It is both right and wrong that Kyle Rittenhouse will in no way be prosecuted for what happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August last year. The then 17-year-old Rittenhouse had killed two people with a semi-automatic firearm and injured another during protests by the Black Lives Matter movement in the city. It is obvious that no even halfway enlightened society can want minors to appear armed in city centers and shoot people.
Nevertheless, the jury cannot be blamed in this case. She followed the rules of procedure and Wisconsin law. If the law doesn’t allow for conviction, feeling doesn’t matter – including whether or not a dangerous precedent is being set in acquiring a marauding teenager who killed two people. In a constitutional state, the law applies first.
The jury wasn’t the problem. The problem is much deeper.
Suppose Kyle Rittenhouse had turned up that night when he had decided that he wanted to help in Kenosha, where his father lived, because some demonstrators were pillaging through the city without a deadly weapon. Suppose, even further, no one in downtown Kenosha had appeared with a gun. Because the carrying of firearms would be forbidden.
However, as is well known, gun ownership is far from banned in the United States and that will not change for the foreseeable future, possibly never. But it is important to repeat this mind game over and over again: With a gun ban, there would have been violent demonstrations that evening in Kenosha as well. But almost certainly nobody would have died.
The firearms lobby argues at every opportunity that it was not the guns that killed people, but that people killed other people. But what if the vast majority of people didn’t have firearms?
The right to own guns is enshrined in the American Constitution. It is legal in many US states to visibly carry weapons. In addition, most states have an extremely broad right to self-defense. In essence, if someone even has the feeling that their life or physical integrity may be in jeopardy, it is enough to make it legal to use the weapon.
In view of the confusing situation at the demonstrations in Kenosha, with groups sometimes attacking each other physically, it was therefore easy to argue that Rittenhouse had felt a threat to his life. In such situations, the legal situation in the USA is de facto a license to kill. Therefore Rittenhouse was acquitted.
There is one crucial caveat here, however: it is highly questionable that if Kyle Rittenhouse had been a 17-year-old African-American he would have been acquitted as well. It is even doubtful that a black boy armed with a semi-automatic rifle who has just killed two white men, self-defense or not, would have left the scene alive.