Kyle Rittenhouse is Acquitted of all Charges. A Victory for Gun Rights Advocates.

​Last week Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all five charges for fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 25, 2020. Rittenhouse’s defense team successfully argued that he acted in self-defense. I have no issue with the verdict in this case. But I do have an issue with a system that allows a teenage boy (or anyone else) to openly carry a loaded assault style weapon at a public protest and legally use it on a public street for self-defense. Gun rights advocates are hailing the verdict as a victory. Two men were shot dead in the streets of Wisconsin and this is a good thing for America? Those men would be alive today if Kyle Rittenhouse had not been openly carrying a gun that night. Will his acquittal embolden similar behavior, and will vigilante actions be justified in the name of gun rights and the right to self-defense?

​Kyle Rittenhouse is not a hero, and any attempts to make him one should be discouraged. He is a naive young man who was caught up in a situation he should never been a party to. He went to Kenosha with an illegally obtained AR-15 assault rifle, ostensibly to protect private property during protest marches. He was acting as a vigilante, buoyed by lax (or non-existent) open-carry laws which allows such behavior. In my view, openly carrying an assault weapon in public is an act of aggression, or at the very least, an act of intimidation. Rather than promote safety, it increases the chances of violence and armed confrontations. Do we want to give armed vigilante groups the same privileges we give to trained police officers, and allow them to patrol our streets? For the sake of our country, I hope not.

The ability to defend oneself against threats is codified in law and has come to mean different things in different states, https://www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminal-justice/self-defense-and-stand-your-ground.aspx.   Self-defense laws allow an individual to use force against another to prevent imminent bodily injury to yourself or others. As seen in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, you can legally use deadly force to protect yourself when there is a real, or perceived, physical threat to your person. When you combine the right to self-defense with open-carry laws, the result is armed confrontation with deadly results.
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Liberal open-carry laws encourage armed confrontations on our streets. They promote individual rights over the good of society, and make our streets less safe. How would you feel if you saw a person walking down the street carrying an assault weapon? You would most likely fear for your safety and get away from that area. Your right of free movement on a public street or public place has been denied to you. Where is the justice in that? The right to own and bear arms in this country has morphed into any gun, anytime, anywhere. This individual right has been allowed to supersede public safety and the well-being of society as a whole.  This is not how strong societies are built. It is how they fracture and fail.

Anyone who has read my four- part blog series on “Guns in America” knows that I am not a big fan of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It has become so twisted that the framers of the Constitution wouldn’t recognize it. The 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms was intended to keep the citizenry safe from tyrannical governments. But citizens no longer use their personnel weapons for militia (military) duty. The 2nd Amendment has not kept pace with the needs of a modern industrialized nation. As a result, we are awash in guns of all types, and the sales of guns and ammunition are at record levels. The tyranny that we now face is caused by gun violence and individualism over societal good.

Do guns make our society safer? The grim statistics don’t bear this out, and I feel that the Kyle Rittenhouse case will make it worse.  Even attempts at the most moderate and common-sense gun regulations cannot get through Congress.  The only way out of this sorry state of affairs is to repeal or replace the 2nd Amendment. Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime.

If you are interested in learning more about open-carry laws in the United States, follow this link https://giffords.org/lawcenter/gun-laws/policy-areas/guns-in-public/open-carry/.
 
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Thanks,
Armchair American