Thoughts on Kyle Rittenhouse
Graeme Wood has a great piece in The Atlantic about the sheepdog mentality of people like Rittenhouse. It’s well complemented by my piece on militarized masculinity. From Wood’s piece:
If you have never walked around with a gun in your pocket, you probably have poor intuitions about how it feels—the power; the discomfort of having a hunk of metal or plastic impeding your gait and mobility; most of all, the sense of responsibility. The writer Dan Baum strapped on a .38 in the course of researching a 2013 book on gun culture and described the experience well:
“Everything around me appeared brilliantly sharp, the colors extra rich, the contrasts shockingly stark. I could hear footsteps on the pavement two blocks away ... It made me more organized. Wearing the gun, I was Mr. Together. There was no room for screwing up when I was equipped to kill.”
Baum would avoid trouble, because he didn’t want to be anywhere near a fistfight, unstable people, or anything that might raise the possibility that he would fire his gun. The feeling of empowerment comes with a wearying imperative of caution: You do not seek out danger, and instead you live the most boring life possible, to avoid using the murder machine you have for some reason decided to attach awkwardly to your midsection.
What distinguishes Baum, who crossed the street to avoid violence, from Rittenhouse, who carried openly and crossed state lines to find violence? One is a seersucker-wearing, middle-aged journalist, and the other is an adolescent. The other salient difference, though, is that at 17, Rittenhouse has never known a world where owning a gun did not go along with what is sometimes known as the “sheepdog mentality”—the belief that your gun exists to protect others, and that you should rush in to perform that duty. [...]
Here are my thoughts on Kyle Rittenhouse: electric chair.
No, wait, that’s too easy. Give him life in prison but make him work to earn his meals and housing. And none of that special treatment for his own safety; put him in with the general population and let the inmates who are in for petty drug charges take turns turning him out in the showers. Don’t give me that “he’s only 17” nonsense, he clearly didn’t let his young age restrict him when it came to possessing a firearm, no reason to let it stand in the way now.
If you think he’s innocent or that he acted in self defense, go ahead and tap out of the argument, carve a swastika into your forehead, and leave the real patriots with fully developed brains to deal with this shitbag Republican superstar.