Folk hero
David French on Kyle Rittenhouse and the self-defense defense:
The trial itself has not gone well for the prosecution, for reasons that relate to the nature of self-defense claims. Such claims are not assessed by means of sweeping inquiries into the wisdom of the actions that put the shooter into a dangerous place in a dangerous time. Instead, they produce a narrow inquiry into the events immediately preceding the shooting. The law allows even a foolish man to defend himself, even if his own foolishness put him in harm’s way.
But perhaps more so if he’s a white man, and a whole hell of a lot less so if he’s a black man. As for women, they don’t generally get the chance to self-defend.
The defense has presented evidence not only that Rittenhouse was attacked, but that there was reason to believe he acted—under Wisconsin law—to “prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself.” The jury will have to determine whether Rittenhouse’s belief was reasonable, and whether it was reasonable for each person he shot.
The narrow nature of the self-defense inquiry is one reason people can escape responsibility for killings that are deeply wrongful in every moral sense. Take, for instance, cases in which bad cops create danger and confusion through incompetence or excessive aggression, and then they respond to the danger or confusion they created by using deadly force.
Examples abound. Police gave confusing and conflicting instructions to Philando Castile before he was shot and killed, and to Daniel Shaver before he was gunned down in a hotel hallway. The killing of Breonna Taylor is another example—police used terrible tactics, but once an occupant of the home fired on them, a grand jury decided, they were legally entitled to fire back.
That’s a hard distinction to make – morally wrong but legally permissible. It’s a hard one to make and a harder one to accept. I understand it, I think, but by god it chafes.
But that brings us to the danger of Kyle Rittenhouse as a folk hero. It is one thing to argue that the law is on Rittenhouse’s side—and there is abundant evidence supporting his defense—but it is quite another to hail him as a model for civic resistance.
As seen in Kenosha, in anti-lockdown protests in Washington State, and in the riot in Charlottesville, one of the symbols of the American hard right is the “patriot” openly carrying an AR-15 or similar weapon. The “gun picture” is a common pose for populist politicians. Mark and Patricia McCloskey leveraged their clumsy and dangerous brandishing of weapons at Black Lives Matter protesters into an appearance at the Republican National Convention.
And Lauren Boebert’s pro-gun antics got her elected to Congress.
Yeah, self defence doesn’t always work the way you think it should and the justice system isn’t blind, even handed, or even just.
The weird (to a lay person) thing about a number of high profile self-defence cases is that because the analysis of self-defence is very narrowly focused on what happened immediately before deadly force is used it seems to remove the possible self defence/defence of others motivation of the vicim.
Ahmaud Arbery’s killer is claiming self defence because Ahmaud was reaching for his gun barrel, either to grab it or deflect it away. Remember, a group of armed men chased him down, pointed a gun at him and fired a shot before that happened. How can shooting someone defending themselves from you be self-defence?
Rittenhouse, at least one of the victims it could be argued (if not all) were acting in what they saw as self defence or defence of others to an armed man. of course we can’t ask two of the three what their motivations and thought processes were, because they’re dead.
Trayvon Martin, I think any of us can make an argument that Trayvon, if he attacked Zimmerman as alleged, did so to defend himself from an armed assailant who stalked and then confronted him. Zimmermans claims about what unfolded can’t be properly examined because Trayvon can’t put his side forward.
The lesson seems to be to be white, preferably male, have a plausible story and be the only survivor.
It is infuriating that Rittenhouse will likely be aquitted. I also find it infuriating that David French can have this take on these events, but still be pro gun ownership. He rightly points out the dangers of “vigilante open carry”, but approves of “quiet concealed carry”. The class of weapons that can be carried concealed are also a blight on the USA.
Given what I’ve heard I tend to believe that Rittenhouse and his victims all ought to be in jail (were they living) but French’s take is more or less my view minus 2A shit (the only armed people at a protest should be on duty police officers).
As an addendum: a major reason Rittenhouse is likely to get away Scot free is that the prosecution is absolutely bloody awful.
Being a jury with instructions that narrow would be difficult. There are so many things that the kid did to damage his credibility in the events leading up to the confrontation. He lied about his age and his EMT qualifications. He was carrying a semiautomatic rifle as an EMT? Seriously? He said his plan was to defend property, and yet he was out there roaming the streets looking for action. The car dealer he claimed to want to protect didn’t ask him for assistance and testified that his insurance was covering his prior losses.
