Seemingly everyone expected he would be acquitted, and now he has been. Was it the right verdict? Maybe. Within the narrow purview of whether Rittenhouse could conceivably claim self defense, maybe. But that only shows that our self defense laws themselves are deeply flawed. Because now anyone can take a gun into an extremely tense situation, create even more tension, shoot people because he felt threatened, and walk away without a single legal consequence.
Also, I think some liberals like myself may conflate the very narrow case surrounding his guilt or innocence with all the bad stuff swirling around it. The truth is, even a guilty verdict would not have addressed them in any meaningful way.
Case in point: even before he fired a single shot Kyle Rittenhouse was already a bad actor. He went to a city he did not live in to protect property that was not his with an illegally obtained weapon of war. He was wrong to do this. Very wrong. And so was everyone who told him that this was a good and necessary thing to do. But of course it takes more than these facts to warrant a murder conviction.
And let’s not forget that he went to Kenosha to “police” those protesting the local police shooting of yet another unarmed black man seven times in the back. Kyle was there because he sided with the police and wanted to keep the protestors in check. It is not–or at least shouldn’t be–the role of civilians to police protesters with deadly weapons. Be that as it may, I generally side with protesters when it comes to police brutality against black people. And for that reason I also say Rittenhouse was wrong. But being on the wrong side of an issue doesn’t get you convicted of murder.
It feels like a conviction would have been a rebuke and a condemnation of these surrounding issues, but I don’t think it really wouldn’t have been.