Rittenhouse verdict unlikely to be last word in debate on guns
Kyle Rittenhouse walked the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, a rifle slung around his chest and shoulder.
The weapon was supposed to be for hunting on a friend’s property up north, the friend says. But on that night in August 2020, Rittenhouse says he took the Smith & Wesson AR-style semi-automatic with him as he volunteered to protect property damaged during protests the previous evening. Before midnight, he used it to shoot three people, killing two.
After a roughly two-week trial, a jury will soon deliberate whether Rittenhouse is guilty of charges, including murder, that could send him to prison for life. Was the then-17-year-old forced to act in self-defense while trying to deter crime, as he and his defense attorneys say? Or did Rittenhouse — the only person in a wellarmed crowd to shoot anyone — provoke people with his weapon, instigating the bloodshed, as prosecutors argue?
It’s a similar debate to what has played out across the country around the use of guns, particularly at protests like the one in Kenosha over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by a White police officer or in other cities over pandemicrelated restrictions. In Rittenhouse, some see a patriot defending an American city from destruction when police were unwilling or too overwhelmed to do so. Others see an irresponsible kid in over his head, enamored with brandishing a firearm, or someone looking for trouble or people to shoot.
On the streets of Kenosha that night, Rittenhouse was notable to some for his apparent youthfulness. But, for a while anyway, he was just another person with a gun.
The Kenosha protest was one of many that year to draw armed militias or counterprotesters. Protesters, too, were armed, Kenosha Police Officer Pep Moretta and others testified.
“We were surrounded all night,” Moretta said, adding “there was probably more people armed with weapons than not.”
The shooting occurred as the coronavirus pandemic raged in the U.S. and three months after the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a White police officer in Minneapolis prompted protests — some violent — in cities big and small. The election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was heating up, with an increase in homicides and calls to “defund the police” a major focus.
All of those factors, experts say, led to a historic spike in the number of background checks to buy or possess a firearm, a key barometer of gun sales. In 2020, the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System database reported almost 39.7 million background checks for gun purchases — more than double the 14.4 million in 2010.
Rittenhouse wasn’t old enough to buy a firearm. But in May 2020 he gave money to his sister’s boyfriend, Dominick Black, with whom he had gone shooting in northern Wisconsin, and Black bought the Smith & Wesson for him. The gun was supposed to remain in a safe at the home of Black’s stepfather, Black testified.
Rittenhouse, who faces a misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18 in addition to homicide charges, testified he did nothing wrong and was defending himself when he fired his rifle. Prosecutors say the former police youth cadet who liked to play video shooting games was taking those fantasies to the streets.
For a lot of people, Rittenhouse is the face of gun owners in America, said David Yamane, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University who studies gun culture.
And while Rittenhouse’s core supporters believe he did nothing wrong from start to finish, a much larger group of gun owners “are somewhere in between,” Yamane said.