JiveBlog

Regarding the Nov. 20 front-page article “Kyle Rittenhouse acquitted on all charges”:

Kyle Rittenhouse was a foolish boy who should have been back home playing video games. The real guilty party in Kenosha, Wis., was the police department, which allowed and encouraged this puffed-up young man to walk around in the middle of a riot carrying a loaded assault-style weapon. There was an 8p.m. curfew because of the mayhem, rioting, looting and arson. A state of emergency had been declared by Wisconsin’s governor. Surely, this should have been enough to justify keeping armed protesters apart. But the police inexplicably encouraged young Rittenhouse with words such as “we appreciate you guys, we really do,” and offering him bottles of water as he walked naively into a crowd of hostile demonstrators. What did they think was going to happen?

The Kenosha police should have stopped Rittenhouse and sent him and his armed cohorts back home or arrested them for violating a curfew during a state of emergency.  

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Blake Fleetwood, Amagansett, N.Y.

In her Nov. 20 op-ed, “The jury gave Rittenhouse the benefit of the doubt. Good.,”  Megan McArdle chastised “the left” for not using the Kyle Rittenhouse trial as an occasion to reach out to conservatives to work together for criminal justice reform. Given that most House and Senate Republicans voted against the infrastructure bill to thwart President Biden on an undertaking they said they supported, no sensible Democrat should waste time seeking Republican cooperation on any issue, even those the two sides might agree on. 

Moreover, it’s unlikely that those whom Ms. McArdle dubbed “law-and-order conservatives” can see a common cause uniting defendants like Mr. Rittenhouse and “the nameless poor kids” for whom “the system” does not work as well as it did for him. Law-and-order conservatives are not the ones protesting every time an unarmed Black man is shot by police or vigilantes; rather, they protest in favor of vigilantes’ right to kill. 

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Richard Handler, Charlottesville

I will never believe that a teenager on trial for firing a gun should be convicted while the National Rifle Association stands in the way of reasonable gun laws.

An underage, undersized adolescent boy, as Kyle Rittenhouse was when he fired the gun, desperately needs help in understanding what it means to be a man. As long as juvenile detention centers frequently report abuse and our penal system concentrates on punishment, not rehabilitation, a conviction would not help him learn.

Sally Alexander, Crownsville

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