Rittenhouse: Good News, Bad News

I’ve had to spend a long weekend explaining to a lot of “progressives”: it’s entirely possible that not only are both of the following true:

  • Something can be a bad idea, legally and in common sense terms,
  • Self-defense is not only legitimate, but a very high hurdle to meet under the law in every state I’m aware of; that it’s a “license to kill” if you consider being arrested, spending two months in jail, having to bond for $2.5 Million to get released, spending 15 months in legal limbo, God only knows how much in legal bills, standing trial with a risk of two life sentences and a couple more decades to boot, and having to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder in case some depraved, entitled lefty narcissist decides to “even the score” to be a “license to kill”.

Most disturbing? Beyond the number of people who think that:

  • we should just ignore the law and make Rittenhoue an example because “we don’t want people wandering around defending themselves, or that
  • “crossing state lines” is a crime, or that
  • Kyle Rittenhouse was a “vigilante” for going to a riot with a gun, but Gage Grosskreutz wasn’t, or that
  • Rioting is sacrosanct protected speech?

…what could be worse?

This: I think both sides missed the most important lesson.

Which is, I believe, this.

Some Background: It is human nature to create order.

thout order, prosperity is impossible – and by “prosperity“, I don’t mean “his and hers Bentleys“, I mean living as something other than a subsistence farmer.

Without prosperity, freedom is academic. (And without freedom, order is tyranny, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves).

I’m no expert, but I think this is the real lesson of Kenosha that a lot of people on the right, and a lot more on the left, need to get.

We pay taxes to government – lots and lots of them. And providing “order” is the one unambiguously legitimate role of government.

And if government isn’t going to provide order, fairly and equally across society, in exchange for the burden of supporting it, and keep our businesses from getting burned, our cars from getting stolen, our kids from getting mugged on the way home from school?

People will start creating order for themselves. And one of these next times, it won’t be a 17 year old kid with more idealism than common sense and a loaner rifle.

It’ll be people who won’t run to the police to surrender when nasty nastiness happens.

It’ll be people who do their self-defense pre-emptively. People who don’t care about the high rhetoric and due process of the legal system.

People for whom shooting people isn’t something from video games; it’s something they do or did for their livelihood, either in the neighborhood or in Fallujah or Mogadishu or Helmand or somewhere in the Pine Barrens.

It’ll be people who keep secrets – you could even say, people who observe, and enforce, “codes of silence”.

Sounds like…the Mob? A Cartel? Omar’s crew from The Wire?

Weird.

18 thoughts on “Rittenhouse: Good News, Bad News

  1. Semi on topic, as it goes to how the mediots “cover” a story.

    Some jerk drove a car through a crowd at a Christmas celebration; the story just says “a person drove a car”. Lol, guess the race, right?

  2. Funny how so many lefties are suddenly interested in borders.

    PS: for the troll, the distance to the “border” was one mile. The rifle did not cross “the border’. The rifle is not an assault rifle, so it is NOT a weapon of war.

  3. the real lesson of Kenosha that a lot of people on the right […] need to get

    I don’t understand this point. No, I’m not disagreeing, I don’t understand.

  4. I think the thing that sometimes the right doesn’t get is that sometimes I read comments that suggest that someone is just fine with a cesspool being a cesspool–that if Gary (Kenosha, Milwaukee, etc..) go south in a hurry, that’s their problem, and we can just shake our heads at them. Then we have car trouble on I-94 and learn that it’s a lot of our problems, or we find out the hard way that the gangs there can find their way to Portage, Merrillville, Hobart, Hammond, and East Chicago. Or further.

  5. and we can just shake our heads at them

    I’d like to see Mitch explain his assertion himself, but if you think this is what he meant, then I have a question for you. Exactly how do people in Milaca, Worthington, or Ortonville influence politics in the Twin Cities? I mean, so as to prevent those fuckwads and their enablers (voters) who are running Mpls and StP from being less self-destructive?

  6. One thing that helped quite a bit in Colorado was preemption statutes–state laws that prevent cities from doing things in contradiction. That prevented Boulder, for example, from trying to become a new “New York City” or District of Columbia in terms of gun control. You could do the same in any number of areas, and I’d bet that the mere threat of them becoming law might scare big city politicians and prosecutors to do the right thing.

    It can be hard–you’ve got crime families in the big cities like the Daleys and Madigans in Chicago working against you–but it’s worth a try. More or less, when federalism is abused in a way that hurts the population as a whole, you rein in the latitude of local authorities. Yes, it ought to be done with the District of Columbia. Re-elect a guy who was caught smoking crack with a hooker, you lose your right to elect your own officials. That’s how it ought to work at least.

  7. Might be worthwhile to allow armed citizens on commercial airlines to tamp down on violent passengers. ;^)

  8. I hear you, Mitch.

    I know a bunch of current and former cops, soldiers and feds through other forums. They uniformly believe that the best case end-state will be professional* security for the really well heeled, with every ethnic version of La Cosa Nostra, or Redneck cousin equivalents for Joe & Jane Sixpack. One way or another, we are in for a bumpy ride.

    * Ghurkas, SEALs, or Brit/Aus SAS, for a good example. Executive Outcomes might have a domestic service division at this rate.

  9. I hear you, Mitch.

    I know a bunch of current and former cops, soldiers and feds through other forums. They uniformly believe that the best case end-state will be professional* security for the really well heeled, with every ethnic version of La Cosa Nostra, or Redneck cousin equivalents for Joe & Jane Sixpack. One way or another, we are in for a bumpy ride.

    * Ghurkas, SEALs, or Brit/Aus SAS, for a good example. Executive Outcomes might have a domestic service division at this rate.

  10. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 11.22.21 : The Other McCain

  11. OFF TOPIC

    Yesterday, I was having problems with my Yahoo email, so I cleared my browsing history and removed the cookies. My email now works fine.

    And, this website, Shot in the Dark, also loads as fast as any other blog. So …

  12. AllenS.
    Yea, you should clear out your cache and cookies on any browser at least once per month.

  13. Lex Luther wrote:
    I know a bunch of current and former cops, soldiers and feds through other forums. They uniformly believe that the best case end-state will be professional* security for the really well heeled, with every ethnic version of La Cosa Nostra, or Redneck cousin equivalents for Joe & Jane Sixpack.
    This was the default way of creating order from at least Roman times until the 18th century. In the Olden Days, there were judges and magistrates, but citizens and subjects provided day to day security for themselves, by themselves.
    If you were robbed or assaulted, you took care of the issue yourself or you and your friends dragged the culprit and witnesses before a magistrate if you wanted state sanctioned justice.

  14. MBerg wrote: “Some Background: It is human nature to create order.”

    But to what purpose? Unless you know what that purpose is, the order created can be corrupt. People were not created, by nature or by God, to maximize “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Or to maximize our economic output (the goal of both capitalism and communism), or to engage in race war. Or to enforce God’s laws.
    The idea that mankind can choose its own purpose is ridiculous. We cannot become other than we are, any more than a gold fish can choose to become a lion. If a goldfish could choose to become something else, it would choose to become a version of a goldfish, not a lion.
    In any case the “we” that chooses our purpose is never all of us, but the narrow strata of society with more than their share of economic and political power, awarded to them by a society which they believe is corrupt.

  15. Might be worthwhile to allow armed citizens on commercial airlines to tamp down on violent passengers. ;^)

    9/11 might have turned out differently if that had been the case.

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