Madison Cawthorn Crows About Rittenhouse Acquittal ‘Be Armed Be Dangerous’

This didn’t take long. As you are no doubt painfully aware, the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is over and he walks, found not guilty on all charges. This solidifies his folk hero status with the right-wing and they just can’t pop the champagne corks fast enough. Here is Medison Cawthorn’s two cents.

Madison Cawthorn offers Kyle Rittenhouse “an internship,” says he isn’t guilty, and tells followers to also “be armed and dangerous.” pic.twitter.com/m3EHnp5EOD

— PatriotTakes ?? (@patriottakes) November 19, 2021

And he’s the second right-wingnut to offer Rittenhouse an internship. Matt Gaetz thinks it’s a swell idea, too.

It's interesting that the people who are cheering this on today might not realize that the shoe can be on the other foot tomorrow. This verdict has just opened a pandoras box.

— ORDuckGirlFan (@ORDuckGirlFan) November 19, 2021

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— Leo (@leo1979xz) November 19, 2021

Kyle Rittenhouse is a creation of the NRA and right-wing media. Plus, the judge in his case threw out the illegal possession of a firearm charge on a “technicality.” Maybe that’s fair but the rest of the scenario is not. Rittenhouse claimed self-defense, but he also crossed state lines and put himself in harm’s way. It’s very difficult to rationalize that this isn’t a victory for vigilantism.

What about the other self-defense trial going on now, the one in Georgia? Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael and their neighbor William Bryan ae all claiming self-defense as well for killing Ahmaud Arbery, for the crime of jogging past them while black. The men filmed themselves arguing with Arbery before they shot and killed him. But it’s still self-defense, three armed men against one unarmed one, who was literally just passing them in the street.

These and other tragic cases are showing up in the courts nowadays because the NRA put together its “Stand Your Ground” philosophy, which has been twisted to anything but standing one’s ground. It’s been bent into situations where the people claiming defense went massively out of their way to create a violent situation. That’s where morality flies out the window and the NRA walks in the door. Salon via Raw Story:

Blame the National Rifle Associaton (NRA) and the gun industry, which has had a massive assist from the right-wing media. For decades, the gun lobby has fought a battle on two fronts — through law and propaganda — to redefine the American concept of “self-defense” away from the sensible one and towards one that encourages people to seek out violent conflict. They’ve empowered every insecure yahoo in the country to recast himself as a hero in an action movie, who goes out hunting for bad guys under the guise of “protecting” the community. Of course, in the real world, bad guys aren’t as easy to find as they are in the movies, and so there’s the ever-present temptation to round up people who aren’t actually threats — lefty protesters armed with skateboards and Black men out for a jog — into the role of the villain, to make those violent fantasies come true.

We see this most clearly in the spate of “stand your ground” laws that the NRA spent years aggressively lobbying state lawmakers to pass. (About half of all states have some version of this law.) As the gun safety group Giffords explains, these laws “allow a person to use deadly force in public, even if they know they could safely avoid any need for violence by simply stepping away from the incident.” They were passed with bad faith arguments that they would prevent violence, but in fact, they are linked to higher rates of violence precisely because they incentivize starting fights. With these laws, you can start a fight with someone and, if they punch back, you can now claim “self-defense” to justify shooting them. “In other words,” as Giffords notes, “they make it easier to get away with murder.”

This ugly reality was exposed in the 2012 killing of a teenager named Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Florida. Martin had been out buying candy at a convenience store when Zimmerman spotted him. Zimmerman had a classic case of racist NRA brain, and notoriously had logged 46 calls to emergency services in the years before killing Martin, usually to report “suspicious activity,” such as “children playing in the street,” Black men driving through the neighborhood, Black teens hanging out, dogs sitting outside, and, of course, parties. That night in Florida, Zimmerman called 911 and chased Martin down, even as the 911 operator told him to leave Martin alone. The ensuing conflict led to Zimmerman killing Martin. Because we can never know who technically hit who first, Zimmerman was able to get away with it. (There’s a strong reason to believe that Martin was acting in legitimate self-defense after being followed by a creepy racist, but he’s dead now, so there’s no way to hear his side of the story.) What we can say with absolute certainty is that, if Zimmerman had left Martin alone in the first place, none of this would have happened. […]

Gun lobbyists love to claim that guns are frequently used in self-defense, but this argument depends on their definition of “self-defense,” which covers people who instigate and escalate violence. As Harvard researchers have found, most “purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments,” not in situations where one has to fend off an unprovoked attack. Indeed, armed self-defense in an unprovoked attack is incredibly rare, researchers found, and when it does happen, guns prove no better than other forms of self-defense, such as hitting or throwing things at an unprovoked attacker.

That guns are so useless in real self-defense is no doubt why the gun lobby has been intent on redefining the cultural conception of self-defense to cover people who grab a gun and go looking for people to fight with. It’s hard to get people all excited to spend money on guns, when the chances you’ll ever need to defend yourself are low and throwing a chair at an attacker and running away works just as well, if it does happen. Instead, guns are marketed to people — mostly men, but increasingly women — who are insecure and often incredibly racist, and who enjoy the power fantasy the gun represents.

The Rittenhouse verdict is what the NRA hath wrought, and nobody works hand in glove at the behest of the NRA like the GOP, especially its extremist fringe element. Today was a victory for them. They know it, and they’re exalting in their day in the sun.