I was happy and relieved at the verdict yesterday in the Rittenhouse trial. Of course you have plenty of ridiculous takes on the trial out there like this:
America today: you can break the law, carry around weapons built for a military, shoot and kill people, and get away with it.
That’s the message we’ve just sent to armed vigilantes across the nation. https://t.co/yiVLN2v718
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 19, 2021
I have spent an inordinate amount of time following this trial and spent my evenings watching the proceedings. Which reminds me that we need to start having cameras in federal courtrooms, but that is a different subject.
It’s breathtaking how none of the screaming loons like Newsom looked at one minute of these proceedings, looked at not one exhibit of evidence or even bothered to look at all of the video that is out there everywhere. Why are there even sides on the right to defend yourself?
This is a great time to have conversations about prosecutorial misconduct, the Constitution and self defense and instead it is just all rank bullshit. Imagine all of the innocent poor people rotting in jail because they took the deals due to prosecutorial misconduct. Kyle had people setting up defense funds or he would be there too. Especially if there wasn’t video.
The left in this country are absolute trash. I hope Kyle is able to somehow get on with his life and live it in a somewhat normal fashion after this all blows over. Oh and also after he is done suing everyone who called him a white supremacist, murderer, and all the rest. He could start with “Biden” but there is probably lower hanging fruit out there for some quick settlements. I’m sure there are a lot of people scrubbing their social media as I write this, but the internet never forgets. Just ask Nick Sandmann.
The point that a lot of the Newsom types have either never learned or willfully forgotten is that those “weapons built for a military” are the only ones protected by the Second Amendment, and that their use by the general public is really more of a “sanctioned by the Constitution” thing than anything they’re doing or want to do in government.
Aside from that, the AR-10/AR-15 weren’t necessarily “built for a military”. Fairchild Aviation basically did those speculatively, and were selling them to all and sundry before the US military ever bought any. In fact, if you go looking at the reality, there’s a long sordid history of the US military being less well-armed than civilians. When the average Westerner was carrying around lever-action repeaters like the various Winchester offerings, the US Army was saddled with the trap-door Springfield single-shot conversions. “Civilians” with superior weapons and firepower are a huge part of what happened to Custer’s 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn… Just saying.
If the Second Amendment means anything, it means that access to so-called “military arms” are what they meant to protect; the militia was never meant to be a wholly government-owned and operated civil function; it was meant to be the armed fist of the body politic, in order to prevent petty tyrants like Newsom himself taking over the machinery of government and then using it against the people of these United States.
Of course, they’ve consciously obfuscated the plain meaning of the word, and done their level best to undo the militia tradition. Personally, I think we need to go back to it, if only from the standpoint of civil defense.
Good post.
So is Newsome talking about Rittenhouse, or Grosskreutz?
@Christopher B – excellent.
The tacit policy of the Left/Democratic Party/Biden administration is to punish normal people for defending themselves against politically favored mobs and individual criminals.
It’s good Rittenhouse wasn’t convicted, but his case was obvious self-defense and should never have been prosecuted. The Left won a partial victory because the process is the punishment. Most normal people will not risk a legal ordeal even if it seems likely to end in acquittal.
Official toleration of riots and persecution of individuals who defend themselves from rioters could lead to an increase in group vigilantism, if only because there is safety in numbers. This is ironic because leftists are quick to mischaracterize self-defense as vigilantism, especially when defenders are white males and attackers are members of groups favored by the Left.
Anybody with sense would look at the big picture and ask why the local and state govts didn’t flood Kenosha with police to stop the rioting ASAP.
Continued migration from poorly managed leftist regions to relatively well managed non-leftist regions of the USA seems likely.
Jonathan…”Official toleration of riots and persecution of individuals who defend themselves from rioters could lead to an increase in group vigilantism, if only because there is safety in numbers.”
Also, laws that prevent people from arming themselves make them far more vulnerable to mob action, and hence encourage mob action for political purposes.
While I applaud the verdict as well, I have to remember that it is at best a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak picture.
Where are all the “brave” journalists that gave us mostly peaceful arson? I haven’t seen any reports on just what the human cost was from all the burned businesses. Have they all been rebuilt thanks to the munificence of insurance? Yeah, we all know that revisiting those places would show either the burned out hulks or the lots cleared of debris at the owners expense. I suppose we got a lot of street art out of it, so win-win.
If I had a business in a liberal bastion such as Madison, I’d be examining my options to limit what the next round of “peaceful” protests could wreak. You’ll be able to depend on the police to zealously enforce parking restrictions.
