Kyle Rittenhouse - a 17 year old with an AR-15 assault rifle - traveled to another city as a volunteer armed guard to "defend" a car dealer during mass protests against a police shooting of a Black man..
Confrontations ensued, he killed two men and shot another in the arm.
Asserting self-d defense he was acquitted to today by a Wisconsin jury. - GWC
Kyle Rittenhouse’s Defense Is a Threat to the Rule of Lawby Eric Levitz
The "vigilante right" sees America as teetering on the brink of Hobbesian breakdown, and guns as the sole guarantor of personal safety. And the more influential its worldview becomes, the more its paranoid delusions come to resemble our collective reality.
It is not obvious how (or even if) America’s self-defense laws should be reformed. As [Fordham Law Professor] John Pfaff argues in the Washington Post, lowering prosectors’ burden of proof in self-defense cases may do more to imperil victims of alleged domestic violence like Marissa Alexander than to restrain right-wing vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse.
The fundamental source of the carnage in Kenosha, and the anarchic legal paradoxes it exposed, are America’s superabundance of firearms, self-appointed guardians of public order, and the culture that produced them. When anyone could have a gun, or be about to reach for someone else’s, every victim is a potential killer, and every killer potentially innocent.
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