Merry Gun Christmas
While Rittenhouse and the shooting in Michigan have already faded from the news, the thing with the parents—one was good, the other bad—keeps bothering me.
(Not in the way murdered kids bothers me but bothers me nonetheless.)
Mr. Rittenhouse's mom called him a hero and those who love guns agreed.
Yet the Michigan parents are being held for being irresponsible. Is not that a double standard? After all, like Mr. Rittenhouse’s mom, they said guns are good too.
And since that goes along with where our law is at the moment, I can’t really see the difference in the two cases.
Let me say more about this.
As far as I understand American jurisprudence currently, the fifteen-year-old in Michigan was going 70 on a road posted with a 45 MPH speed limit. He killed four people. Kyle Rittenhouse may have gotten pulled over for the broken tail-light of killing two people, but was deemed a responsible driver.
To put it another way, does not the smart lawyer say that the Michigan shooter just "stood his ground" against bullies?
After all, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this Michigan kid may have swerved out of his lane but he also drives a road of countless billboards that read “Drunk Driving Welcome Here.”
And if a seventeen-year-old can, by choice, travel to a place of civil unrest and kill two people “in self-defense" should a fifteen-year-old who is forced to go to school (a ‘government school’ at that) be punished if--in his perception--the people there threaten him?
We must understand, my fellow citizens, that all rights extend from the righteousness of firearms and that all sense of threat is based on one’s own determination of that threat. This is, in essence, settled law.
A threat to me is what I imagine it to be.
All defense can and, indeed should be, lethal.
With logic that basic, how can anyone infringe on the right we all enjoy to kill those who may endanger us? Anything less is practically oppression.
If seventeen-year-olds with guns can decide who should be executed and who not, how do we deny that right to fifteen-year-olds? To do that would be almost crazy.
Needless to say, parents who say guns are bad shall have no standing under the law and should be ashamed their Christmas Cards do not show their families with machine guns. (In fact, those parents who complain such pictures are like ones that inspired the killers of their children will need to be corrected, as the YouTubers who love guns will do in the comments. These parents who have nothing more to stand on than the loss of their children, the defenders of guns will say, are virtue signaling.
In a country that holds guns holy, objecting to an event like the one that led to the slaughter of your daughter is not insisting on virtue, but feigning it, is not, Sir, how you defend the life of our sacred gun, but how you pretend you matter. And how you make yourself a threat.
Meanwhile, of course, from the floor of another school, another janitor is mopping up the blood of a kid who might, otherwise, be learning to drive or rushing to civics class, be sharing a priceless secret with a priceless friend or popping that popcorn you hang on your tree, the presents for family beneath, a crooked star above.