A Tale of Two Shootings
So the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict has come back: not guilty on all counts. What can we learn from this case?
Background
In case you’ve been in a cave the past couple of weeks, this is what happened in brief. In August 2020, there were riots in Kenosha, WI, following the police shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. (Blake survived but was paralyzed from the waist down.) Kyle Rittenhouse was a 17-year-old guy who decided to drive from Antioch, IL to Kenosha (about 20 miles) to do something about the riots. He went armed with his AR-15 (military style, semi-automatic rifle). While there, he had confrontations with some of the rioters. He wound up shooting three of them (all white men). Two died (Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber) and one was injured (Gaige Grosskreutz).
Rittenhouse was then prosecuted for two counts of murder, one of attempted murder, and a gun control violation (plus miscellaneous related charges). During the trial, pro- and anti-Rittenhouse protestors gathered outside the courthouse.
The judge dismissed the gun charge, and the jury just came back with acquittals on all the other charges.
Reactions
Some people are convinced this was a grave injustice. In the wake of the verdict, the ACLU tweeted, “It is far too easy to overlook the impact that violence in defense of white supremacy has on the Black and Brown communities.”
MSNBC host Joy Reid explained, “This country was built on the idea that White men had a particular kind of freedom and a particular kind of citizenship that only they have that gives, you know, from the slave catchers on, the right to inflict violence In the name of protecting property. That's like the foundational creation of the United States.” She compared Rittenhouse’s victims to allies of the Civil Rights Movement.
Who Was Shot?
In case there’s still anyone who doesn’t know this: Much of the news media is just completely given over to ideological propaganda. Different sites with different political orientations give radically different spins on the same story. Here are two stories about Rittenhouse’s victims:
1. From the Huffington Post:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/victims-kenosha-jacob-blake-protest_n_5f4801a3c5b64f17e13a9546
“Two men killed at a protest for Jacob Blake were a father and a skater who tried to disarm the shooter. A third injured man was a volunteer medic.” …
“An avid skateboarder, Huber was ‘really sweet’ and ‘really friendly,’ friends told the newspaper. ‘He was one of the most amazing people,’ Huber’s girlfriend, Hannah Gittings, said at a gathering Wednesday night near the location where he was killed. ‘He took down an armed gunman with nothing but his fucking skateboard, and he took that fucking bullet.’" …
2. From Wisconsin Right Now:
https://www.wisconsinrightnow.com/2021/03/12/kenosha-shooting/
“Rosenbaum was a registered sex offender who was out on bond for a domestic abuse battery accusation and was caught on video acting aggressively earlier that night. Huber was a felon convicted in a strangulation case who was recently accused of domestic abuse. Grosskreutz was convicted of a crime for use of a firearm while intoxicated and was armed with a handgun when shot.”
I don’t think either media outlet is outright lying. Despite their criminal records, I don’t doubt that the three men were a father, a skater, and a volunteer medic, and that Huber’s friends and girlfriend said those nice things about him. But the degree of intentional spin here is extreme.
Why did this matter? Well, if you know that all three of the people who got shot were criminals, that increases the plausibility that they were really acting in a threatening way that would justify defensive violence. By contrast, the HuffPost article is intended to create sympathy for the people who were shot and thereby create negative emotions about Rittenhouse.
Who Was Right?
There is grainy video of all three shootings, which is fortunate for Rittenhouse.
Video shows that the first “victim”, Rosenbaum, was running at Rittenhouse and tried to grab Rittenhouse’s gun when Rittenhouse shot him, killing him. In the video, Rosenbaum is nearly on top of Rittenhouse at the time Rittenhouse shoots him. Earlier that night, Rosenbaum had said to a group of men including Rittenhouse, “I catch any of you guys alone tonight, I'm going to fucking kill you.” Rosenbaum subsequently caught Rittenhouse alone and apparently moved to carry out his threat.
Rittenhouse then ran down the street toward the police, with a group of rioters chasing him. He fell on the ground, whereupon one man ran up to him and kicked him, a second hit him in the head with a skateboard, and a third pulled a handgun and pointed it at Rittenhouse from point-blank range. Rittenhouse shot the skateboard guy (Huber), killing him, then shot the handgun guy (Grosskreutz) in the arm, injuring him. All this happens very quickly.
Just from the video, it looks very clear that these were self-defense shootings. It’s actually surprising that it took the jury as long as it did to come to their verdict. (Perhaps they were weighing the odds of another riot in the event that they acquitted?)
Kyle Rittenhouse: Hero or Fool?
This article in the Atlantic says that people are wrong to view Rittenhouse as a hero, because he was actually foolish to go to the site of the riots: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/kyle-rittenhouse-right-self-defense-role-model/620715/.
The author suggests that the Rittenhouse fans would not themselves do such a thing, nor would they send their own children into a riot to try to protect businesses. I’ve heard other people question why Rittenhouse would go to the riots, I guess suggesting that it’s disreputable to try to protect other people’s property instead of leaving it to the government to do so (?).
Well, of course it was foolish to go to the scene of the riots. It’s the sort of thing a brave 17-year-old kid might do. I don’t think that stops it from being heroic, though. It was foolish in the sense that Rittenhouse was taking excessive risk upon himself for the sake of helping other people. That’s also kind of heroic.
Lessons
So here are some lessons we could draw from this whole incident.
1. Stay away from riots. It’s just luck that Rittenhouse survived, and that he didn’t accidentally shoot any innocent people. He still might get sued, and his life has been and will be ruined for a while.
2. If you see a man with a gun, do not run at that guy and attack him.
3. The media is full of bullshit propaganda, in case you didn’t already know that. Most of the time, their stories are not literally outright lies. But what they say is so misleading that the general impression you take away from reading a story is often the exact opposite of what a fully informed person would think.
Most people, when they notice this about a particular story, assume that it’s just that story plus a few others that they’ve checked on, but that all the stories that they haven’t bothered to check up on are pretty much fair. It takes a long time for it to eventually dawn on you that maybe the media regularly operates this way.
4. Political activists see whatever they want to see. I’m not sure if the anti-Rittenhouse protestors never looked at the video, or if they looked at it but then somehow saw something completely different from what a normal person would see.
5. American prosecutors are profoundly corrupt. If the prosecutor had any integrity, as soon as he saw the videos, he would have dismissed charges (or never filed charges to begin with). It’s unethical to prosecute someone who is obviously innocent. The only explanation I can think of is that it was a politically motivated prosecution: he did it because angry protestors demanded it.
The prosecutors also had some amazingly awful arguments to give in the trial. E.g., one tried to impute guilt to Rittenhouse because Rittenhouse had wisely chosen to remain silent before the trial. Another suggested that Rittenhouse should have just taken a beating rather than defending himself, and that he lost the right to self-defense by virtue of the fact that he brought a gun with him. This indicates that they are either idiots or desperate liars who don’t care about justice.
Never trust a prosecutor.
[Edit, 11/23/2021:
Lesson 6: Don't bring a skateboard to a gunfight.
Other pictures of Rittenhouse that are less often shown in the media:
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