You really can’t make this stuff up.
George Zimmerman, the former neighborhood watchman who was acquitted in 2013 in the killing of Trayvon Martin, is reportedly teaming up with a Florida gun-store owner who wants to make his shop a “Muslim-free zone” to sell prints of the Confederate flag with the slogan “The 2nd protects the first,” Salon reports.
Of course he is.
As Salon notes, Zimmerman called the catchphrase a “double entendre, because the first flag I painted on this canvas was an American flag, but I decided to repaint over it with the Confederate Flag when I heard [Florida Gun Supply owner] Andy Hallinan was getting sued by [the Council on American-Islamic Relations]. The second flag I painted was the Battle Flag [of the Confederacy]—which we need in America in order to protect the first.”
In addition, he says, the slogan also points out that the Second Amendment protects the First Amendment. Zimmerman started his partnership with Hallinan after he heard about the backlash the gun-shop owner was receiving in response to his claim that “the core tenets [of the Islamic faith] is to establish a one-world order and do so by violent acts” and that political correctness “has become overly extreme here in the United States, and causing loss of life that we could prevent if we looked at Islam for what it is.”
In a YouTube (Original) Mini-Documentary produced by Hallinan’s store, Florida Gun Supply, Hallinan and Zimmerman can be seen discussing the impact of the backlash.
“I didn’t want to see Hallinan give up the fight simply for financial reasons,” Zimmerman said, adding that CAIR had “endless resources, they have tons of money—I just wanted to do my part.”
Each print of the flag will be sold for $50, while one person will get a copy of the painting itself, which “could be worth up to $100,000.”
Read more at Salon.