He was in over his head, didn’t have the capacity to deal with the situation he had placed himself in. The police who saw him and what he was doing should have intervened and told him they don’t want vigilantes, but they didn’t.
He’s not a hero by any means.
Something that I have found offensive and simple-minded in all of this is the stance taken by some (not you, Ophelia!) that this is an “open and shut case”. It’s fairly clearly a difficult case, even if you’ve taken a side. The fact that the jury has been deliberating for three days, is itself evidence that there is nothing “open and shut” about it. I would also note that I’ve heard this “open and shut” nonsense from both sides.
Rittenhouse is no hero, folk or otherwise, though in the balkanised information environment there is an enormous contingent of people willing to cast him as one. In truth he was and is a foolish child, from a poor and broken home, who saw the city where his father and extended family lived (and where he himself worked) being burned down and looted by rioters whom the reporters standing within sight of burning buildings described as “mostly peaceful”, in some of the most nakedly Orwellian reporting committed to tape.
He went on to see the mayor of that city and the governor of that state seeming to give their royal assent to the rioters. And he had drunk deeply, for most of his life, of propaganda about the kind of rugged individualism and rebelliousness and suspicion for government authority that many poor disaffected white people grow up on as a quasi-religious centre of meaning to explain and excuse why they have no economic or cultural power or any real political power, at least not before 2016, when Trump more-or-less accidentally activated a number of them and used them as part of his coalition before discarding them to conspiracy theorists and hucksters to explain why Trump seemingly didn’t give a shit about them once he had won.
Rittenhouse consequently made a series of very foolish decisions which led him into harm’s way. One of these was, naturally, going to the city in the first place; another was accepting an AR-15 from someone after he arrived at Kenosha; another was leaving the group of armed men which Rosenbaum had already threatened to pick off one at a time. There is a long chain of decisions that Rittenhouse made, any one of which would have kept him from killing those two men and maiming the third; he will have to live with that experience for the rest of his life, regardless of the verdict.
But he was not a textbook white supremacist picking his nose in where he didn’t belong, on the hunt for black people to gun down willy-nilly. For one, all three of his interlocutors were white, and all of them were either giving chase or actually assaulting him when he shot them. Secondly, he had deep personal ties to the community that he was foolishly trying to defend, and he believed — not without cause — it was being abandoned by a government unwilling or incapable of securing it. Neither of these points are dispositive of his inner motivations, of course; he very well could have been attracted to a lawless situation in order to prove his own manliness, or even to exercise an underlying psychopathy, and simply have been patient and indiscriminate enough to wait for a plausible scenario where he could claim self-defence.
As Freddie deBoer has pointed out, when virtually the whole of the traditional media and a broad swathe of progressivism is hamstrung on the ontological propriety and political valence of the word “riot” to the point that they seem to abandon any pretence of condemning lawlessness, when we are asked to disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes and abandon our principles in service to a greater cosmic truth being told by the application of violence as a sort of retributive reparations, we invite violent actors who will use violent means to pursue violent ends. And those actors, those means, and those ends will rarely stand in accord with either the cosmic truth supposedly being told nor with the broader civilising project of creating a safer, freer, more just and harmonious society.
We do not collectively get to declare certain areas at certain times anarchist utopias where a certain group of people is allowed to operate outside of the law because their motivations are deemed pure. I mean, we can certainly try, but then when we become outraged that other groups of people have sprung up in and around those utopias to engage in lawlessness for motivations we consider impure, we have little solid ground on which to stand when we condemn them. The truth is, there is and always has been a significant impulse to violence within us; it could be argued that the animal kingdom is predicated upon violence, and the extent to which we can collectively hamper our violent impulses is precisely the extent to which we can claim some kind of humanity.
But those impulses persist, to a greater or lesser extent within each of us individually, and to a breathtaking extent collectively. And environments such as Kenosha in 2020 attract people, mainly young men, who are aroused by danger and the opportunity to test their mettle in environments with real stakes. Such environments cannot be allowed to become the vehicle for a political movement, because such a movement is only a recipe for disaster. At the very least, in the United States, it is worth considering that less than ten percent of the population owns as many firearms as the rest of it, and of these ten percent, there are likely very few who are sympathetic to any kind of progressivism — therefore, in the breakdown of civil society, it is unlikely that progressives will be able to impose their will upon the men with all of the guns.
So no, Kyle Rittenhouse is not a hero. He is a victim, and a symptom, of a potentially-failing state. He and those he killed all deserved better.
Der Durchwanderer: Hear, hear.