Vengeance Is NOT Justice

There have been reports of George Zimmerman going into hiding because of death threats.
It was an appropriate act for Americans to protest peacefully the miscarriage of justice that let George Zimmerman go for six weeks after he shot Trayvon Martin.  At no point was it appropriate for crackpots to make threats, of any kind, regardless of the racial tensions or miscarriages of justice in that jurisdiction.
When I read the following this morning, it appears to be the first, and mercifully the only, instance of  reported violence that used the pretext of Trayvon Martin's killing as an excuse.  I have to wonder if that is really what happened here, or if this is a case of prolonged racial tension and the use of racial slurs by both sides of the dispute simply erupting and being attributed to the Trayvon Martin killing.
Those who like to throw around the term 'playing the race card' pretend that there are not still areas of deep racial tension, and wrongly deny that racist attitudes and blatant racism exist.  Certainly overall there have been many improvements.  Racism has changed, in many respects it has improved, but it has not disappeared, nor is the existing racism at a tolerable level.  More progress needs to occur.
The following video is an example of that.  It is an example not of violence BECAUSE of Trayvon Martin - and I'm skeptical that was actually said  - but an example of exactly what happened to Trayvon Martin, someone decided to take matters into their own hands.  First the man who made racial slurs ordering kids to stop playing basketball in the road; then the neighbors who attacked him.  Both were wrong.  The man who was beaten was no more empowered than George Zimmerman to enforce anything and he certainly wasn't in any position to order people around.  Asking them to stop, without racial slurs is very different from giving orders or making threats.  That is the job for police.  It is also arguably a problem for communities that lack a safe place like parks as an alternative to kids playing in the streets.  But this man did not deserve a beating, he did not deserve being chased onto his porch.  There was equally no excuse for the far worse conduct of beating a man half to death.  That was not justice, that was vengeance. 
Perhaps there is a problem with justice in this community; the refusal of people in the area to cooperate with the police in solving this crime as well as the tensions suggest it.  But it is the law, and courts resolving conflicts, and dealing with crime, that distinguishes justice from vengeance.  Justice is proportional; the violence that consistently results from the Shoot first laws is not.  That disproportional violence is itself part of the injustice that boils over in incidents like this.  What is not addressed in this report was mention if threats of violence with firearms had been part of the existing tension on this street.  But a civil society, one that exists under the rule of law is NOT a society that takes the law into their own hands.  That was true of George Zimmerman's actions in the Trayvon Martin case, where he harassed and pursued a black teen who was doing nothing wrong.  It is true here of the man who orders his neighbors around with demeaning racial slurs.  And it is true of the neighbors who responded violently, severely injuring this man.  All of those were instances of people taking the law into their own hands, and all of them were wrong.  Justice, unlike vengeance, is proportionate, and unemotional.  This kind of violence, and the Shoot First shootings are vigilanteism, not justice, and not the rule of law.