Dear friends,
This morning I woke up thinking about Kenneth Walker. He was asleep beside his girlfriend, Breonna Taylor, on the night that police entered her home with a no-knock warrant. He picked up the gun for which he had a license and fired a single shot that hit one of the three men who had kicked in their door in the middle of the night. What followed was a hail of bullets, 32 in all, six of which hit Breonna Taylor, killing her.
A year after Breonna’s murder, charges against Walker were finally dropped. There was apparently some question about whether Walker was acting in self defense. Wait, what?
I’m sure I thought of Walker because I’ve been thinking about the perversion of the notion of self defense. Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people — two of them fatally — and was acquitted with a self defense argument.
Before Rittenhouse was acquitted, Farhad Manjoo wrote “The Truth About Kyle Rittenhouse’s Gun.” Manjoo was watching the trial closely and was riveted by the prosecution’s dissection of the big lie of gun ownership:
That guns are effective and necessary weapons of self-defense. That without them, lawlessness and tyranny would prevail. And that in the right hands — in the hands of the “good guys” — guns promote public safety rather than destroy it.
In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it.
The details are now familiar to us. The first person he killed, was Joseph Rosenbaum, who was unarmed. He ran toward Rittenhouse, who was pointing his gun at him.
Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe.
Anthony Huber, having witnessed the killing of Rosenbaum, died while attacking Rittenhouse with a skateboard. The third man, who survived, aimed his gun at the teenager but hesitated; Rittenhouse shot him in the arm.
Gun violence is a public health issue, and we know that public health crises have a disparate impact on the public, harming those who are already marginalized. There are lots of groups working on the research, education, and advocacy work to change gun laws. Among them are the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, which has done important research on the dangers of carrying firearms in public. Many of these organizations are part of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
Support the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which “develops and advocates for evidence-based solutions to reduce gun injury and death in all its forms.”
There is more at stake here than sensible gun laws, obviously. There is the terrifying response of the right, not just among the activated base, but from members of Congress. Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz, and Paul Gosar tripped over themselves to offer Kyle Rittenhouse an internship.
Congresswoman Cori Bush tweeted:
Just being real: every day it feels more and more dangerous coming to work.
Not only do these members fuel violence. Now they’re actively recruiting someone whose sole qualification is killing people standing up for Black lives and getting away with it. They must be expelled.
Contact your Congressional Representative and let them know that Cawthorn, Gaetz, and Gosar have to go. Quote Cori Bush.
Yesterday was World Remembrance Day for the victims of road violence. Our local event was held at Brooklyn Borough Hall. The flower pots arrayed on the steps bore the names of the 1,800 people who died in our city as a result of road violence during De Blasio’s two terms as mayor.
Photograph by Stanley Greenberg
Streetsblog criticized Mayor-elect Adams, who is a relatively strong voice for street safety, for recent remarks, in the run-up to this event, which he did not attend but helped to organize:
[H]e did promise “traffic-calming” measures, better driver education, more enforcement against recklessness and a “zero tolerance approach” to crashes, but he closed by harping on the misguided idea that our “culture” can be changed simply through personal good deeds.
Adams’s office announced plans to create a memorial grove of trees to the victims of road violence. There are, at this writing, only one or two such memorials in the world.
A memorial grove is an important statement because if you truly want to change car culture, the first step is to highlight that car culture has actual once-living victims.
Unfortunately, a senseless death theme has emerged this Monday morning. I promise that tomorrow, we will find reasons for hope and gratitude.
We’ll end this morning with a little climate action to target the president. Even eighth grade activists understand that addressing huge problems cannot be done by individual action alone. As Alex B. wrote to a legislator:
It is up to you to save this planet from the deep evil known as climate change.
Tell President Biden: No more fossil fuel permits!
with love,
L