Our Laws And Culture Are The Problem

 This explanation of the legal issues in the Rittenhouse case is very good and thorough. There are two reasons why Rittenhouse escaped the most significant consequences of his actions.

The first is that our laws give broad latitude to people defending themselves. The most extreme case was the Trayvon Martin case, that bears a fair amount of similarities to what happened in Kenosha (and which the author references). The "Stand Your Ground" laws are invitations to lethal force. They are nothing less than fetishizing the myth of the "good guy with the gun."

The second stems from this, which is our sickening gun culture. I own some guns that we inherited, family heirlooms. We keep them in a safe. My son has gone hunting with them on a few occasions. That's fine. But that's a LONG way from where the gun culture is in America today. We elevate guns through open carry and Stand Your Ground laws. Our laws encourage people to walk into a Burger King with an assault weapon on their hip. 

This is absurd and obscene. No one, and I mean no one, needs to be packing a weapon capable of mass casualties in order to get a burrito at Chipotle. Some of this is the warping of gun culture the NRA has been doing since the 1980s. The way they have done so is to stoke fears of American Carnage. Trump's rhetoric was of a piece with this trend to make Americans terrified of other Americans. Many of our issues with police shootings stem from the police reasonably worrying that every traffic encounter could involve a firearm.

This is then amplified by the paranoid conspiracy theories about the American government and the need for Bubba to pack major weaponry to defend against the tyranny of infrastructure spending and increased access to health care. The idea that Mr. Open Carry is going to defend his community against antifa and Biden's black helicopters is ridiculous, but it becomes a major problem when we add the ubiquity of these weapons to the mix.

From Sandy Hook to Orlando to Las Vegas, we have shown repeatedly that we simply do not care how many of our countrymen die, as long as we don't threaten the fragile masculinity of our ammosexual population.