My personal opinion is that Judge Bruce Schroeder would have set aside a guilty verdict. I’m pretty sure that the conduct of the prosecution would have produced ample grounds for appeal. He could have granted the defense motion for a mistrial. I believe that jeopardy had been attained at that point so that would have ended it without possibility of a retrial. Instead, he gambled that the jury would do the right thing and end it decisively. This also probably heads off any DOJ attempt to drum up a trial of their own.
I remember reading that a lawyer that didn’t believe in juries should stay out of court rooms and stick to real estate. The same goes double for judges.
@MCS – I also think that the judge would have given a mistrial, likely with prejudice if the jury’s verdict didn’t go the right way. I think he was reading the jury and probably knew the verdict before he sent them off to deliberate.
The 5th amendment violation alone which was blatant, obvious and ridiculous would have probably gotten the judge tossed off of future cases or somehow otherwise sanctioned if he didn’t rule on it. As it is, the prosecutors need to be disciplined in some fashion.
I’m not so sure about the judge- he punted on so many decisions where the prosecution was clearly over the line and allowed in evidence he complained about more than once. Besides, based on the evidence, Rittenhouse deserved the cleaner result of a clearly well-considered not guilty verdict over a mistrial finding. The judge was spared the stress of overturning the verdict.
One thing I though this trial pointed out was just how much of a crapshoot the US justice system is, and how you have to be able to pay to play. The Left complains about how Rittenhouse got all of this attention that a black defendant would not- in fact, the Left is responsible for Rittenhouse’s notoriety as the Great White Defendant. Without that, he doesn’t get the attention from the right, doesn’t get the $2 million in crowdsource funds, and probably ends up with a public defender and ends up in jail for the rest of his life. So I have no sympathy- it’s their own damn fault.
And, hey, the next time someone asks you why you would possibly need a gun like the AR-15… it makes a dandy self-defense weapon, am I right?
One more thing- you believe a black defendant wouldn’t get the same consideration as Kyle Rittenhouse? How about this (from Ace of Spades blog…)
https://news.yahoo.com/jury-acquits-gifford-man-claimed-195415308.html
Black felon gets in shootout with SWAT team raiding girlfriend’s house; girlfriend killed; felon accused of 2nd degree murder; jury acquits; self-defense.
It did not help that we have a fool for a governor, who did not send the State Patrol and the Guard in, to immediately back up Kenosha PD, and Kenosha County. The riots, given the state of affairs in this country, were entirely predictable.
Evers is not just a fool, but an evil one.
zombie governor, I would say he craves brains, but facts are not in evidence,
@Scott – oh for sure Evers is to blame for much of the nonsense by sitting by and letting the mostly peaceful burning and looting carry on.
@Mom – indeed. That is sort of the point of the post that the “progressives”, who should be advocating for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged who don’t get a fair shake could have used the trial as a fantastic showpiece for injustice and prosecutorial misconduct. Instead they turn it into some sort of weird militia war?
The left’s reaction is entirely predictable. They have a narrative and no moral curb on emotionalism. Kyle was their hand-picked poster boy for “white privilege” and “institutional racism”. Legal doctrines and facts that would deny this narrative are excluded from consideration. They knew the verdict they wanted and the political/social results that would have caused. How do I know? Look at their clear ignorance of the facts of this case as they lavished hyper pejorative labels upon Kyle and those of us who didn’t buy their conclusions sans evidence. They still can’t even get the facts correct that the weapon was not brought across state lines by Kyle and that he was a local by numerous family connections and that the weapon was not illegally possessed by Kyle. Let alone the elements of self-defense, etc. “Video? What video, WE already know what happened.”
Judge declaring a mistrial? Maybe, but unlikely with prejudice. Had he done that the entire rath of the left would have descended on his pointy liberal head as the sole emancipator of Kyle.
Death6
@Dan from Madison,
“That is sort of the point of the post that the “progressives”, who should be advocating for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged who don’t get a fair shake could have used the trial as a fantastic showpiece for injustice and prosecutorial misconduct.”
I think you already know this, maybe not articulating it, but the idea that “progressives should advocate for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged” is delusionally wrong. They’ve never been about “advocating for the downtrodden”; it’s always been about leveraging people’s empathy for the not-so-lucky-in-life types in order to accrue political power for themselves. It’s a fraud, always has been.
Progressivism goes back to the days of nose-in-the-air genteel WASP America looking at all these unsavory unwashed types they were saddled with, either newly-immigrated types or those “not our own” who’d had the ill manners to come here to America before and during the time of the WASP hypothetical migration. Do remember that many of those types were of the opinion that the “great unwashed” couldn’t govern themselves, and needed “guidance”, guidance that the WASP-y types appointed themselves to provide. It’s not accidental that these control-freak types picked up on the whole “Help the helpless” idea as a means to garner political power to do what they liked; note the latest spending extravaganza–See anything at all in that bill which actually builds out infrastructure, or benefits anyone outside the normal Democratic voting blocks?
