Mixed Feelings on the Rittenhouse and Arbery Decisions
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By BENJAMIN DEL BARRIO
Kyle Rittenhouse idolized law enforcement, so it comes as no surprise that he joined a local youth cadet program. He would later work as a lifeguard and train to be an EMT, while supporting Donald Trump. In 2020, when he was 17 years old, he shot three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two, in the middle of protests and riots following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, leading to one of 2021’s biggest murder trials. So how did a simple right-wing kid like him end up in this mess?
It started when a friend, who lived in Kenosha, bought an AR-15 assault-style rifle for Rittenhouse a few months prior to the shooting. Since Illinois has stricter gun laws than Wisconsin, this friend stored the gun in his home. On the fateful night of August 25, Rittenhouse retrieved the gun to defend businesses from rioters, he said, while also carrying a medic kit to help the injured.
Inevitably, people got aggressive with him. Rittenhouse was chased into a parking lot by Joseph Rosenbaum, whom Rittenhouse fatally shot after Rosenbaum lunged toward his gun.
As Rittenhouse ran away, a crowd of people chased him. Anthony Huber attempted to club Rittenhouse in the head with his skateboard. Gaige Grosskreutz pointed a pistol at him. Rittenhouse shot both. Grosskreutz was the only one to survive. Rittenhouse and all three of the men he shot were white.
At the trial, Rittenhouse was found not guilty for reasons of self-defense and because he had not broken any laws.
Now, I'm not upset at the verdict since, judging by the video footage of the incident, it was pretty clear that Rittenhouse shot the three men in self defense. For example, Grosskruetz admitted that he had his gun pointed at Rittenhouse when Rittenhouse shot him.
What I do have a problem with is Rittenhouse’s irresponsibility. For one, by bringing his AR-15, he definitely raised the likelihood of this incident happening, as people will obviously feel threatened if you brandish an assault rifle.
It’s also hard to believe it was a coincidence that Jacob Blake, a black man, was shot by the police when he was wielding a knife while Rittenhouse faced none of this hostility from the cops monitoring the protest. Such implicit racial bias is why he’s alive to this day.
This incident created a divide between people. The right wing hailed Rittenhouse as a hero while the left considered him a terrorist. And it wasn't just his actions at the protest that widened the ravine between America’s political sides.
After getting his $2 million bail paid for mostly by right wing supporters, Rittenhouse went to a bar in southern Wisconsin. There, he was hailed as a warrior by members of the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group. They posed for a photo with him, flashing the upside down ‘ok’ symbol.
As a result of all this, Rittenhouse has become a jolly roger for the right wing, the face of things he may not support. But he has made many choices that led him here, and in that sense he is facing the consequences for his actions.
Not that long after the Rittenhouse decision came down, another jury reached a verdict in the case of Ahmaud Arbery. Arbery was a 25 year old black man and an avid jogger, and unfortunately, that would lead to his undoing. In February 2020, Arbery was jogging through Satilla Shores, Georgia when he happened across a building that was under construction.
Arbery sometimes had auditory hallucinations. He also might have wanted to find a water faucet to drink from. But for whatever reason, he entered the house.
There had been some recent thefts in the neighborhood, and Travis McMichael and his father Greg, two white residents of the neighborhood, suspected Arbery of being the thief when he left the house and started to jog again.
The two got a shotgun and a pistol and got into Travis’s pickup truck to pursue him, shouting at Arbery to stop. Their neighbor, William Bryan, saw the chase and began to follow closely while filming.
Once the three men cornered Arbery after five minutes, a desperate Arbery ran at Travis, who held a shotgun. As the two fought, Travis shot Arbery three times, killing him. At the trial late last year, all three men were found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
I am elated that the killers were found guilty, but the fact that they almost never even got indicted in the first place is maddening. Greg McMichael is a former police officer, and the three were not charged for weeks — until Bryan’s video came out. And there are a few reasons to believe that their pursuit was racially motivated. Firstly, they chased an unarmed man wearing nothing but a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. It should have been easy to tell if he had stolen something. Secondly, Travis had been caught saying the n-word in text messages and Instagram comments, and his truck sported a confederate flag vanity plate.
One thing that the Kyle Rittenhouse incident and this one have in common is that they were both examples of horribly misguided vigilantism. One important difference is that Arbery was innocent while the men Rittenhouse shot were actively attacking him.
While the juries got it right both times, the cases still reveal how divisions in America between the political left and right, lingering racial bias, and out of control gun ownership leave our society unstable.