Self-Defense
I am watching the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and have just witnessed his testimony on cross-examination. The court has just taken a ten minute break because this eighteen-year-old defendant who shot three people in Kenosha last August, broken down crying as he tried to describe the events that involved his shootings. His defense is clearly oriented towards describing this young man, who was seventeen at the time of the incident, as young and innocent and acting strictly in self-defense during the Kenosha riot on August 25th, 2020. Rittenhouse was not a resident of Kenosha, he lived in Antioch, Illinois, a small town about 20 miles from Kenosha. He was a fire department cadet who had been on social media regularly supporting Blue Lives Matter and other law enforcement activities. He and a similarly aligned buddy, drove to Kenosha to help defend property (specifically a car dealership) which had suffered damage during the riots. These were riots brought on by the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, which occurred in the wake of the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis in May, 2020.
I have a very strong reaction to seeing a young man who shot three people with an assault rifle, two of whom died from those wounds, cry about how frightened he was during the encounter, when he had no legal basis for being there and certainly not for carrying an AR-15 rifle. I understand that one of the extenuating circumstances here is that the young man was a minor of only seventeen at the time of the shooting, and that fact does bear on the likely punishment he can or should receive. I understand that he says he was there to provide EMT services to people in need and that the gun was only on his person for self-defense (according to him), but he was not an EMT. The only thing he was at the time was a cadet in the Antioch Fire Department and had received some pre-training in EMT techniques, sufficient, apparently, to allow him to work as a lifeguard at a local swimming pool. Despite all of that, my reaction to Kyle Rittenhouse is mostly governed by the fact that he is a young man who loves guns and gun culture and that acts as a primary source of entertainment for him (target and general shooting). He is clearly a law & order sort, which is fine. But he is also a young man who posted quite boldly on social media that he was trying to get famous. Therefore, the intersection of gun culture and getting famous for an otherwise unaccomplished young man in that part of the world put him squarely in the path of violent participation in the local riots last summer, which were in the news daily.
We all have a right to defend ourselves, but that right gets eclipsed rather dramatically when we purposefully put ourselves in harm’s way and when we choose to indiscriminately use deadly force to do that, especially when we are not legally allowed to own such a weapon and carry it with full-metal-jacket ammunition in the breach. This incident clearly pushes the limits of any definition of legal self-defense I can imagine. I believe there is an entirely different notion of self-defense at play here that needs to be considered.
I believe I have a right as a citizen to NOT have crazy people or just immature people running around with military-grade assault weapons. Furthermore, I have aright for the law enforcement professionals that I pay my taxes to support to not encourage vigilanteism by condoning other citizens carrying such lethal weapons on the street so long as they perceive them as being a “militia” that is on their side of the altercation. My form of self-defense is to ban all assault rifles AGAIN, as they were for several years, and add to that, handguns. I would also ban any carry privileges when it comes to live ammo weapons, except for law enforcement. If people want to have weapons for hunting, that’s fine. We can craft rules of engagement that define hunting locales and means of transport and require that people who want to own hunting weapons must provide proof that they have a secure gun sage for them and their ammunition. I think it would be even better if we had weapon depots that controlled gun utilization and storage, but I’m sure that there are enough Second Amendment fanatics out there that would consider that to be too restrictive for their definition of an armed militia. As for those who want to shoot for target practice, I might even allow handguns, but with the same or even more restrictive use, including regulated ranges where they can shoot.
The arguments that we have to allow people to own guns as they wish and carry them as they wish is barbaric. If we ban them overall as I suggest, soon enough those bad guys that do have them will make themselves known and law enforcement can deal with them. Sooner rather than later, this approach will rid the streets of these lethal weapons. There is much to be gained to reduce street violence and make policing more effective if they are the only ones with guns. I know that knives and other deadly weapons will still exist, but there is something about eliminating distanced and remote lethality with guns that will greatly reduce deaths from violent crime. To me this is the ultimate form of self-defense for us all.
I understand that there will always be Kyle Rittenhouse sorts that are out there dreaming of war and playing Call of Duty, killing countless people in cyberspace. They will want to get their hands on an AR-15 or an AK-47. We might even be able to accommodate that under highly controlled conditions like a government regulated or even military target range. Let people get their jollies under a controlled environment. Once when I was traveling to Paris, one of my French officers took me to a shooting range in the basement of a building right on the Champs Elyse. There I was given the opportunity to fire pistols, rifles and even an Uzi. To the extent I needed to tick that box or get that off my to-do list, I did it. I also learned how wasteful automatic weapons can be when I paid for the vast quantity of ammunition I sprayed all over the range in several short burst. It was a good experience, but not one that I had to recreate over and over again.
I think we all understand that Kyle Rittenhouse, being a young and impressionable man raised by a single mother and perhaps without sufficient or good male role models, can go astray. He clearly went astray on August 25th last year. But the issue we probably all also understand that he is the product of a culture that has gone off the rails for a few moments (hopefully just a few). With Trump and Republicans pushing libertarian values over common good, with Republicans continuing to push for Second Amendment rights and looking the other way about gun control with every mass shooting incident, with white supremacy being unleashed from the dark corners in which it has traditionally been forced to occupy, is Kyle Rittenhouse really the problem or just the symptom. I am all in favor of punishing Kyle Rittenhouse appropriately for his vile actions that August day, but I am even more interested in seeing our national norms get reestablished such that the urges of the other Kyle Rittenhouse out there are kept in better check and not encouraged to be unleashed on society under the banner of self-defense.