Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"under Wisconsin law, you can kill people in self-defense if you reasonably believe that doing is necessary to spare yourself or others from imminent bodily harm or death. This belief need not be accurate. Nor must it be reasonable from an objective perspective. It only needs to be reasonable from the subjective point of view of the shooter in the moment he or she pulls the trigger.

[...]

"Rittenhouse’s self-defense claims boast legal plausibility. But they also illustrate the difficulty of reconciling mass gun ownership and expansive rights to self-defense with the rule of law.

"Rittenhouse’s killing of Rosenbaum may have been lawful. But that was scarcely self-evident to the bystanders who heard gunshots and then saw a killer holding an AR-15. The group of protesters who proceeded to chase and attack Rittenhouse could have reasonably believed that killing the armed teenager was necessary to save others from imminent bodily harm. If Rittenhouse had a right to shoot Huber and Grosskreutz in self-defense, the latter had a similarly legitimate basis for shooting Rittenhouse dead.

"Put differently: Once Rittenhouse fired his first shots, he and his attackers plausibly entered a context in which neither could be held legally liable for killing the other. Whether one emerged from this confrontation legally innocent or lawfully executed hinged on little more than one's relative capacity for rapidly deploying lethal violence.

[...]

"If America's permissive self-defense laws and abundant guns open up a vast zone of permissible killing, the precise borders of that territory are shaped by white supremacy. In a 2013 study of U.S. homicides, the Urban Institute found that killings involving 'a white perpetrator and a black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim.'

"A legal environment that favors the armed in their confrontations with the unarmed, police in their confrontations with suspects, and whites in their confrontations with Blacks is antithetical to social peace, let alone social justice. It is, however, quite favorable to the American far right."

-- Eric Levitz (EricLevitz), "Kyle Rittenhouse’s Defense Was Strong It’s also a threat to the rule of law.", New York magazine, 2021-11-19