Student op-ed says Rittenhouse "needs to be stopped"

AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

Kyle Rittenhouse’s ordeal may have begun that night in Kenosha. It hasn’t ended, though, as he’s apparently dealing with civil lawsuits resulting from that night.

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But he’s also starting a gun rights organization, which makes sense. After all, without that gun, he’s not here today.

But not everyone is a fan.

That’s unsurprising. After all, many people don’t respect gun rights.

A student publication from Cerritos College in California has at least one such person writing for it, and they think Rittenhouse should be stopped.

No, really, the title of the op-ed is, “Kyle Rittenhouse needs to be stopped.”

On July 23, a file with the Texas Secretary of State noted that an anti-gun control non-profit foundation was launched by Kyle Rittenhouse aiming to make the use of guns legal to carry without the proper education and legal assistance.

Kyle Rittenhouse was accused of murder in Wisconsin back in 2020 shortly after the death of George Floyd. Rittenhouse faced multiple charges like first-degree intentional homicide and first-degree recklessly endangering safety.

During a ”Black Lives Matter” racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rittenhouse, 17, at that time of the incident, armed himself with an assault rifle to defend himself and private business owners.

Protest is a strange word to use in place of “riot,” but the author is normally the co-sports and photo editor, so clearly she doesn’t have much experience writing. This will show later.

Carrying any weapon with or without a proper license of usage will lead to death eventually. Any type of weapon was designed to kill whether it’s to defend yourself or to hunt.

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I want to demand she apologize to the English language for that paragraph, but I won’t. She’s a college student and only has one published piece, so this may just be inexperience at work and I shouldn’t be mean.

But even if it was written in a way that would make Hemingway and Tolkien weep for joy, it’s still nonsense.

Carrying any weapon at all, even if you overcome every hurdle in place, will eventually lead to death? That’s a bold statement without even a hint of evidence to back it up.

Millions of people have permits to carry firearms. Millions of others live in constitutional carry states.

Some of them go their whole life without ever taking a human life. Many of those don’t hunt, so you can’t even lay those kinds of deaths at their feet.

What’s weird, though, is that she goes on to more or less correctly lay out why Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges when he shot three people. She doesn’t even pretend there was no threat to him, though I suspect she figures he should have just rolled over and died instead of fighting back.

She then goes on to cite cases of kids carrying guns illegally, cases which had nothing to do with Rittenhouse, before wrapping up with this:

Rittenhouse’s non-profit foundation should not be supported by anyone. What these anti-gun control foundations fail to realize is that open control of firearms can lead to more worldwide destruction.

Now, she’s entitled to her opinion that Rittenhouse’s organization shouldn’t be supported, though she hasn’t really made a case for why it shouldn’t be. I think she tried, but kind of sucked at it.

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First, we don’t “fail to realize” any such thing. We looked at the arguments and even RAND hasn’t found definitive evidence that gun control works as claimed.

Second, if “open control of firearms”–a nonsense term, to be fair–leads to more “worldwide destruction,” then how come we see violent crime all throughout South America, with rates far higher than the US rate, all while they have far more strict gun control measures than us?

And before you claim the problem is American guns filtering south, why do we see the same thing play out in Africa?

Gun control or the lack of it isn’t the problem and never was.

I get that this is someone on staff at a student publication at a community college in California, and we definitely need more student outreach, but these arguments aren’t moving at all. I mean, it’s just “Rittenhouse shot people in self-defense so he’s bad” and little more than that.

 

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