The shooter who killed two people during Tuesday riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Yes, it is necessary for authorities to use whatever means necessary, including force, to quash violent riots. Key word: authorities. There is no good excuse for vigilante groups, especially of outsiders, to take that job upon themselves.
That’s exactly what appears to have happened in Kenosha. While facts remain to be ascertained, it appears that 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been charged with firing the shots, was part of a militia group, or at least imagined himself to be allied with vigilante militias. At least one militia group was acting not merely in lieu of law enforcement, but in defiance of law enforcement. In an obviously volatile situation, every single person acting in defiance of law enforcement is morally responsible for any violence that ensues, and by the very act of defiance is by definition a criminal.
Rittenhouse apparently lived not in the neighborhood where the shooting took place, but 15 miles away. What was he doing in the riot zone? Why was he armed? Why was he there after an announced curfew, in defiance of the curfew? Every person defying the curfew, whether protester or militia, is committing a crime, and is thus a criminal.
Of course someone has the right to protect his own property from rioters and urban terrorists, and anyone acting lawfully has the right to defend his own life or that of innocents. Nobody, though, has the right to travel across state lines to insert himself into a violent situation, carrying a gun, after a curfew, and then claim to be acting in self-defense. No matter what other provocations there are, such a person has himself become a provocateur.
Before the conflagration restarted on the night in question, the ”commander” of a militia called the “Kenosha Guard” first made a recruitment pitch and then tweeted a veiled threat to any police who tried to stop its activities.
“I ask that you NOT have your officers tell us to go home under threat of arrest as you have done in the past,” he wrote. “We are willing to talk to KPD and open a discussion. It is evident, that no matter how many Officers, deputies, and other law enforcement officers that are here, you will still be outnumbered.”
These are not law-abiding citizens. These are just as much anarchists as are the original rioters. This is a group taking the law into its own hands against the express wishes of duly constituted law enforcement, warning the police that the militia has more members than the police does.
This is not acceptable in the United States. We are a nation of laws, and those laws are duly constituted through the consent of the governed, by representative means. It is a federated system, meaning that there are levels of authority that can, through lawful means, step in and reestablish lawful order if local officials fail. Outside militia, agitators, have no right to undermine that system. Nobody elected them. No duly elected officials appointed them. They are wrong.
All the protesters who broke the curfew had, by disobeying the law, become rioters who deserved arrest or, in some cases, tear gas. The militia, too, were a form of rioters. They merited the same treatment. And a teenager from another state who joined them, who used a gun to threaten violence and then responded to violence by using the gun, is morally guilty.
The legal system will determine if he is legally guilty, too. That system must be respected.
This column originally said the gunman “killed three people,” but in fact he shot three but killed two. It has been corrected.
