Kyle Rittenhouse has to defend himself

 Teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse has been on trial since the night that he shot three people, killing two. He has been praised or condemned, and subjected to media analysis for more than a year. At the end of his actual trial, just getting underway, he will be found guilty or innocent of the charges of murder and attempted murder. He will remain a polarizing figure in the historical record no matter how he fares in court.

Teenagers do ill-considered things. We consider the ones who get themselves killed as unlucky, but the ones whose rash decisions lead to the deaths of others face a lifelong challenge. Depending on how the deaths occurred, they might be harder or easier to rationalize. Accepting responsibility for a fatal error is always hard, but when the error was an active decision to use deadly force to end someone else's life the bar is at its highest.

True remorse is a life sentence without parole. It's one thing to get drunk with your buddies and crash your car, killing one or more of the passengers while you, the driver, survive. There was probably a certain degree of consent among the partying carload. It is easier to rationalize drunken teens playing with a gun than it is to accept that a sober and well-intentioned -- however misguided -- boy picked up a rifle and was willing to walk into a volatile scene of social unrest and make snap decisions in combat with people he identified as disposable.

Humans react to the threat of violence in two ways: fight or flight. These two reactions may mix in strange ways, as you see in videos of demonstrators clashing with either law enforcement or self-appointed keepers of the peace, in the posture of someone who tries to deliver a blow while simultaneously turning to retreat. You see it in street altercations and playground fights, the untrained actions of fear and anger. Adrenaline flows, the brain buzzes, the body tries to interpret the commands, and neither the fists nor the feet look heroic.

Carrying a weapon that extends your deadly capability many yards in front of you generates some degree of confidence. That confidence frays rapidly when an actual confrontation calls for clear decision making. Supposedly trained police officers have trouble making the right choice every time. Military personnel discover the difference between training and reality when they are actually attacked. Knowing how to handle a gun is not enough. You have to know how to handle yourself. Elite units are elite units not because of their weaponry, but because of their ability. As with so many other human endeavors, the ones who turn out to be excellent prove that we are not all created equal. We are equal in moral responsibility and in our right to be treated fairly, but not in the distribution of qualities that favor achievement in one realm or another.

Kyle went looking for trouble. He may have hoped that his armed presence would subdue the unhappy mob without the need to take any out, but he was equipped to kill, and he did so. Whether it was self defense in the actual instant, he didn't have to be there at all. He decided that he could help the beleaguered business owners of Kenosha by showing up armed at an already inflamed situation, to act more or less independently of any centralized command.

He meant well, within his world view. At least it appears that way. That makes it worse for him, because it makes him more vulnerable to himself, should he decide that he was completely unjustified from the outset. He must defend himself against the worst interpretation of his own actions. No one can protect him from that. He can decide to absorb the approval of his supporters and use that to block any notion that he did something really wrong. It may come easily. But if it fails, he will be left with his own inner voice reminding him every day that two people are dead because of choices he made. It will form a wall between him and deep happiness, unless he can write off the lives of his targets as just a lesson learned in youthful indiscretion. The compulsion to defend himself, even from himself, is powerful and normal. He has to live with himself.

The militia next door

Self-styled patriots have seized a federal government building in Oregon to protest land use regulations they feel represent federal overreach. They're heavily armed and promising to defend themselves with deadly force if the government starts any trouble.

The substance of their grievance is not important. But it got me wondering what it might be like if they'd done it in the woods behind me, rather than in a small structure grandly and misleadingly described by the media as "a federal building."

Consensus among the many experts who fill social media and chat rooms, is that the authorities should simply turn off the water and electricity to the building and ignore the militia men until they give up and go home to hydrate and thaw out. But what if they didn't?

I imagined a patrol of armed men trooping out of the woods to request or requisition supplies from me.

My first move would be to politely refuse them any aid. They got themselves into this, they can put up with the hardships until they figure out how to get themselves out.

In response, they would probably claim to be a revolutionary army and say they would commandeer whatever they needed from me, an enemy combatant branded by my obvious sympathy to the tyrannical central government. Or they might go looking for better luck at a neighbor's house, but let's say my house is the only one convenient to their little revolution fantasy camp.

My next move might be to display, or even use, a weapon in response to their threat of physical force. Or I might already have called in law enforcement to do their job protecting peaceful citizens from armed hooligans.

This is a watershed. If I engage the militia in a firefight, I am acting more like they say they act, taking the law into my own hands to serve a higher cause. The fact that I am using my Second Amendment right to bear arms to shoot at them as they exercise theirs to try to coerce me puts us both strangely on both sides of the law at once. As the aggressors, they are more wrong than I am, but once the firefight starts it comes down to skill and accuracy, no matter who might be "right."

If law enforcement shows up and shots are exchanged, we have another skirmish for the militia set to add to their list of federal acts of tyranny. Remember Waco! Remember Ruby Ridge! Tyrants and Patriots! Win or lose, they've picked up another piece of propaganda to use later.

Once citizens decide that the threat or use of deadly force is acceptable as a routine part of conflict resolution, in accordance with the holy scripture of the United States Constitution, we make government law enforcement agencies an instrument of tyranny and vigilantes the real arbiters of dispute. The money we save on taxes that used to fund law enforcement can be spent on armament, personal fortifications, medical supplies and funerals.

Any quick skim of news outlets turns up plenty of misbehavior by law enforcement personnel as well as trouble made by gun-worshiping freedom fighters. You can't point at either side and say they're the bad guys or the good guys. All you can say is that they are incapable of expressing themselves in a less destructive way. You can be in the cross hairs or the cross fire, but either way you're neither free nor safe. The enemy of freedom is violence, no matter who instigates it.