Zimmerman should be behind bars. One of the very odd yet predictable things I've heard over the last several days from the right-wing nuttery in general is this saying, "The folks on the left are trying to make this into a racial issue." Please. If you look into the statistics, minorities get stopped and frisked at alarming rates. If Zimmerman were a cop we would never have heard about this story. And one would think that a cop would have the good enough sense not to mutter racial epitaphs into a cell phone just prior to killing a young black man.

One night I was carrying two suitcases out of the subway exit in the inner city and two black men approached me from two sides -- I immediately concluded that I was being mugged. "Need a taxi?" I did need a taxi and I had 2 choices; what luck. Despite that experience, I would probably make the same negative snap decision today. So why did Zimmerman follow the shoplifter around until police arrived and not do the same for Martin-- that was not "impulsive action"? Seems like there's conflicting evidence for the same man's brain response. Was Zimmerman looking for trouble, while I was just looking for a taxi? More controlled experiments are needed, not just "what would you do" TV, to make the conclusion about the effect of race in this. We need to control both the neighborhood and the race of the participants to make the conclusion you give. Remember that there are also experiments to show that toddlers and even rats will help another in need, even if it means sharing food that they otherwise would have all to themselves. What about that (black) hero who covered up and saved the stranger while a subway train rolled over them -- wasn't that a snap judgement? Who is his right mind would do that? If this psychoanalysis is even partly right, is it your conclusion to deny guns to anyone without police training? Ahhh, and, remember the pro gun control black journalist in Washington DC who shot a teen ager who was slinking around his swimming pool at night -- with all his background, was he still a puppet to this "fear response"? All journalists should study that case. I think there's way more the this story.

Great article... ....

I wouldn't mind Malcolm Gladwell's bank account, that's for sure. But I think the wanna-be aspect stops there. I haven't read Blink in its entirety, but Robert Burton, the neurologist I interview, said Gladwell had far too much faith in the wisdom of these snap judgements. Burton spends more time exploring the dark side of those instant opinions.