Don’t fall for Sunak’s
leader-in-waiting spin
Iain Martin
Page 35
Jong-un.) It was terrible, wrote
Trump, that the radical left (aka the
Wisconsin judicial system) wanted
“to PUNISH law-abiding citizens,
including a CHILD, like Kyle”.
A “CHILD” with an AR-15 and a
belief that he has the right to use it
when he sees fit. Biden had been
wrong to suggest, before knowing
anything about him, that
Rittenhouse was a violent racist, but
now Republicans have been hero-worshipping someone who took a
gun to a riot and killed two unarmed
civilians. What lesson would you, if
you were a wannabe vigilante with a
personal armoury, take from the last
week? Or, if you were Gaige
Grosskreutz, the gun-owner whose
arm was partly vaporised by Kyle
Rittenhouse, might you not just
conclude that next time you should
bring a bigger gun and shoot first?
It could get worse. In the new year
the US Supreme Court will rule on a
challenge to the state of New York’s
more restrictive gun laws. At the
moment you have to show “proper
cause” to get a licence to carry a
concealed handgun. The gun lobby
wants that “proper cause” ruled
unconstitutional. They could win.
Which, of course, will make us British
tourists feel so much safer. We’ve long
wanted to play Squid Game for real.Rittenhouse shows madness of US gun laws
It was fear of being shot with his own weapon in the Kenosha unrest that led the teenager to kill two unarmed men
ADAM ROGAN/AP
City in parts of America. And of those
involved, often only the person who
survives — usually the shooter —
gets to testify. No one knows what
Anthony Huber’s argument was.
This would be bad enough in a
society that wasn’t as horribly
polarised as the United States is now.
When the relieved Rittenhouse, who
had sobbed uncontrollably on the
stand, walked out of court, his lawyer
said that the young man wanted to
become a nurse, adopt a low profile
and move out of the limelight. In fact,
within days Rittenhouse was being
interviewed by the leading far-right
TV personality Tucker Carlson and
was then photographed smiling,
thumbs up, with Donald Trump. (I
daresay Rittenhouse didn’t notice that
on the wall above his left shoulder
was a photograph of Trump greeting,
equally delightedly, a grinning KimKyle Rittenhouse “patrolling” the city
in Wisconsin in August last yearlaw only applied to short-barrelled
weapons. Seriously.
Under what are called “open
carry” gun laws operating in many
US states, including Wisconsin, you
can take a loaded gun almost
anywhere and display it. So that bit
wasn’t illegal. Under “stand your
ground” self-defence laws in many
states, if you genuinely feel you’re
being threatened, you are entitled to
use force. In Wisconsin (unusually)
this is modified by a duty to retreat if
you can safely do so. That wouldn’t
have been easy for Rittenhouse after
the first shooting.
So you can head for a highly
charged situation armed with an
army-style weapon which you carry
openly. If someone approaches you
threateningly you can shoot them. In
this case the irony of the gun lobby’s
claim that gun ownership makes you
safer is illustrated by the fact that it
was his own gun that Rittenhouse
was frightened of being killed with,
and that Grosskreutz’s gun was what
got him shot. Here in the UK, where
it is illegal to “carry any knife in
public without good reason, unless it
has a manual folding blade less than
three inches long”, the mere
possession of such weapons seems
crazy, but we are invariably
reminded that America is a different
society with a frontier history (when
does that excuse run out?) and a love
of hunting (with a semi-automatic?).
The Rittenhouse case and the
acquittal — as with the shooting of
unarmed Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia
last year, for which three white men
were convicted of murder yesterday
— indicates that the direction of travel
in many US states has potentially
catastrophic consequences. The
coming together of permissive gun
laws, permissive and subjective self-
defence statutes and citizen’s arrest
provisions is creating a kind of DodgeB
efore he left home on the
night in question, the young
man on the stand in the
Rittenhouse murder trial
testified that he had
followed his invariable routine: “Keys,
phone, wallet, gun.” Always the gun,
he said, because he was a big
supporter of the Second Amendment
and the right to bear arms.
This was not the defendant, Kyle
Rittenhouse, who was charged with
murdering two people and wounding
a third — all of them, like him, white
— during disturbances in the city of
Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August last
year. It was in fact the man he’d
wounded, Gaige Grosskreutz. Glock
pistol in hand, Grosskreutz had
approached Rittenhouse as he sat on
the floor holding his semi-automatic
rifle after shooting and killing two
other men, both of them unarmed.
I think if I’d been a jury member at
the Rittenhouse trial I might also have
acquitted the 18-year-old of murder on
the basis that he feared for his life. But
had Grosskreutz shot Rittenhouse
dead then I imagine I’d have acquitted
him too, on the same grounds. That’s
how messed up this whole thing was.
How messed up America is.
It happened on the third night of
rioting following the local police
shooting of an unarmed black man,
Jacob Blake. People, most of them
young, were out on the streets after
dark, some acting violently, some just
protesting. Some of them had driven
in, heavily armed, vowing to “protect”
property from being looted or
destroyed. One of these latter was
Kyle Rittenhouse, who took his AR-15
semi-automatic rifle and drove 20
miles to Kenosha. It was while he was
“patrolling” that a man called Joseph
Rosenbaum, bipolar and off his meds,
ran after Rittenhouse and tried to
disarm him. Fearing that he would
possibly be killed with his own
weapon Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum.
He was then attacked by a
skateboarder, Anthony Huber, who
probably thought that Rittenhouse
was a lethal danger to dozens of
other people. Rittenhouse, by now
on the floor, shot Huber too. The
engagement with Grosskreutz came
with Huber lying a yard away, dying.
All this was captured on video.
As soon as Rittenhouse was
arrested he became a symbol. To
those on the Republican right he was
a citizen hero intent on protecting
lives and property from marauding
antifa. To the Democratic left he was
a neo-fascist vigilante who hadarrived in Kenosha wanting to shoot
Black Lives Matter protesters. At the
time Joe Biden, then a presidential
candidate, appeared to suggest that
Rittenhouse was a “white
supremacist”.
In American courts facts still
count for something, and opinions
for a bit less. Nevertheless the laws
that the courts are obliged to follow
can be hard to understand. For
example, there was one statute that
Rittenhouse might have broken
unequivocally: 17 at the time of the
shootings, he could have been
charged with carrying a firearm as a
minor but the judge ruled that thisThe direction of travel
in many US states
could be catastrophic
If you were a vigilante,
what lesson would you
take from this case?
Comment
David
Aaronovitchred box
For the best analysis
and commentary on
the political landscape
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the times | Thursday November 25 2021 33