In recent weeks, Americans watched two major court trials for cases in which gun owners created situations that led to violence and the killing of innocent victims, and then claimed self-defense as justification for their actions.  In one of the trials, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges because he apparently convinced the jury that he felt threatened at the time of the shooting.  In the other case, the three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery were found guilty of murder.

While the Arbery case brought some measure of vindication to those who have been protesting against the killing of innocent black people, the Rittenhouse case opened a debate about the limits of the right to self-defense.  I happened to notice an article published on November 24, 2021, by Gunnar Gundersen in The Christian Century, titled The Rittenhouse Verdict and the Twisting of Natural law.  I will discuss Gundersen’s thoughts in this post.

After his acquittal, Rittenhouse was hailed as a hero of the Second Amendment by some, while being denounced as a white supremacist by others.  As noted by Gundersen, conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation justified Rittenhouse’s action in terms of a natural right to self-defense.  As a natural-law lawyer, Gundersen found that effort quite disturbing:

“These responses are just another example of how natural law and its expression in the Anglo-American legal tradition—common law—has been deformed by its adaptation to support White supremacy.”

He explains how the right to self-Defense has been, in the past, understood in common law:

“At its core, the right to self-defense in common law was based on one’s right to use the proportionate amount of force necessary to keep oneself from harm. The amount of force used could be neither disproportionate to the threat faced nor greater than that needed to maintain one’s safety. Properly understood, self-defense is not a license to kill; it’s a justification for using protective force that may have the unfortunate result of a homicide.”

He points out that the self-defense doctrine, in its early days under King Henry VIII, was a narrowly applied defense that did not lead to an acquittal, but to a pardon from the king.  It also had a key limitation:

“The person arguing self-defense could not be the one who caused the escalation that led to the need to use deadly force. Simply put, you could not escalate the conflict and then claim a right to defend yourself. This is the corollary of the self-defense doctrine: if the person you killed was defending themselves first, then their right to self-defense takes priority over yours, because you are the aggressor.”

Noting that this logic is still found in American statutes today, including Wisconsin laws, he then declares that white supremacists are invoking self-defense in a very unique way today:

“But these venerable doctrines—rooted in Christian legal development and meant to enshrine the value of human life and deter the resort to lethal force—have been twisted by White supremacy to serve a whole new need: to justify the use of force against those seeking to vindicate their equal rights. In the mind of the White supremacist, the protest for equal rights is a threatening provocation. Thus, anyone who answers that threat with violence cannot be an aggressor and has the right of self-defense intact.

A person who views a protest for equal rights as a rightful and just assembly, however, will see someone arriving from outside the community with weapons as a provocation, meant to escalate a conflict into deadly violence.”

One side of the debate looks at Rittenhouse’s preparations and actions leading to the moment he started pulling the trigger, and sees a premeditated attempt to engage in conflict.  It is not surprising that he is the only one who ended up killing people.  The other side chooses to focus only on the shooter’s claim that he felt threatened immediately before he pulled the trigger.  In Rittenhouse’s case, it worked, and in the Arbery case, it did not.  But in both cases, one or more innocent persons died.  What prevents such incidents from happening over and over again?  Are innocent people minding their own business protected at all?

This logic leaves black people, in particular, at the mercy of gun-carrying white supremacists who can always initiate acts of aggression: they may or may not be found guilty, but the black victims will die.  Is that justice?

Gundersen makes the point that white supremacists appear to have their own view of what constitutes an individual right.  They have decided that black protest is not a right, but a threat against them.  Therefore, all preparations and actions by Rittenhouse that led to the shootings were self-defense against that threat.  As Gundersen puts it,

“It is this fundamental disagreement, on who constitutes the aggressor in the wider social context, that is driving the different reactions we are seeing to this case. It is why some people can see Rittenhouse as a hero, a shining example of self-defense. And it is why so many Black people and their allies are heartbroken, recognizing what the acquittal reveals about the broader legal and social landscape: to be free and Black and to support Black freedom are still acts of aggression in America.”

Of course, this approach by white supremacists is supported by the almighty Second Amendment which lets them carry assault weapons with no fear of endangering the public.  As some gun-rights proponents see it, the best remedy against a bad man carrying a gun is a good man carrying a gun.  In other words, the law of the jungle is the best form of government.  Indeed, that is what we see in western movies!  Apparently, that’s how God-fearing citizens are supposed to live.

But the founder of Christianity had a completely different view on the whole matter:

“’Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to him, ‘for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?’” (Matthew 26:53-54)

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (Matthew 5:9)

By the way, this last verse implies that those who are not peacemakers cannot be called children of God.  The other verses indicate that Jesus did not even use self-defense as justification for violence.  Neither did his disciples who were persecuted after his departure.  At the very least, those who claim to be Christians should have a strong bias against the use of violence.  That does not seem consistent with the cult of the Second Amendment we see around us.  And that is certainly not consistent with carrying assault weapons in public places to be ready for violence if the opportunity presents itself.