Young, Armed And Dangerous: The Kyle Rittenhouse Shooting is a Warning of What’s to Come
By: Alex Loinard-González
Tags: Gun Control, Mexico, Kyle Rittenhouse, Politics, Racism

Young, Armed And Dangerous: The Kyle Rittenhouse Shooting is a Warning of What’s to Come

Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

“Dueling in America might as well be legal again. I cannot believe that I live in a country where you can shoot a guy in the chest because he came at you with a skateboard.” My friend and I were watching the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, faces twisted in disbelief.

Over the next few days, as we mulled over a verdict that did not surprise me as much as I wanted it to, I tried to identify the sinking feeling in my stomach. It actually had little to do with Rittenhouse or his acquittal: as horrifying as I found it that a 17-year-old had brought an assault rifle into the streets and shot three people with it, I am well aware that teenagers are reckless, and that gun control in America is practically nonexistent. The circumstances leading up to the crime left me much more apprehensive than its tragic conclusion.

First: The racism

In the days leading up to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the Kenosha Guard FaceBook page called for “patriots willing to defend [our] City tonight from the evil thugs”, in an event titled Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Properties.

And “patriots”, armed and willing, answered the call. Dozens of people, carrying all manner of weaponry, arrived that night to protect private property, keep the protest within check, and function as a neutral point of contact between the protestors and the police. Allegedly.

A gang primarily made up of armed white men showing up to “protect property” from “thugs” at a protest for Black lives is blatant racism that harkens back to the days of lynching. I cannot mention the Kenosha Guard without stating that property should not be prioritized above life, and that those trying to act as a “neutral force” in an argument about basic human rights should ask themselves whose side they’re really on.

These are arguments that have been made before, though, and thus that blatant racism is not what this article is about. This article is about what the Kenosha Guard represents, and how it’s a harbinger of what’s to come.

Joining the Militia

Main Character Syndrome, an informal term mostly used in regards to social media, describes when someone acts as if they were the lead in a dramatized version of their life. Those who display this syndrome act with grandiosity, and expect other people’s lives to revolve around their own. There aren’t many formal psychological studies on it, but Psychology Today has linked it to Munchausen Syndrome and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. When it comes to civilian groups taking the law into their own hands, there is also a good dose of entitlement involved, and a resulting dehumanization of others.

These are people who have been told for years, as White people are told in America, that all it takes to make it in life is guts and grit and a good attitude–and they aren’t making it. They are being told, as White people are told all their lives, that they are exceptional–yet they don’t have exceptional lives. They are seeing communities that they think of as inferior receive reparations that they perceive as advantages. What are they to do?

Well, what happens, in fiction, when a main character is faced with a challenge? An adventure of epic proportions, climaxing in an action sequence or passionate kiss or screaming match or heroic death. Especially in action movies; this main character around whom the world revolves often leaves behind a ground littered with broken infrastructure, hurt or killed civilians, and disrupted lives. The fixing of these is beyond the scope of a story that focuses on the wellbeing and happiness of a single life.

And so, people who see themselves as exceptional, as the stars of the show, have themselves a challenge. In a movie, where it’s truly a one-against-the-world fight, you’d have a vigilante. In the United States, where 32 million white people live below the poverty line and countless more may be discontent — and guns are legal, to boot — you have an insurrection.

I have seen this before: Mexico’s Autodefensa movement

If you have read my other pieces, you may know that I grew up in Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacán in Mexico. It’s in the South-West, in the land of the Magic Towns, some of the most famous Day of the Dead celebrations, and a very specific bean soup recipe that is as of yet unmatched by anything else I’ve tried. It’s also the land of the drug cartel La Familia Michoacana.

The history of cartels throughout Mexico, and civilian resistance to them, is complex. La Familia Michoacana was originally founded to oust the Zetas cartel when they moved into Michoacán. This fire-against-fire, however, left civilians vulnerable to the scorching. And so in 2011, in a show of civilian organization after years of discontent, members of a native community in Cherán, Mich., used rocks and fireworks to attack a truckful of armed members of La Familia Michoacana. They then ousted the local police force, took control of the town, and established a militia not unlike a neighborhood watch that spread to Opopeo, Mich., 72 kilometers (45 mi) away.

After this, members of La Familia Michoacana formed a second cartel, the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) — this time with civilian support, as they promised protection from the Zetas. Quickly enough, however, they began to extort, kidnap, rape, and murder, leaving the community in semi-slavery. To combat this, in 2013 a group of landowners took up arms to fight the Knights Templar in a second show of heroic civilian vigilanteism.

