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We Must Remain a Nation of Laws
Kyle Rittenhouse was found “Not Guilty” on all counts. There has been a lot of background noise on the events that occurred in Kenosha on August 25, 2020, that resulted in the deaths of two men and the wounding of one.
My personal opinion is that laws are written to provide a consistent process to prosecute, and defend specific actions when someone is charged with a crime. Laws do not prevent someone from committing a crime as much as we would like that to be true. Most criminals commit crimes because they believe they will not be caught.
If Kyle Rittenhouse had asked for my advice about going to Kenosha on August 25, 2020, I would have advised against it. It’s the same advice I would have given to any of you about placing yourself in a situation that you cannot control. I’ve been in those situations as a former police officer. From domestic disputes, traffic stops, working demonstrations, and welfare checks, I was placed in the position of having to react and assess a situation in a matter of seconds in some of those incidents.
That being said the Rittenhouse trial involved a specific action(s) involving a specific statute, specific elements of the statute, and allowable defenses to the statute. Nothing else matters. The jurors reached their decision after examining the facts. This is how the law should work.
The background noise comes from individuals that don’t know the law and have no desire to understand the law. The mob has no conscience, they have desires. Conscience becomes desire, and whim, and whims are enforced by a fist. Mindless violence was tolerated for an entire summer. Kyle Rittenhouse was not responsible for this. Elected officials who abandoned their responsibility to uphold the law by ordering police officers to stand down as their cities were being destroyed are responsible for this.
Published in Law
Amen.
Only because this can’t be said enough.
Remain a nation of laws? Who said we are a nation of laws anymore? With prosecutors refusing to charge obvious lawbreakers, the laws are no longer being enforced in a number of cities. Shoplifters being allowed to run rampant through retail stores, looting and burning downtowns with impunity, shows that whatever laws remain on the books are only for show, especially on our southern border.
This is the problem, and it must be changed. Protected speech is not arson, looting, blocking traffic, and assaults.
Of course. Except he was asked to protect property and was a civic-minded soul. There were quite a few there, from what I understand, and we don’t know how much worse it would have been had they not shown up. He, and they, may have saved lives by their presence.
And it’s unfortunate that the police were so good at taking orders from the politicians. Now, of course they have to take orders but they also can apply pressure and make it very difficult for politicians to put the community in danger, which I didn’t see much of.
The focus should not be on what advice we would give some 17 year-old (ex)naive kid, it should be on the people who allowed, fomented and engineered this tragedy. The politicians and the media. And these corrupt prosecutors.
@franco, Sorry I’m only allowed to give you one like. You’ve got it exactly right, in my humble opinion.
This.
We are not a nation of laws.
This is only a victory on the battlefield of a war already lost.
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Okay. I just can’t.
I originally had the line “This is where Hank tells me to shut up. ” I took it out.
Should have left it in.
It not just the notion of a Nation of Laws that is important, but also Equality under the Law. The selective prosecution or non-prosecution of certain people based on ideological conformity completely and totally distorts those precepts.
I no longer believe in the justice system being impartial. I no longer believe in the FBI being selfless patriots working to enforce the law. I no longer believe this a Government that works for the betterment of the average citizen. The Left has destroyed numerous institutions with their Marxist Progressive crap.
It is clear. The same laws no longer apply to us all.
Why people on the right ignore the evidence on this is beyond me.
One wonders what would have happened if the gov’t had spent as much effort tracking down the Portland “mostly peaceful protesters” who were trying to breach the Federal courthouse as they did tracking down the 1/6 protesters? Of course, those individuals tend to mask themselves so that they are harder to identify later, but if 1% of the effort was spent I would be surprised. It makes one wonder about the Equal Protection Clause as it relates to the political motivation of these prosecutions or lack thereof.
The system is not really working if garbage prosecutions are brought for political reasons while serious criminal acts are ignored also for political reasons. An unlawfully armed felon was given immunity to testify against a conspicuously innocent kid because the narrative demanded it.
The jury (and the judge) rescued the system from itself.
LOLing out loud.
While I’ll never tell you to shut up, I admit that I respond pretty predictably to “we have already lost this war” and similar talk. That probably won’t change. ;)
Not so sure. Give it a few more months. San Fran has teed up the Soros funded prosecutor (i.e. let the thieves loose) for recall in June. The 3 CRT school board members are up first. San Francisco not Loudin County but my wife’s democratic friends are livid and want some scalp. And no Republicans are around to accommodate. Except me. But I have real low profile.
Pay attention to who your DA’s are. Get involved in your local politics. DA’s railroad people like this all of the time.
If this trial didn’t have cellphone footage, there’s a good chance nobody would know about it outside of Wisconsin. So in some twisted way, all of the noise this case attracted ended up helping Kyle, because from what it sounds like, his family did not have the financial resources to stand up to the state. They target poor people with ridiculous charges all of the time. There’s a big problem with for-profit policing, asset forfeiture and loads of other things that conservatives can be consistent on fighting while still “backing the blue.”
Yes, if you only look at the specific facts of the attacks and the response, then it was the correct verdict.
But Acquittenhouse was as fully a rioter as any of the people he killed. He didn’t bring order to the riot, he brought more chaos. Most people in a riot don’t consider themselves rioters but once a riot has begun, people have a moral responsibility to leave until order is restored.
