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Part of America sees the not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman case as a travesty of justice, a modern iteration of Jim Crow, where a white man walks free after shooting an innocent black person, in this case an unarmed Florida teenager named Trayvon Martin.

Another part sees in the verdict the emergence of another kind of civil rights movement, a gun freedom movement ultimately tested in the Zimmerman trial by a state willing to forego hard evidence in order to try to prosecute what police originally deemed an open and shut self-defense case.

Prosecutors in the case said Zimmerman had evil in his heart and that he crossed legal boundaries when deciding to follow an innocent Trayvon before shooting him on a rainy February night last year. Zimmerman supporters, though, say he was providing a civic duty in a post-9/11 America, where safety and crime concerns have become paramount even as overall crime rates have dropped to historic lows.

The overarching theme of the Zimmerman trial and its verdict is the way it points to an emerging 鈥渟iege mentality鈥� that鈥檚 driving Americans apart, to the point where Trayvon and Zimmerman traded blows and gun fire instead of respectful inquiry, writes Charles Ray, a Sanford resident, in a verdict response in Yahoo! News.

Yet in much of the post-verdict debate, the issue comes back to the anxious interaction聽 between race and guns, fueled for many by black-on-black killings in places like Chicago as much as the alleged profiling by Zimmerman when he decided to follow Trayvon Martin for no other reason than he looked, at least to Zimmerman, like a criminal.

Some commentators say the shooting, the publicity and the eventual trial highlighted a sort of cultural settling, and perhaps sunsetting, of the civil rights movement (the Supreme Court declawing the Voting Rights Act came in the run-up to the trial}, at a time when society is tackling more vigorously the new frontier of liberalized gun and self-defense rights.

鈥淭he public conversation about race tilts toward a more enlightened attitude about civil rights, but the conversation about guns is extremely conflicted, regional, socioeconomic, and divided in every conceivable way,鈥� Austin jury consultant Doug Keene told the Monitor last month. 鈥淭his year, for all the tragic reasons we鈥檙e aware of, gun policy has become a constant presence 鈥� in our neighborhood conversations, and the lack of agreement on correct policy about guns is going to be one of the legacies of this trial.鈥�

To be sure, civil rights icons like Dr. Bernice King, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.鈥檚 daughter, Tweeted that the verdict would be a gauge on the state of equal rights in America. In a mass reaction to an early decision by Sanford police to not charge Zimmerman, civil rights activists had mentioned Trayvon in the same breath as Medgar Evers and Emmet Till, young black men whose violent deaths fueled the civil rights movement and eventual passage of equal rights legislation in the mid-1960s.

鈥淚f u really believe racism isnt a massive problem, that the oppression of minorities is not a horrific and systemic issue 鈥� U R in denial,鈥� Tweeted the actress Ellen Page.

At times, prosecutors seemed to be trying to answer an existential question instead of providing necessary facts to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to the jury.

鈥淲hat is that when a grown man, frustrated, angry, with hate in his heart, gets out of his car with a loaded gun and follows a child?鈥澛� prosecutor John Guy asked the six jurors 鈥� all women, five of them white 鈥� before they began a 16-hour deliberation that ended late Saturday night.聽 鈥淎 stranger? In the dark? And shoots him through his heart? What is that?"

But while the big picture visuals of the case echoed past civil rights battles, others believe the George Zimmerman trial instead may bolster the bold assertion by the National Rifle Association that ending persecution of lawful gun owners by the state is the new 鈥渃ivil rights movement.鈥�

鈥淎 Zimmerman acquittal will be bad news politically to the gun prohibition lobby, which is also anti-self-defense,鈥� writes Dave Workman for Examiner.com. 鈥淕un grabbers do not like it when armed citizens defend themselves, demonstrating one case at a time that guns in the right hands are good, and dead criminals pose no further threat to the community. Recent years have seen an increasing number of people successfully using guns in self-defense with no criminal charges, a scenario that seems to elicit revulsion or stony silence from the gun control crowd.鈥�

Zimmerman supporters say the state overreached, putting hate in Zimmerman鈥檚 heart, where there was none. Instead, they say, he was a would-be public servant who cared about his neighborhood, and the people in it 鈥� whether black or white. On the night of Trayvon鈥檚 death, however, Zimmerman bucked neighborhood watch protocols to follow Trayvon, whom he had pegged as suspicious and, under his breath to a dispatcher, likened to 鈥減unks鈥� that 鈥渁lways get away.鈥�

But whatever his motives and potentially questionable actions, Zimmerman was a legal gun owner who had the right to get out of his car in his own neighborhood and poke around. The jury also said he had a full right, under Florida law, to defend himself with deadly force if he felt in fear of his life.

鈥淒eath is unfortunate, a byproduct of returning force with appropriate force,鈥� said Robert Zimmerman, Jr., George Zimmerman鈥檚 brother, to CNN鈥檚 Piers Morgan. 鈥淭he jury saw the blood, they saw what Trayvon Martin did to my brother.鈥�

Of course, many of those involved in the trial see the verdict as the opposite of justice for Trayvon, punctuated by what they perceive as the bitter taste of racism, particularly when it comes to how critically society views young black men.

鈥淲e鈥檙e intellectually dishonest if we don鈥檛 acknowledge the racial undertones of this case [and questions it raises] about how far we have come in America in matters of equal justice,鈥� said Ben Crump, the Martin family鈥檚 attorney, after the verdict.

Yet while the specter of racial profiling and institutional indifference to the plight of a black boy drove myriad 鈥淛ustice for Trayvon鈥� rallies and protests, the trial itself rarely mentioned race.

Indeed, the presiding county judge, Debra Nelson, excluded the term 鈥渞acial profiling鈥� from the trial. One of the few mentions of race included Trayvon鈥檚 view of Zimmerman as a 鈥渃razy-ass cracker,鈥� a racial term for poor whites, uttered by Trayvon as he spotted Zimmerman, according to his friend, Rachel Jeantel. The two were on the phone until the moments before Trayvon was shot.

Angela Corey, the special prosecutor who arrested Zimmerman 44 days after Trayvon鈥檚 death, said after the verdict that the debate outside the courtroom didn鈥檛 always match the procedural and legal wrestling match in Courtroom 5D.

"This case has never been about race or the right to bear arms," Ms. Corey said. "We believe this case all along was about boundaries, and George Zimmerman exceeded those boundaries."

For now, George Zimmerman 鈥渘o longer has any business鈥� in front of the criminal courts, as the judge put it, though the US Justice Department said Saturday that it鈥檚 considering a plea from the NAACP to file civil rights charges against Zimmerman. In that way, the tension between expanded gun-carry rights and profiling may not have been fully resolved for George Zimmerman, at least.

鈥淭he department continues to evaluate the evidence generated during the federal investigation, as well as the evidence and testimony from the state trial,鈥� a spokesman for the Justice Department said in a statement.

Given that juries aren鈥檛 privy to any evidence or conjecture beyond what the judge allows, the Zimmerman trial proved to some that courtrooms aren鈥檛 ideal venues to resolve deeper societal prejudices, whether against minorities or gun owners.

These kinds of trials 鈥渃an 鈥� never fully answer the larger societal questions they pose,鈥� writes Andrew Cohen, in the Atlantic. 鈥淭he can never act as moral surrogates to resolve the national debates they trigger.鈥�

Police in Sanford, meanwhile, said they will return the Kel-Tec 9mm pistol used to kill Trayvon Martin to George Zimmerman.