The Changing Definition of “Self-Defense”

Accused vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on a cellphone video

I’m having difficulty describing the rage I feel watching the Kyle Rittenhouse trial unfold. The idea that anybody, especially a minor, could carry a military-grade firearm into a community where he neither lives nor works, kill two people, and claim “self-defense” boggles my mind. The fact that nobody in the justice system discarded that claim unilaterally makes me question the legal proceedings. If that argument isn’t discarded prima facie, that opens doors to unregulated vigilanteism.

American conservatives have rallied around Rittenhouse’s claims. The idea that he has legal authority to “defend” others’ property has become right-wing doctrine recently, a decision that actually makes sense from conservative history. Since at least the 1990s, American conservatives have valued the right for civilians to use violence to defend property as central to jurisprudence. Yet even salutary analysis of their rhetoric reveals something left unsaid. As a friend put it recently, regarding Rittenhouse’s case:

Rittenhouse was afraid of a kid with a skateboard...............

while he was carrying an AR-15.

— Agolf Twitler Slayer (@bblock29) November 3, 2021

I encountered similar logic previously. Writing about Trayvon Martin, killed by George Zimmerman, a vigilante who similarly claimed self-defense, I said that reaction seemed unmotivated by any reasonable definition of the situation. One (unsigned) commenter told me: “Once George was getting his skull bounced on the pavement, without some fantastic counter evidence, self-defense is clear.” Then as now, this struck me as flawed, because it relied on a lousy and legally sloppy definition of self-defense.

In both cases, George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservative response has revealed the unspoken supposition: self-defense happens with a gun. When a mysterious stranger pursues a youth through residential streets, and the youth responds with fists, what that youth does isn’t self-defense, even though the mysterious stranger caused the confrontation. Likewise, when a lawful protester sees a vigilante with a rifle, and aims to prevent violence, that isn’t self-defense. Self-defense happens with a gun.

Like me, you probably assumed initially that the Trayvon Martin killing was primarily racial. Martin was Black, while Zimmerman was a fair-skinned Hispanic man whom many commentators, including me, initially mistook for White. But if the Rittenhouse situation is essentially similar, then race isn’t the dominant concern, since both Rittenhouse and the three people he shot (two of whom died) are White. The commonality between these situations isn’t race or class, it’s only the gun.

Trayvon Martin

As an ex-conservative myself, I recall hearing, and occasionally even speaking, the core argument. We need civilian firearms, as people like Wayne LaPierre keep reminding us, to defend ourselves against common criminals and tyrannical governments. All guns, of all kinds. Everything from a pocket-sized Kel-Tec, to a hip-holstered Glock, to a Remington .30-06 deer rifle, to an AK-47. To the firearms true believer, we need guns to defend ourselves from a scary and violent world.

The arguments unfolding around Zimmerman and Rittenhouse reveal, however, that the rhetoric has skidded. At least among American conservatives, the correlation between firearms and self-defense has become reciprocal. Punching your pursuer, or clocking your pursuer with a skateboard, is an act of thuggish violence and mayhem. Shooting the person who punched you or swung at you with a skateboard is self-defense. This seems to apply even if the person carrying the firearm started the conflict.

This argument began among the police. The officer who shot Jacob Blake, kick-starting the Kenosha violence that entangled Rittenhouse, has evaded charges by claiming self-defense. This despite the officer, Rusten Sheskey, shooting Blake in the back while he was walking away. But wait, Officer Sheskey’s defenders hasten to claim: Blake had a knife in his car, and a warrant for his arrest! The mere fact that Sheskey couldn’t possibly have known that evidently doesn’t matter.

But what began among police has drifted into civilian law. Self-defense happens with a gun; anything involving hands or tools is not self-defense. I seriously fear this argument will empower more vigilantes, like Rittenhouse and Zimmerman, to deliberately provoke conflicts with anyone they personally dislike. If this defense holds any legal water—and Zimmerman’s acquittal suggests it does—then it’s only a matter of time before others misuse this premise to perpetrate cheap street justice.

Worse, if Rittenhouse is exonerated, you know it’s only a matter of time before some asswipe (that’s a legal term), giddy with culture-war self-righteousness, takes a firearm into a bar and picks a fight that turns deadly.. If Kyle Rittenhouse is permitted to excuse himself from shooting strangers by claiming self-defense, then the precedent is clear: self-defense is whatever happens with a gun. And someone, somewhere, will use that to make American life immeasurably worse.