On Aug. 23, 2020, a Black man named Jacob Blake was shot seven times at point-blank range in front of his family. A video was released of Blake when he was shot by officers, and the reaction of the officers is quite telling. Blake held no weapon, and he wasn’t resisting arrest by a long shot, yet in this video, seven shots ring out and the bystanders are not screaming in terror and sadness. Blake survived, partially paralyzed, yet the police still handcuffed him to his bed.
In wake of his shooting, protests broke out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where it all happened. On the night of one of the protests, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse showed up, armed and ready to cause problems. The Guardian posted the video of Rittenhouse opening fire at innocent protesters, and when people tried to take him down, he shot even more instead of stopping. Rittenhouse ended up murdering two protesters and injuring another. Make no mistake when calling him what he is: a domestic terrorist.
It seems that right-winged media outlets are trying to humanize this evil individual by saying that he was simply trying to defend businesses and acted in the realm of self-defense. I even saw a GoFundMe created by Christian right-wingers to help out Kyle and his family. Thankfully, both fundraising sites took these horrid fundraisers down. Since I am combating the “facts don’t care about your feelings” party, it should be acknowledged that Rittenhouse is 17 years old, therefore too young to buy a firearm legally. It is evident that guns are an issue in this country, but in the video of Rittenhouse walking towards police, he isn’t even handcuffed. Rittenhouse walked free, unharmed and wasn’t even arrested till the next day.
Still think this isn’t a race thing? I present the example of Philando Castile, a man who was fatally shot by police in 2016. In the video that went viral, Castile’s girlfriend records the altercation as Castile was reaching for his driver’s license and letting the officer know that he had a legal gun. As Castile reached for his I.D., the officer shot him repeatedly, despite the conservatives’ argument that he was “resisting arrest” or that he was “reaching”.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives are trying to protect this terrorist, as this isn’t the first time the police and media have treated white shooters with much more dignity and respect than their Black/brown counterparts. For example, Feb. 14, 2018, Nikolas Cruz shot and murdered 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Cruz walked away from the situation, unscathed as the police didn’t even fire at him, making great use of their de-escalation practices and techniques.
Of course, I am not saying that Cruz should’ve died. However, it is hard to look at this situation and see how Castile suffered a brutal death because the officer thought he was reaching for his legal gun. In an interview with Jeranimo Yanez, the officer who shot Castile, Yanez “told them he stopped Castile not for a broken taillight, as he told the driver when the stop began, but because he thought Castile matched the description of a suspect in a robbery days earlier.”
This is sadly an excuse police frequently use to try to justify the wrongful deaths of police brutality victims. For example, Breonna Taylor was in her apartment with her boyfriend the night police entered her apartment and open fired. To be clear, Taylor’s boyfriend had a legal gun and was well within his rights to shoot back, especially when he wasn’t sure who was trying to get into their apartment. According to CNN, the police were raiding her apartment because they assumed that they had seen a drug lord leaving it before. There were no narcotics on the premises, and they had brutally murdered Breonna Taylor for this mistake.
It has become increasingly common over the last decade to coin white mass shooters as “mentally ill” or “troubled” whilst ignoring the fact that they are, in fact, terrorists and should be charged as such. While it is evident that there is a mental health crisis in the U.S., this doesn’t excuse these kinds of behaviors. Vice reported that, since the 1980s, there have been a little over 70 mass shootings in the U.S, and 44 of these terrorists were white males. This is telling because white men have committed approximately 63% of mass shootings during this time, despite the fact that they comprise a much smaller percentage of the population, according to Vice news.
When I Google Kyle Rittenhouse or any other white shooter, I’m sure it isn’t purely coincidental that they are not immediately referred to as domestic terrorists. When I searched for Dylann Roof, he is called a white supremacist instead, which seems a bit nicer than a domestic terrorist, which is exactly what he was. However, when I looked up the perpetrator of the Pulse nightclub shooting, I saw that he was titled a domestic terrorist in his description. This was because this shooter had connections to a militant jihadist group, and the U.S. is still wary of Muslim individuals. His name was Omar Mateen, and he was killed by a shootout with police following the shooting. White shooters have been able to waltz away from their horrible acts against humanity, but when a shooter is BIPOC, the police become trigger-happy. Even the shooter from the tragic UNC-C shooting last year didn’t get shot at and was arrested shortly after he murdered two students. He also isn’t labeled as a domestic terrorist.
Kyle Rittenhouse is not an American hero, or anything close to it. He is a domestic terrorist and is responsible for the death of two innocent protesters. What he did that night was premeditated, and he deserves to be locked away to the full extent of the law. It’s very embarrassing and quite disheartening for the right to try and defend an actual murderer.
