Lessons from the Rittenhouse Verdict

By Thomas Coffin

With all urgency, politicians and legislators need to heed and take meaningful action in light of the lessons to be learned from the travesty that is the Rittenhouse verdict. The list includes the following:

1) Our citizen’s arrest, stand your ground, and self-defense laws need an overhaul. As presently interpreted and applied, they have permitted vigilante lynch mobs to operate as a shadow state-sanctioned death squad with 007 license to kill. It is now considered lawful to point a deadly weapon at an unarmed victim and shoot the person if he or she attempts to disarm the threatening assailant. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, as in Georgia (the Ahmaud Arbery killing) and Florida (the Trayvon Martin killing), we have seen unarmed individuals supposedly “justifiably” killed because in each case the killer claimed he was concerned for his own safety because his victim tried to take his firearm away. Although the Georgia jury properly rejected that defense, it will remain viable for future incidents unless circumscribed.

And the “stand your ground“ defense is currently being used by a homeowner in San Antonio to justify his fatal shooting of an unarmed Moroccan man who was lost and pulled into his driveway to turn around. Getting lost happens to all of us; is execution really the law?

This phenomenon feeds the aggression of gun wielders. In May of this year in Salem, Oregon, for example, members of the public in a municipal park were accosted by an armed group consisting of Proud Boys and Three Percent militia members and forced to leave the park because the group did not want any outsiders at the site to witness their rally. Had some children’s parents understandably felt their family was threatened and attempted to disarm a menacing AR-15 white supremacist, the parents would be the provocateurs under this twisted contortion of “self-defense, stand your ground” jurisprudence.

Ahmaud Arbery’s and Trayvon Martin’s supposed “crimes” triggering the “citizen’s arrest” cloak of authority in each case was simply being present while Black in White neighborhoods.

2) It should be a criminal offense to bring firearms to public assemblies. People have a Constitutional right to assemble, and Congress has the power to protect that right of assembly by banning firearms at such gatherings. Armed intruders functioning as vigilantes who are motivated to negate that right through calculated intimidation are on the wrong side of Constitutional rights and protection. The Salem park incident is but one example. There are numerous others, including an armed right-wing disruption in November 2020 of a peaceful Black Lives Matter gathering in Creswell, Oregon, and armed gatherings at State Capitols in Oregon, Michigan, and other public forums over issues such as Covid mandates, election results, and legislative agenda. Nor should we overlook other venues where people assemble to worship, recreate, learn, discourse, listen and be inspired by music and art, etc. and have been likewise targeted or intimidated by brazen, threatening displays of deadly weaponry.

These gatherings and others should all be sanctuaries from the specter of potential violence from those armed with assault weapons and the like and spewing their intolerance and bile by wielding intimidation through deadly weaponry. Halls of learning, to cite an example, should be safety zones, not settings for anxiety, trauma, or “active shooting drills” for students.

3) The deployment of deadly force requires the satisfaction of a high standard that can be difficult to grasp even by trained law enforcement officers, much less untrained self-appointed vigilantes. It was nothing short of madness to allow a juvenile Rambo with an AR-15 to roam through a crowd of demonstrators and empower him to make life or death decisions about those he encountered. And it is also extremely dangerous to vest Carte Blanche citizen arrest authority in anyone regardless of a lack of basic education in the field of law enforcement.

4) Military weaponry such as AR-15s and other assault rifles should be banned from the private market and locked up where they belong—in a well-guarded military arsenal. We are witnessing first-hand why that is the case and why weaponry designed for the military for the purpose of inflicting maximum lethality on the enemy in combat should not be entrusted to the public at large. America is rapidly descending into lawless anarchy, fueled by the greed of the arms industry, the falsified distortion of the Second Amendment, and the lack of courage among our elected representatives to do what is necessary to rein in the carnage. We are mirroring Afghanistan and Somalia as a result, and those are not models that bode well for the future of our country.

I have raised this existential threat to our democracy before (The Euphemism of the Modern Rifle and A Night of Horror), yet it continues unabated in our culture. We suffer massacres in schools, places of worship, concert halls, theaters, workplaces, malls, and everywhere. Our nation’s Capitol has been attacked, government is under siege, Congressional representatives meme cartoonish murderous violence against colleagues and political enemies, and democracy itself narrowly survived an insurrection.

All this civil unrest which is bordering on self-annihilation of the stability of our government and substitution of totalitarianism is fed directly by the arms industry’s romanization of rebellion and supply of the weaponry to enable it. It will only continue to gain momentum unless the chain is broken.

5) We have a proven path out of this spiral: Congress enacted an Assault Weapon Ban (AWB) in 1994 in response to mass shootings, and it successfully ended the carnage for 10 years. But then the AWB lapsed, and a different Congress, under pressure from the NRA, refused to renew it. Worse, the new Congress in 2005 passed legislation (Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, aka PLCAA), which effectively immunized arms dealers for liability from selling assault weapons. What followed was a resumption of sales with the predictable and inevitable deadly results. Thus, here we are today, plagued by unsafe schools, government officials receiving death threats, peaceable assemblies being danger zones, all while the Rule of Law and Constitutional government teeters on the brink of destruction.

The path forward must borrow from what Congress did once before when confronted with a much lesser evil than presents itself today. The blueprint already exists—re-enact the Assault Weapon Ban and repeal PLCAA, the blanket immunity protecting the arms industry from liability from the commercial trafficking of military weaponry. It will take courage, but the Nation has responded with courage to every challenge for over two centuries. Insist on what is realistically Constitutional “self-defense” action from your elected officials. It is past time to do so before the collapse becomes beyond repair.

There is no upside in continuing to fiddle while Rome burns. There is no future in the rubble of Democracy.

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Thomas Coffin was the keynote speaker at the Blackberry Pie Society’s Political Party in February, 2020. He is a retired federal magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon and a former professor at the UO Law School. Thomas retired in 2016 after 24 years on the bench, prior to which he had a career as a federal prosecutor spanning 21 years. He is married with 7 children. The Blackberry Pie Society is pleased to include a collection of his essays on our website. We will post them as they become available.

Posted 12.2.2021