Yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all charges. No one should be surprised. Shree Paradkar lists three other examples of American injustice:
Tamir Rice, 12. Just 12 years old in 2014, playing with a toy gun, on a quiet playground in Cleveland, Ohio, when he is gunned down by police for possibly being a threat. The cop who killed him, never charged. The boy’s apparent guilt: being Black.
Trayvon Martin was 17 in 2012, killed for the crime of wearing a hoodie and carrying a packet of Skittles in Florida. George Zimmerman, the man who killed him, claimed self defence and was acquitted.
Mark Hughes, a 34-year-old Black man in 2015, shows up wearing a legally purchased AR-15 rifle at a protest in Dallas in the open carry state of Texas. The protest turns deadly leaving five police officers dead. Hughes quickly hands over his weapon to police and helps them evacuate people from rally, but the Dallas police department still circulates his photo to the world naming him the chief suspect.
Americans claim that the second amendment gives them the right of self-defence with a deadly weapon. But think for a moment:
Are we supposed to care about which particular set of laws in which particular state allows fully armed people to claim self defence against unarmed people? Are we supposed to be mollified that an acquittal most unjust was simply the law proceeding as decreed? Are we supposed to be blind to the knowledge that such laws, including the basic presumption of innocence, are never applied equally?
Rittenhouse arrived in Kenosha to help protect an auto dealership at the invitation of the owner. He walked into a smouldering tinderbox of a situation with a dangerous weapon he had no business carrying and one that immediately made him threatening. And when people around him responded to him like the threat he was, he reacted to that fear with his own. And claimed he responded in self-defence.
As the parents of Anthony Huber, one of Rittenhouse’s victims, said, the not-guilty verdict “sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.”
I have reached the conclusion that the United States is a doomed nation.
Image: NBC News
