More than a year after the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, legal, social and cultural questions raised by the case are still being discussed across the country. The Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations will analyze a number of these questions during the 10^th annual CSRRR Spring Lecture, which will bring together experts from nine different departments at UF along with keynote speaker, New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow.

“At Close Range: The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin,” will take place Wednesday at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180. The panel presentations will be from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and Blow’s keynote lecture will be from noon to 1:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public and law school parking restrictions will be lifted in the green lots. The event will also be webcast at http://mediasite.video.ufl.edu/Mediasite/Play/0bb612b41ae84a359f258f135abb99321d.

The panels will look at a wide variety of issues raised by the case, from a multitude of academic perspectives. Some of the featured panels include “Jim Crow Riding High: The 21^st Century Assault on African-American Voting Rights in Florida,” “Half-Baked: Weed, Race and the Demonization of Trayvon Martin,” and “Racial Profiling, Security and Human Rights.”

“The Trayvon Martin case is a social touchstone precisely because it serves up topics we’re uncomfortable talking about in public, including race, crime, policing, interracial crime, use of deadly force, black crime victims, Southern race relations, media representations of race, and gun control,” said Katheryn Russell-Brown, director of the CSRRR and Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law. “The case offers an important opportunity for us to learn about, discuss and debate these myriad and overlapping issues. Our Spring Lecture event will contribute to the national discussion of the case and emphasize policy recommendations.”

The departments of political science; health services; philosophy; sociology, criminology and law; journalism and communications; history; English; anthropology, and African-American studies will all be represented. The academic papers, which comprise the basis for the panel discussions, will be compiled for the first installment in a new series in collaboration with UF Law’s Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center. The panel agendas and abstracts for the papers can be seen in the Collections of the UF Law Scholarship Repository at, http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/csrrr_events/10thspringlecture/panels/. For more information regarding the spring lecture, please visit the CSRRR homepage, http://www.law.ufl.edu/academics/centers/csrrr.

The University of Florida Levin College of Law’s CSRRR is committed to fostering communities of dialogue on race. The center creates and supports programs designed to enhance race-related curriculum development for faculty, staff and students in collegiate and professional schools. Of the five U.S. law schools with race centers, the CSRRR is uniquely focused on curriculum development.

About Charles Blow

After graduating cum laude from Grambling State University, keynote speaker Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper’s graphics director, a position he held for nine years. The Louisiana native went on to become the paper’s design director for news before leaving in 2006 to become the art director of National Geographic Magazine.

Blow often appears on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, Starting Point and AC360. He has also appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and Hardball with Chris Matthews, Fox News’ Fox and Friends, the BBC and Al Jazeera, as well as numerous radio programs.

Lott, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, argued Wednesday that those with concealed weapons permits should be allowed to carry them onto campus.

The Federalist Society brought Lott to campus.

Criminals do not care if guns are prohibited on school campuses, Lott said. In fact, it makes it easier for them to kill people, he argued.

“Rather than creating safe zones for victims, we’re creating them for criminals,” said Lott, who has written many books and articles on guns and gun control.

Lott argued that a criminal that wanted to kill many people on a campus would not go through the process of getting a proper permit. Nor would he or she worry about the punishment for bringing a gun on campus considering the other punishments coming or likely death of the criminal.

Lott conducted a study on multiple victim public shootings between 1977 and 1999 and found that all of the killers either died (75 percent) or expected to die (25 percent).

Because of that, there is no way to deter them from killing, so the only way to end their massacre would be to kill them first, Lott said.

The greater probability they would be stopped, the greater the deterrence, Lott said.

He said about three percent of Florida’s population has concealed weapons permits. If a killer went into a classroom, he or she would not know who had a gun and would not know who to shoot first. Instead of the killer being able to take many people out, someone would shoot him or her first, Lott said.

Lott argued that the media does not do a good job covering when a law-abiding citizen using a gun stops a potential crime.

In 2001, he said, the media wrote approximately 190,000 words on gun crimes, and not one story mentioned a citizen using a gun to protect himself or someone else.

And while Lott understands that a murder is more newsworthy than someone stopping a crime, he gave examples of newsworthy events that the media ignored that someone stopped the crime with a gun.

In 2002, at Appalachian Law School in Virginia, a shooter opened fire. A couple of students ran to their cars and got their guns and eventually subdued the shooter.

Out of 218 stories, only three mentioned that students subdued him with guns. One of the students was interviewed heavily and not quoted. Lott said every reporter knew about it, and 47 reporters interviewed one of the students that stopped the killer. The Washington Post said students pounced on the attacker but did not mention their guns.

Lott used statistics from Florida concealed weapons permits holders to address whether chaos would break out in the classroom. Between Oct. 1, 1987 and Dec. 31, 2008, Florida issued 1.46 million concealed weapons permits. Out of all of those, there have only been 166 weapons violations, and most of them were accidentally carrying a weapon into a gun-free zone, Lott said.

Further, Lott said that out of five million concealed weapons permit holders in the country in 2007, there were only nine murders.