The Rittenhouse trial was basically about gun rights and self-defence

One of the best accounts of what really happened in Kenosha — on the night of August 25, 2020 and then on November 19, 2021 — is in ‘The Economist’ (paywall). Set aside the politics of the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse and it was fundamentally about a testy issue — gun rights in America.

Mr Rittenhouse’s response to the day of violent protests that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man, by Kenosha police, was to go to the city from Antioch, Illinois 20 miles away. He picked up an AR-15-style rifle from a friend who bought it for him. After a confrontation with Joseph Rosenbaum, a “troubled” 36-year-old man in the words of ‘The Economist’, Mr Rittenhouse shot him four times and killed him. He then tried to run away, fell, shot at three other people chasing after him and killed one of them.

Interpreting the events of that August night has been contentious. The prosecution said Mr Rittenhouse was a “chaos tourist”. The defence argued that he went to Kenosha to help out, was set upo…