Even if Rittenhouse somehow magically knew any of this before illegally smuggling a weapon across state borders for the express purpose of violating the same curfew as the people he shot whom the police pointedly insulted saying it basically didn’t matter they were dead because of that broken curfew and threatening the police should they attempt to make him abide the same curfew fully intending to gun someone down in the street at the first excuse…
How does this change that he’s a murderer? How would cleaning up graffitti change that he’s a murderer? I know for a fact nothing any of the people you’re trying to say didn’t deserve to live and don’t deserve justice because they had criminal records could have done would negate any crime real or imagined. Not community service, not working to combat poverty or gang violence, not military service, not directly saving other lives, not curing cancer, certainly not cleaning up some paint.
And what if somebody went and shot Josh Duggar? He’s a child rapist. But unlike a black person when it’s discovered it’s his parents that get to decide he’s been punished enough rather than any representative of the law and then if you say he shouldn’t be an outright role model for families despite his past well then in your eyes you must be racist against Christians. The idea of treating him like his rights are something he needs to earn and that he should be kept on the other end of a gun waiting for the first slip-up is horrifying to you. His rights are rights regardless of his sins. Everyone else? Punishment of the law but no protection even if another lawbreaker breaks the law to victimize them.
You go to a meeting of Republicans and spray bullets chances are pretty good you’ll hit embezzlers and con artists that have stolen more than the combined amount of every petty theft and mugging in North America. Rapists who insist women “let” them do anything and if they say otherwise it’s because they “changed their minds.” People who say outright they and Jeffery Epstein like girls to the same degree. People who think marriage means whatever you do to your wife isn’t illegal even if she’s fourteen and her “consent” wasn’t nearly as much a factor as her parents was. Financiers of terrorism. People who abuse their positions to buy and sell political favours. And maybe even somebody that personally has blood on their hands instead of just arranging for something bad to happen to someone else through someone else. Lot of them don’t get punished in any form. None of that would justify a killing spree. Even if America would genuinely become a better place for some of the people I’m thinking of biting it.
Certainly not in your eyes because the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse is an unrepentant murdering criminal doesn’t matter to you, only that you want his victims to suffer and any hints of wrongdoing on their part which you went digging for to minimize their murder as has been the routine for centuries don’t really matter to you either. It doesn’t matter what kind of lives the people he killed lived as even if they were living saints who harmed not a blade of grass and spoke not one unkind word, standards to which no other human being is ever expected to live until they’ve been victimized and an excuse is needed to not care, you would merely try to find somebody the victim was standing in a hundred feet of to use to demonize them by association. Associate them by the most tenuous of links to fringe ideas you insist must be inherently dangerous. Invent, imply, recycle old lies… You manufacture your justifications. Innocence, whether it’s the victim or the person standing next to them that could just as easily have been killed if they were a meter closer, a millisecond slower, and in the cases of the people who died trying to pin him down found their valor and sense of self-sacrifice for the person standing next to them… it’s just inconvenient to you. Guilty until proven otherwise, and even then what does it matter to you?
If I’m not mistaken, you also tried to characterize their attempts to prevent him from killing more people as an attack. If not you certainly those like you who also try to minimize and excuse the murders. It didn’t matter to you that he killed a person first, that nobody in the crowd who had a gun thought to pull it out and end Rittenhouse in accordance with the vigilante morals you are espousing and instead put their own lives in danger by throwing themselves on him to save others hoping to pin him down until the police arrive - an instinct to put trust in the law even as the fear that police will sooner mark them the villains is continuously validated. Defying the narrative that they are a lawless pack of bloodthirsty violent criminals even as they were gunned down by a bloodthirsty violent criminal who came into the state for the direct purpose of breaking the law and threatened police if they tried to arrest him. Proving themselves better than him… better than you.
You don’t care.
The only thing that matters to you is that through Kyle Rittenhouse and sanction of his activities you feel you can terrorize a population into submission without the blood being on your own hands. And you want them to know a life of constant helpless terror because they dared to say they matter and if they matter it takes away from your personal sense of relevance as the sole existence of consequence with everything that is outside your concerns or noticeably strays from your opinions being problems to sweep under a carpet and stomp on so the mess is out of your sight and out of the world you believe yourself in control of. That’s why you tolerate a gang “militia” from out of state - immigrants, by some definitions - to wander the streets armed and eager for victims. Untouched by the supposed peacekeepers and only part-time enforcers of the law, given free license to gun down anyone that thinks that just because they live there the streets are theirs and just because they’re supposed to be guaranteed rights that they can exercise them without being punished brutally.
Power and dominance. Fear and compliance even when compliance does not offer salvation, merely easing the amount of effort on behalf of their tormentors. Blood for for your image, blood for the “insult” of not acknowledging the ground under their feet is your turf. Gang mentality. That’s all that matters to you.