It’s always been about political power, and suckering the marks into believing that they’re acting in the interest of said marks. Note just how they react to the traitorous blacks who dare vote and espouse Republicanism… That’s a telling thing, that.
What’s amazing is how effective it is. Democrats were the ones wanting to keep slavery in force, were behind the Secession of the Southern states, the Civil War, wanting to end the Civil War in a stalemate enabling Southern intransigence and continued slave-holding, and establishing the KKK. Democrats established the Jim Crow laws, exploitative sharecropping, and a whole host of other offenses against black Americans, and somehow… They’re the good guys, the ones who’re not racist, at all…
‘Effing mind-boggling.
@ Gavin Newsome – now do Portland, Seattle, Baltimore, St Louis, and (gulp) Kenosha.
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
Basically, the proggies are trying to outlaw defending yourself and your property against violence committed against you and yours by members of the protected class.
I’m still a bit boggled that of the three people KR shot – and the fourth that he missed – all were criminals, some of them violent criminals with a long list of various offenses against the laws of God and man.
The lesson the progressives seem to be trying to teach us is – let the Brotherhood of the Traveling Progs do the violence they wish to inflict on us, and don’t you dare respond in any effective manner, you damned dirty conservatives!
Sgt Mon: “I’m still a bit boggled that of the three people KR shot – and the fourth that he missed – all were criminals …”
That may explain one of the peculiarities of this case — the lack of mention of the “victims”. Usually (i.e. when the person shot is of a particular heritage but not also a child in Chicago), the names of the “victims” would be front & center. Now, I have not been paying attention to the trial, but I do not recall skipping past any articles about the upstanding lives of the “victims”, or the pain being experienced personally in their communities.
We all know that when the first word describing some office holder indicted, convicted or caught In flagrante is not republican, we are dealing with a democrat. Is anybody surprised that among people traveling around to take part in riots there is a distinct lack of Sunday school teachers?
The less the media says about the “victim” the more their silence speaks.
Thanks Dan. I’m going to throw in my 2 cents but I think you hit the big things.
I was absolutely shocked by what were lies, real lies not differing opinions. The (was it an MSNBC person) who said that Rittenhouse shot the guy with hands raised when the guy himself (was that Grosskreutz?) acknowledged Rittenhouse didn’t shoot until he had lowered his gun and pointed it at him.
We visit my husband’s uncle every Sunday; last Sunday the woman who takes care of him said he’d been complaining to her about Rittenhouse who, he said, just shot into that crowd of blacks. She told him the facts; of course; she remarked to us that he really had to get Fox or Fox Nation or, well, something other than NBC, CBS, ABC (he’s out in the country, hard to get and he wouldn’t want to spend the money on cable, etc.). His politics have always been dependably conservative, but his brother died a couple of years ago and it was his brother that was the real fan of Limbaugh and of the NRA and listened and read everything they sent out. Now, with more people around, he watches television more. And of course Limbaugh is gone. And I’m not sure he subscribes to the NRA magazine, though he still has a sign at his door saying he doesn’ call 9/11, has his gun instead – forgotten the slogan.
How much of this country is really at the mercy of these a-holes on television?
Viva Frei (a Canadian attorney) has done a lot of vlogging about this, and also shares some of it with Barnes, an American trial attorney who was a consultant on the case for the defense (apparently, the poor defense needed someone but Barnes was too good)
My favorite bit was the “across state lines” mantra.
Rittenhouse’s home is 1 mile from the WI border. His father lives in Kenosha, as does his GM and some other relatives. But they keep repeating the “across state lines” garbage to try and make it sound like he drove half the length of the state to get to Kenosha, and had no other reason to be there except to shoot someone.
https://youtu.be/hY1eoY_MMco
}}} Sgt Mom: “I’m still a bit boggled that of the three people KR shot – and the fourth that he missed – all were criminals ”¦”
}}} Gavin: That may explain one of the peculiarities of this case ”” the lack of mention of the “victims”.
Well, that and the fact that they weren’t black. Having cemented that into the perception, they don’t want people to see pix or know their backgrounds.
Again, pick any one of the long-form Viva Frei entries (ca. 2h) on this, he and Barnes make the case that it appears as though there were four psychos looking for a victim they could take out under the cover of self-defense. The fact that, if you look at footage from it, you see them together regularly throughout the night. It’s not provable (they ack), but seems like a decent hypothesis, and explains some of their behaviors.
The MSN and looney left is still hammering the across state lines nonsense. The prosecutor made a big deal out of it at the trial. Anyone who knows the area understands that this was a red herring. And legally, outside of perhaps giving the feds some shred of, well, “something” to drag Kyle through the courts on later, a total non starter.