On Being Redeemed from Violence
I'm not a pacifist, but a violent man trying to follow Jesus and live into the non-violence of the Kingdom of God coming. The theory of just conflict (whether just war or the just exercise of violence at a local level) is aimed at curtailing our inexorable tendencies toward the escalation of reciprocal violence in a cursed creation. The idea is that the evils of retributory violence are sometimes made necessary by the victimization of the innocent and the incorrigibility of some victimizers. The idea is emphatically not that those necessary evils are to be celebrated as though they were a positive good. Even capital punishment may be made necessary when every alternative means of restraining evil has been exhausted, but the practice becomes evil and gravely sinful when those intermediate means are disregarded or half-heartedly attempted. While I make no assumptions about the state of George Zimmerman's soul, it seems pretty clear that "stand your ground," both as a law and as an ethos occasion and even celebrate such disregard and half-hearted effort.

The vocation of a policeman or a soldier is much like that of anyone who wields temporal power. We are especially called to pray for such persons because they bear a heavy load so that we may be free, prosperous, and alive all at the same time. As St. Augustine observed, to wield temporal power is to be unavoidably corrupted by it. Those in authority are faced with limited resources, expansive need, intransigent competing interests, and ungovernable human hearts. Choosing a positive good is the exception; seeking the lesser evil is the rule. That's the price of administrating the civitas terrena. Aspiring to such a burden or unilaterally assuming the role as an an armed individual without the warranting vocation by God and the society so governed is at least the near occasion of grave evil if not evil itself.

Many Christians of late have manifested the tendency to fantasize about unrealities that prepare us to excuse our implication in violence and death-dealingl. You likely know what I mean because you've heard the interrogations of the bloody hypothetical. "What would you do if a group of armed assailants broke into your house to kill you, your wife, and your children? The questions entice us to spend the precious moments of our short lives rehearsing for random disaster and we gradually accommode ourselves mentally, emotionally, and rhetorically to unreal violence. We forget, of course, that the sheer randomness, novelty, and overwhelming unlikelihood of such situations guarantees that they are sui generis. We have no idea of the hypothetical circumstance, the number of involved parties, the nature and disposition of your assailant(s), or our own capacities, so we lack the script to prepare for our role as the would-be, crack shot action hero that we've seen in the movies. And yet in our fantasizing about death-dealing, we've conditioned ourselves to be suspicious of the world and afraid of other people. We've already adusted ourselves to the dire burden of ending the life of a nameless "someone" and who bears the image and likeness of God. Invariably and inevitably the "someone" morphs into the hypothetical "anyone."

We might as well be prepping ourselves for the possibility of a busload of penguins crashing into our house!

All the while, this frenetic rehearsal comes at the expense of contemplating why we shouldn't go about dreaming of and practicing for death-dealing.

Wouldn't we be more obedient to Christ's calling to "take no worry for tomorrow" (Cf. Matt. 6.34) if we were to become just as studied and practiced at spiritual practices of peacemaking and restraint and the discernment of hopeful possibility? Wouldn't this habit of seeking of the Kingdom of God and his righteousness FIRST sharpen our sapiential skill to redeem the world in more high-stress situations of charged strife? Wouldn't this be a better embodiment of the cross and resurrection than rehearsing so as to become more efficient when contributing to the world's further destruction?
Imagine that Zimmerman could calm his outrage at the "assholes" that "always get away." 

Imagine that he humbled himself to obey the dispatcher urging him not to pursue Martin. 

Imagine that he had left the damn gun in the car rather than letting it stoke his bravado and escalate the confrontation. 

Imagine that he hadn't accommodated himself to the fantasy of being the heroic defender of his domain and arrogated to himself the responsibilities of a police officer.

It seems clear that the law and a violent man's fantasy conspired to bring about the death of a man who had committed no crime and who wasn't initially a threat to anyone.

I write to professing, pro-life Christians especially: From where did you learn "stand your ground," meeting fear with fear, violence with violence, or the threat of death with death-dealing? God the Father did not stand his ground. God the Father did not even withhold his only begotten Son, but gave him up for us all (Cf. Rom. 8:32). Neither did Jesus stand his ground. Though he was God of very God, he humbled himself and took the form of a servant, even to death on a cross (Cf. Phil. 2). St. Paul prefaces the latter passage with "Let this same mind be in you as was in Christ Jesus." I say "stand your ground" is heresy. I say, TO HELL with "stand your ground." That's where it came from and where it's destined to go. We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.