Figure it Out

Not Guilty

Eighteen year old Kyle Rittenhouse is free.  He killed two and took another’s arm in those fateful few moments in Kenosha in August of 2020.  This week a jury of the citizens of Kenosha, found him not guilty of felony manslaughter.  We can’t know what the full reasoning of the jury was – but we can imagine that they accepted his attorney’s claim that Kyle was; “defending himself”.  The doctrine of self-defense is one of the few ways our law justifies intentionally taking a life or maiming someone.

Kyle was not an innocent teenager, thrust into a situation fraught with danger.  He intentionally placed himself there, armed with an AR-15 rifle. (By the way, the “AR” stands for Armalite, the first company to make this type of rifle, not “automatic rifle”.  The AR-15 is not automatic, it is semi-automatic, and requires a trigger pull for each round fired).  

Attracted to Danger

Kyle went to “protect property” from the “rioters”.  He ended up in a car lot, and after shots were supposedly fired (not from Rittenhouse), one man came up and tried to take Kyle’s gun away from him.  Kyle shot him four times.

After shooting the first man, Kyle ran for it, pursued by about a dozen people.  He fell to the ground and was kicked in the head.  He fired two shots at the “kicker”.  Both missed.  Kyle got back to his feet, and a man struck him on the shoulder with a skateboard and tried to take the rifle.  Rittenhouse shot him in the chest, killing him.  A fourth person approached with a handgun.  Kyle shot him in the arm.

If Kyle had been in the hallway of his Illinois high school, Antioch Community, with that AR-15, the men who attempted to get his rifle would be hailed as heroes, and the seventeen year-old would be a “school shooter”.  By virtue of the laws of neighboring Wisconsin, it was legal for him to be armed with a rifle on the streets, in the middle of “civil unrest”.  And when it all came down, he wasn’t even placed in custody after the shootings. It wasn’t that the police didn’t know.  They simply sent him on his way, after taking two lives and irrevocably changing a third. The Kenosha police perceived Kyle to be on “their side”.

Scared Boy

Eighteen year-old Kyle Rittenhouse is neither the horrific villain progressives paint him or the vaunted hero of the Second Amendment set.  It is obvious that he was a scared teenager, a “boy in a man’s job”, who put himself in a situation he couldn’t handle.  The boy who clearly saw the Marine advertisement:  “we run towards danger when others run away”, saw himself as that heroic figure.  But when courage was really needed, all Kyle could do was hide behind the AR 15 strapped to his chest (so it couldn’t be taken away).

There is no question that, once the shooting began, Kyle was in fear for his life, one of the fundamental tenets of “self-defense”.  “Grown men” were trying to take away his gun, his shield, the symbol and tool of his assumed “heroic manhood”.  The question the jury had to answer was when Kyle took on the adult responsibility of bearing arms in a time and place of civil disorder, did he somehow lose some of that self-defense protection.  Those who backed him say that it’s common sense:  he had a gun, he was in fear for his life, and he used the gun.  He is not guilty, and those who tried to take his gun away from him assumed all the risk and responsibility.  Their lives were forfeited by their own actions.

Assumed Responsibility

But that reasoning is simplistic (though it obviously worked with the jury).  Again, if he were in the halls of Antioch Community High School there would have been no question that he did not have that right of self-defense.  If he were in the process of committing another crime, say robbing a bank, again he can’t claim it.  So the legal question was, does a self-appointed vigilante (in the defined sense – a civilian who takes on law enforcement duties without legal authority) have the same rights as a police officer might?

If Kyle had been a police officer, and someone tried to take away his gun, then we would all agree that the officer would have the “right” to protect it, and himself.  But Kyle wasn’t a police officer, he was a “wannabe” police officer.  And the police in Kenosha “on the streets” seemed to welcome Kyle and his vigilante friends to the scene.  So how much responsibility do they bear?

And there is the mostly unspoken question of “white privilege”.  Neither Rittenhouse, nor any of the people he shot, were people of color.  But if we closed our eyes and saw Kyle as a Black seventeen year-old with that AR-15 strapped to his chest, would the outcome have been the same?  Would the police have been so welcoming?  I think we all can agree that things might have been very different.

Precedence

That Kyle Rittenhouse was found “not guilty” (of course that isn’t the same thing as innocent) doesn’t establish a legal “precedent”.  The facts of the Kenosha event are narrowly defined, and local courts don’t set precedent anyway.  The same fact pattern with a different prosecutor, judge and jury might well have had a different outcome.  The real danger of the Rittenhouse trial is the perceived “precedent” it creates in the public mind.  How many “vigilante” groups will appear in the next time of civil disorder?  And if they start shooting – are they “school shooters” or “heroic helpers of authority”?  

We better figure that out.