Order does not need to be restored by the government, the people acting without the government can bring order, but one or two people acting alone cannot stop a riot. That’s not how it works. Acquittenhouse was a fool. Being in a group that defended a car dealership was a good idea. Leaving that defense and wandering around in a riot was not. The people who started that fire were not sane or rational and he had every reason to expect that they would attack him. His actions were dangerous and contributed to the chaos.
I’m glad he was acquitted, but I’m glad he spent a lot of time in jail waiting for the trial. I hope he got some sense into his head.
Brings back memories. On my first ship in the late ’80s, my first job required me to provide anti-terrorism training to the crew in preparation for deployments overseas. One of the major points of the training was for crewmembers to avoid local demonstrations, under the concern that the protests could become violent and our people could get hurt, thus impacting ship’s readiness. It’s common sense advice that parallels yours, since no one can predict how a mob will behave. While the training was intended to prepare people for overseas locations we would be visiting, I remember pointing out that it could just as well apply while in the US.
My Navy career ended up being spent mostly overseas. With all of my years of being stationed or traveling overseas, including residing overseas now, few locations have been as risky to personal safety as many major cities have been and are in the US. As an American, this pains me.
I’ve expressed criticism of the young man’s judgment. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I won’t do that any more, since there’s more than enough unjustified, and often dishonest, criticism leveled against him already.
A boy of seventeen is unlikely to possess wisdom. Mr. Rittenhouse possesses guts. I’ll give him that. Guts, and self-control under pressure.
My life has been in most ways easy. I was raised by a mother and a father who married in their 20s and are still married today, 60+ years later. I’ve enjoyed the benefit of wise, loving, and thoughtful parenting. I’ve had every advantage middle-class life affords an American. I gather, from reports, that Mr. Rittenhouse has not had it quite as easy. Yet I made mistakes in my youth that could have been as consequential as his choice to be at the riot that night, but I made them for more trivial reasons than probably motivated young Mr. Rittenhouse.
I have often decried the absence of manliness in America today. I will give Kyle Rittenhouse credit for stepping up and assuming a man’s role. We could do with more of that.
That’s funny if Rosenbaum, Grosskreutz, or Huber and all the other arsonists and vandals, and attempted murderers had asked me, I would have advised them against going, too.
And you know, I think that that shooting stopped the riots. I don’t think anyone returned the next day. It looks looks Kyle Rittenhouse stopped days worth of destruction and arson and violence.
Come to think of it, Kyle Rittenhouse really, really is a hero.
And John Wilkes Booth ended a play.
Aren’t you special. Great to have someone like you around to adjudicate and teach everyone lessons.
Aquittenhouse? How clever. Did you make that up yourself or was it from some activist mook on MSNBC?
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. For one, Rittenhouse was not a rioter. I don’t know what logic you used to deduce that, but you might as well be calling the police rioters as well as instigators who bring more chaos to the scene. And I don’t see a “moral responsibility” to leave until order is restored unless you are getting in the way of police actions. What if it was your business that was being ransacked and burned to the ground. Do you just turn away and let the mob do their thing? Or worse yet, leave your loved ones in danger?
You are now contradicting your previous assessment. I agree that order does not necessarily need to be restored by the government. And how do you know that Rittenhouse was only one of a couple guys on the scene trying to protect their property or community? Even if he was, that is not a reason to condemn his actions. That should be a reason to applaud him for his bravery! Too many people are afraid to get involved when crime is happening. If more brave men showed up on the scene to deter the rioting, then it never would have gotten started in the first place. Too many people want to shut their doors and hide in the corner curled up in the fetal position. This is not a good way of fighting for one’s way of life and values.
Again, police contribute to the chaos all the time. That’s why leftists blame them for starting the violence against “mostly peaceful protesters.” I hear it all the time.
Rittenhouse showed more courage than Derek Chauvin, by testifying at his own trial. I give him a lot of credit.
Rittenhouse shouldn’t have been on trial. That contemptible cur Tony Evers should have been.
I have never been in the military but I sense that the priorities for a military force and the priorities for civilians living in a community are different. Our soldiers do not have a personal stake in foreign communities, but have obligations to follow the orders of their immediate commanders, who in turn are following civilian leader’s commands in the interest of our own country. I would think that in a rioting situation we would value the lives of our soldiers over the lives of foreign citizens unless specifically instructed otherwise.
Yes.
I guess Skyler’s approach is that we should just let everything be burned around and don’t be there when the riot shows up to burn your house to the ground. Flee when they come for your business. Citizens should not defend themselves or their property if they do they are simply as bad as the writers and they should be in jail.
Yes, it is quite good of me. What’s your problem, don’t like your world view challenged? Actually I have never watched more then three minutes of MSNBC in my life, and it was Rittenhouse admirers who came up with that name. I thought it clever, I’m glad you did too.
No. My approach is that the people need to form up in a militia and kill everyone rioting. Do that once or twice and rioting stops being popular. Going into a riot by yourself is the opposite of stopping a riot, it is adding to the riot.
Then you would be a victim of a riot and would need a lot of help. One idiot with a fire extinguisher and a rifle is not the solution. It requires a lot of people acting together.
Bravery is not the solution to a riot.
This is what we have government for. It’s also why we should have militias. That the government failed is a huge problem. That we don’t have militias is another failure.