the whole story.

Kind of a clear sign the whole case is media-driven, not evidence-driven.

Affidavit: http://media.trb.com/media/acrobat/2012-04/69353440.pdf

Transcript: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/326700-full-transcript-zimmerman.html

How about standardized briefings for police departments to give to neighborhood watch leaders and members, covering such questions as rights to or prohibitions from:
carrying a gun, loaded or unloaded
using said gun
other rights of confrontation, or “citizen’s arrest”?
Most SYG supporters assume that SYG is not a license to stalk someone and corner them, but what did Zimmerman believe?

Each State’s gun laws are different, so each State (and some local governments with distinct laws) should have its own distinctive briefing.