More than a month ago, Trayvon Martin was killed.  We are still trying to find out what happened, precisely, amid cascading failures by local police, temporary steps and side-steps to shore up this or take a peek into that.  The static view to date of these "stand your ground" killings shows us later-stage symptoms of an American disease no longer in remission: Racism.

You need not be an expert to know something has gone terribly wrong in life and liberty here, and feel a cold, clammy, unsettling change in the American character and nation, whatever its superficial and surface appearances may say.

The symptoms inform us we have individuals in our midst affected with this brain-rotting disease, usually catching it from family and friends -- people we always let through our defensive perimeters.  Most of the rest of us are unaffected enough, not carriers, content to allow signs and symptoms in others just slide.

If you think Trayvon's death is not about racism, check out the shooter's racist slurs on 9-1-1 tapes, the ones we've had drilled into our minds.  You could also ask how much we would know about the killer right now if things were switched around -- say, if the shooter was an older black man, just gunned down a white teen.  If this were so, everything would be fully and completely known about the man by now -- except, perhaps, the shooter's favorite pair of socks, what he had for Christmas dinner in 1984.

Yes:  This looks like a gunpowder lynching, although the jury's still out, so to speak.  This is part of the point, of course, getting this matter into court, as we are a nation and people of laws.  This will be tricky.  There has been no arrest as yet in the month's time that has continued to pass since the teen's was stopped cold.

That we must all push and press so hard for an arrest speaks volumes -- more than any sane people would care to openly display -- about the effort required to track, locate, and grab onto justice, ambushed at last, in a land supposedly overflowing, positively gushing with the stuff.

This situation also says more than we should like about these "stand your ground" laws on the books in the first place, now in so many places, too.  These are armed, paranoid-fantasy playgrounds come true, waiting for iffy members of the already-tipsy lock-and-load set to get one more load of rotten brain fuel pumped into their heads by hate-spewing Rush and Fox, and then, off we will all go, we will ride the shoot-'em-up merry-go-round all over again.

Next treasure-hunting tear-around-crazy, the next armed lunatic should be through, looking for trouble, just ten or twenty minutes or so -- or, maybe, at the mall, around town, all through the 'hood, maybe the bus station...

Most stand-your-ground shootings never get much attention, not after the initial headline splash.  Even killings on porches -- a supposed gray area in this type of law -- never hold up long in the press.  How many of these legalized murders have come to pass since these laws came to pass, too -- dozens? Hundreds?  Who is keeping score -- counties, or just families?

Trayvon's tale has come to pass as one of many deaths, singled out, but in same-and-similar situations under these murderous laws.  So many contrasting elements in this story, between The Shooter and The Shot, this time out.  Plus, none of those other killings had all this gripping sound, all this audio around -- or you would have heard all the tapes by now, for every single killing, over and over, until you thought the sound clips were going to be unloaded and drilled into your head, forced to live in your mind, mate with your DNA, reproduce as heart worms, as shrews in your brain.

The NRA of course, will not be happy until everyone over the age of three is permitted to carry, and in all environments, bar none -- especially in church, at sporting events, and in bars.  Then, they will work on getting us all upgrades, and then, multiples.  It all ends with a Big Bang in the NRA-hive-mind, when everyone -- every man, woman, and child above age three -- has a complete, full, and extensive personal collection of NBC inventory and home armory:  Nuclear, Biological, Chemical.

By then, of course, the laws will then be officially and jovially nicknamed, the "just go ahead and blink -- I dare you" statutes.

Probably, the NRA and the press will go with the "Act-React-Acts," attempting to invoke courts, lawyers, and the cool, calm, rule of law.  The rest of us will keep seeing Dirty Harry's long barrel looking down at us, a sweating, faceless maniac in a toothy, Chesire Cat grin -- and, us, all of us, down on our backs, down on the ground, not meaning to make anyone's day.