I’m one who thought the Kyle Rittenhouse case in Kenosha, Wisconsin, should have never gone to trial. If you have to shoot someone in self-defense, it’s a simple constitutional issue for me. The essential protection of private property starts with the self and expands to the assets that might be possessed. A person’s life is their most important possession. The riots in the streets that night in Kenosha looked to overthrow the town, destroy property and terrorize the people who lived there to make a political point. I’m all for debate with people who don’t think the way you might. I’m all for settling disputes with a vote. But once campaign signs are stolen, or mobs are formed, it becomes a private property case, and the way to defend that property is with deadly force, whatever it may be. Yet the Rittenhouse trial was an interesting one to watch. That poor kid should have never had to suffer through it to get to a “not guilty” verdict in the end. Thankfully there was a good judge on the case, and the jury was respectable. But the kid should have never had to go through all that to satisfy the overly progressive prosecutor in the case who represented the state in more ways than just this specific murder case. The prosecutors in the Rittenhouse case were disgraceful. How many liberals are there in these roles? I know the prosecutors in my community of Butler County, and I know many judges, and they are what I would consider “normal people.” They think and act like regular people, and they have a basic understanding of the value of our constitutions, state and federal. Where did all these liberals come from in these district attorney positions who put on these cases? That is the bigger problem, and it set my mind to consider what I proposed in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, dueling as a solution to the legal problems of our times.
I see it as a mistake what we did at the end of the Victorian era and the start of the Progressive era. I’ve been spending a lot of time discussing those mistakes recently as I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last several years. When President Jackson was in many duels, or even Alexander Hamilton was, it is obvious we have lost something in our culture to turn over the responsibility for the conflict to pin-headed lawyers to fight on our behalf. After all, that was what the Kyle Rittenhouse trial was; it was a duel between a young person who killed rioters and a state that wanted to make a case for the abolition of private property. In the prosecution’s assertion was the concept that the people had a right to destroy personal property and terrorize people into collective belief and that Kyle had an obligation to appease the mob. That is a standard position of the communist loving left. I conclude that nobody who thinks from a leftist point of view can co-exist with constitutionally minded people in America. The left wants to erase the constitution; the right wants to live by the ground rules. Those are opposing forces that will never get along, so why fake it? The way to obtain respect for two such unmoveable forces is to blame the actors themselves instead of punting them to a third-party legal system to do it for them.
I recently read a magnificent book that I bought at The Hole in the Wall bookstore at Wall, Drug in South Dakota. It was called Outlaws of South Dakota and was all about legal cases where the people breaking the law either ended up hung or shot dead in most cases covering the gold rush period up until the time of the gangsters in the 1920s and 30s. When the public just shot criminals dead, or as a group themselves, hung people for their crimes, things worked much better in society instead of catching a criminal and holding them for a trial that might not happen for months. The presumption of fairness wasn’t worth the trouble if you take the cases in their totality. Jack McCall, for instance, the killer who shot Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood right in front of everyone, should have been engaged and shot right on the spot. Instead, they captured him, had a phony trial, then let him go, only to be caught later on another charge and eventually killed. As it appears, the town of Deadwood did not want any law and order, so they wanted McCall to kill Wild Bill so the criminal element could continue to make money the way they had been. As I read that book, I visited the actual sites where Wild Bill was shot and resided and considered these legal issues. For me, it’s a perfect comparison to what the Swamp did to President Trump when we elected him to clean things up. The Swamp didn’t want to be clean, so they got rid of those who threatened their criminal enterprises. It costs a lot more to allow people like that to reside in the shadows than to confront them directly with a deadly duel in a lonely street when honor meant something because it was personal.
Because of Covid vaccine mandates and other Biden administration matters, I have had to talk to more lawyers than I usually do. I have been astonished at how stupid they are; they are a lot dumber than they used to be. What’s worse, it’s the quality level of the Bar Association itself. The standards of law have depleted over the years. Lawyers and human resource departments are not suitable replacements for two people fighting out a problem among themselves. The transition from dueling to court trials has not been a successful one. The Rittenhouse case was a hit from the state against an individual for purposes of the state to erode the concept of private property. Personal integrity is not a consideration of modern law, and because of it, the premise of all legal cases is flawed before they ever get started. Kenosha was intended to be destroyed to advance a progressive concept of eradicating the police so that personal property could not be protected in society.
Therefore, all people would have to submit to the mobs of leftism. If we allowed dueling to continue, as it had in the past, none of this legal assumption would have even established itself in our culture. But because we have punted personal resolution to the courts, now the courts have abused their power and become the bullies themselves. The thugs and losers who were shot in Kenosha obviously should have never been on the street if our court system had worked properly, and it would be people like Kyle Rittenhouse putting them in jail. But the prosecution in the Rittenhouse case wanted the opposite; they wanted Kyle in prison and the thugs on the streets just as the town of Deadwood wanted Jack McCall to roam free to murder law and order so that crime could flourish. And that is what we have in Washington D.C., a society of crime that advances while the innocent suffer under legal restraints meant to cripple them, not to empower them. With all that in mind, we were a better society when we settled our matters not with lawyers but with guns. It forced a much more honorable society and personal responsibility for the morality of our people, and it worked a whole lot better than what we see in examples like the Rittenhouse trial. It should never have happened. The night that Kyle shot those thugs, he should have been back home with his mother enjoying milk and cookies for a rough night on the town—not incarcerated for prosecution by a state that wanted to destroy him for even worse reasons than the killings occurred.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 