How to Get Away With Self-Defense: Reflections On the Rittenhouse Trial
Photo: Maurício Mascaro (edited)
How can you get away with self-defense? Turns out, self-defense isn’t illegal. So it’s not something to “get away with.” But you wouldn’t know that by listening to the prosecutors of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Their arguments essentially attempted to redefine self-defense as murder. How so? Well, here’s the story, followed by three reasons why the ending of the story is so good.
The Story
To not know the story of Kyle Rittenhouse after the past several weeks, you’d have to have been living under a rock—or, you’d just have to have been only watching and reading legacy news media, because many of them have been grossly misrepresenting the facts of the case. For that reason, it’s worth telling the story here to get us on the same page.
A young man named Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with five counts of homicide and recklessly endangering safety for shooting three rioters (killing two) during the riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin last year. The riots began in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake (which is a whole different story, but suffice it to say that because Blake is black, the political and social left used the shooting to claim systemic racism and gin up conflict, even though Blake was armed and putting others in danger at the moment of the shooting).
Rittenhouse, 17 at the time, was at the riot, along with several others, to protect a particular used car business and provide medical aid to anyone who may have needed it. He was armed with a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 (an “AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle”). At one point, he ended up getting separated from his group, and was threatened and chased by one of the rioters. As the rioter lunged for Rittenhouse’s gun, Rittenhouse shot him, resulting in his death. Feeling further threatened by the crowd, Rittenhouse ran off to turn himself into the police. He was chased and attacked by multiple other rioters, two of whom he shot (one attacked him with a skateboard, the other with a gun); the skateboarder was killed, and the gunman lost his right bicep. With no further attacks, Rittenhouse approached the police, who did not initially take him in. He turned himself into a police station later that night.
In a stroke of divine providence, all of the shootings were caught on video, which made it easy for anyone in the public to see that he was clearly defending himself. For that reason, it was something of a scandal that the State of Wisconsin would choose to charge him with homicide. As became all the clearer as the trial proceeded, this choice was less about the facts of the case and more about a disdain for the constitutional right to self-defense (more on that below). Fortunately, the jury didn’t buy it. The trial began November 2 and lasted over two weeks, and the “not guilty” verdict affirmed that Rittenhouse had shot in self-defense, and that that was his right.
Why This Is So Good
This verdict is a major cultural victory for law and order, for the right to self-defense, and for justice.
A Victory for Law and Order
It’s a victory for law and order because the vindication of Rittenhouse is a simultaneous condemnation of the rioters who attacked him and, by extension, all of the rioters. Rittenhouse’s attackers in particular, and the rioters in general, have been lionized by the leftist national media; now, they have been condemned by the jury. Rittenhouse did nothing wrong; the rioters did everything wrong. Rittenhouse is the good guy; the rioters are the bad guys. Riots in response to perceived racial wrongs—riots which leftist media and leftist politicians have lauded and justified and made excuses for—have been publicly condemned. The media has been caught (again) defending the bad guys and defaming the good guy. And a message has been sent to the media and all the left: the people don’t support the riots. The people maintain the innocence of the ones who stand in opposition to the riots.
A Victory for the Right to Self-Defense
It’s a victory for the right to self-defense because that’s really what was on trial here. As mentioned above, the prosecution’s arguments were as much against the right to self-defense as anything. This was clear from statements made by the prosecutor, such as when he pointed out that, of the hundreds on the Kenosha streets during the riots, “the only person who killed anyone was the defendant, Kyle Rittenhouse.” The implication was that the fact of killing someone automatically means Rittenhouse was in the wrong. That’s an obvious fallacy, a conflation of murder and self-defense. That kind of conflation is exactly what the prosecution was seeking to accomplish, to make self-defense out to be wrong.
Similarly, the prosecutor at one point said, “You lose the right to self-defense when you're the one who brought the gun, when you're the one creating the danger, when you're the one provoking other people.” The implications are that having a gun is itself a provocation, and that you can only defend yourself with a gun if your attacker also has a gun—but this, of course, was disingenuous, since one of Rittenhouse’s attackers did have a gun, and another one of them would have had Rittenhouse’s gun if Rittenhouse hadn’t stopped him. What’s more, a moment of thought about the prosecutor’s claim renders it completely asinine: if it were true, a gun would be illegal to use against someone who is threatening your life with anything other than a gun; if you have only a gun, you’d have to put it aside and limit yourself to either fighting your attacker with your hands or resigning yourself to death.
The prosecution was full of such terrible arguments and outright lies. They were apparently operating in step with the same worldview as the side of the political and social aisle that really, really wishes self-defense was illegal—at least, whenever it being illegal would be most convenient for their narrative. The verdict, therefore, was effectively a condemnation of their full frontal attack on the right to self-defense, and, by extension, of the political left’s decades-long attack on the same.
A Victory for Justice
Finally, it’s a victory for justice. Throughout the trial there was a lot of disinformation and misinformation going around. For example, it seems many in the public have gotten the impression from the news reporting on this case that Rittenhouse crossed state lines with an illegal firearm, looking for trouble, and executed three black protestors. And even the prosecutor tried to paint those he shot as heroes trying to stop an active shooter. All of these data are wrong: while Rittenhouse did cross state lines the previous day (which is not illegal, obviously), he didn’t do so with a firearm (the firearm was already in Wisconsin), he wasn’t looking for trouble (he was looking to protect a business, and to provide medical aid in the community where his father lived and where he himself worked as a lifeguard), he only shot people who were actively attacking him (the videos show him having remarkable restraint towards other potential threats), and all the people he shot were white.
In addition to the bad information making the rounds, and probably in large part because of it, there were demonstrations outside of the courthouse. People were calling for a guilty verdict. Also, there were multiple attempts to harass or intimidate the jury: someone was caught filming them in the courtroom, and someone else was caught following the jury bus after hours. These are just more of the left’s tactics to get their desired result, whatever the cost, truth and justice be damned.
Any time protesters or activists try to influence the jury in a criminal case, it is an attempt at mob rule. The idea is, “It doesn’t matter what all the facts are that will be presented in the courtroom; what matters is that we get our way”—and their way is determined on the basis of their narrative, independent of all the relevant facts. It’s ok to have an opinion, but it’s not ok to try to influence the jurors, or to even communicate your opinion to them. If you do that, you don’t care about justice. And for all their talk, the political and social left doesn’t care about justice.
Think about that for a moment. The left likes to use the vocabulary of justice, but their idea of justice is the exact opposite of justice. Justice rightly understood is impartiality. It’s treating everyone according to their behavior without reference to what group they belong to. By contrast, treating people on the basis of the groups they belong to (i.e., intersectionality) is the essence of the left’s philosophy right now. It’s the essence of “social justice.” And it’s the essence of why the left wanted Rittenhouse to be condemned. Not because he was actually guilty, but because he’s a white man (at the time, a boy) who opposed a riot that broke out after a black man was shot by police.
The Rittenhouse verdict was blind to all of that. It was blind to the protestors and the activists. It was blind to the color of Rittenhouse’s skin. It was blind to the potential retaliation the jurors may face. It was blind to anything other than the facts of the case. And because it was blind, it was just. Justice is blind.
We’ve had so much bad news, so much injustice in this nation recently—from unjust COVID lockdowns, to unjust vaccine mandates, to an unjust exit from Afghanistan, to unjust inflation, to the constant unjust killing of unborn children, etc. etc. etc.—that this piece of good news almost came as a shock. Justice has been done, and how good it is!
“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”