Given that in Mexico civilian open-carry is restricted and military-grade weapons are illegal, the federal government has been attempting to absorb these “people’s police” groups into the military forces. Those who have been successfully integrated now answer to the Mexican Army (SEDENA). Those that remain unregistered (“Autodefensas”) are persecuted by the authorities, and there are clashes with the federal government as well as infighting. More importantly, cartels infiltrating Autodefensa branches, as well as offshoot groups from Autodefensas becoming cartels, is a rampant problem. For example, the Viagras, infamous for brutal killings, were founded by Nicolás Sierra Santana after he hopped from the Knights Templar to the Autodefensas to this new group depending on who had the upper hand.

The autodefensas thus integrated into what they fought.

The roiling tide

The Kenosha Guard is, of course, not the first — nor the most dramatic — example of a group of civilians taking responsibility for the public order into their own hands. Arizona Border Recon is a volunteer-based vigilante group at the US-México frontier that looks for cartel members. George Zimmerman, who murdered Trayvon Martin in 2012, was not only a member of a neighborhood watch but its coordinator, and he called the police almost obsessively. And of course, the January 6th, 2021 riot, when hundreds of Trump-fanatics stormed the Capitol in a call to overturn the presidential election and hang Vice President Pence for presiding over the certification process.

While on their own these may be seen as isolated events, they are part of a much bigger tide: millions of people who believe that they are owed more than they have received and that the government no longer stands behind them.

And so, they must make a stand for themselves.

The odds and their favors

I am of course biased, but I believe the Autodefensa movement was legitimate even if it was misguided or doomed. The autodefensas were founded to fight a force that while deeply entrenched, at times feels almost foreign: While they operate in, and to an extent control, the country, members of cartels are distinguished from Mexican civilians. They have different allegiances and follow different codes of law. Their economy is funded by countries outside of Mexico, and they exact power through systematic terror tactics. The autodefensas were fighting for freedom from violence, and the right to life.

In the US, these community efforts come from a different place: disillusioned people, mostly White, who desire a “return to the status quo.” The national narrative has historically established a series of stigmas against certain groups of people and served and held up other groups of people in comparison. Recent social progress, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage or Obama’s election, has forced these stigmas to be enacted — individually, at least — covertly, giving to some the belief in a post-ism society. When people who had been led to believe that it was not possible to fall through the cracks are failed by the system, they have the impression that a change in hierarchy has robbed them of their rights. Enter organizations at various levels to bypass the established institutions and restore the “status quo”.

The established institutions, however, never actually stopped serving White people.

When we think of the government we think of a monolith (or perhaps two monoliths, in the case of the U.S. and partisan politics). It’s important to remember that there are people inside all of those fancy buildings. So where do we as individuals end and the government begins, such that we can be disillusioned with it?

To answer that question we look at the people in those buildings, and the civilians they are sworn to serve. When you take everyone that is similar to them — in skin color, sexuality, wealth, etc — who is left out? Those clamoring outside the Capitol, or in the Kenosha Guard, are actually accounted for.

A lot of the time, those asking for a change in status quo and those who write and enact laws are the same people. The only difference is whether they can publicly say and do certain things. There was a clip floating around Twitter after the January 6th Capitol storming of police opening the gates for the rioters that illustrate the point–although the police may be in uniform, the people wearing blue really wanted the same as the protesters. For a dramatized example look to the movie Antebellum (2020), which featured a senator among the plantation re-enactors: while it can be political suicide for members of government these days to openly be racist, many of them are bigots behind closed doors.

In America: How does it end?

Of course, I don’t know. Because I lived through a movement that was similar in nature (though not in origin) and that terrorized civilians near my hometown when I was a teen, I’m inclined to say it won’t go well. When I think back to 2013, I remember a lot of canceled school trips and — when teachers decided to take the risk — talks with the class where we were warned that members of the Autodefensas might inspect our buses. We were told that they would be armed, young, and possibly in a bad mood. We were told to stay absolutely quiet and do everything they asked. After living in the US for 5 years, I see similarities to active shooter drills in school, and “The Talk” that Black parents are forced to give their children.

In America, however, it’s about more than the immediate safety risk–which is considerable, if the 130-plus injured people at the Capitol are a reference. It’s about how these organized movements, coupled with a government that supports them implicitly and explicitly, are building up into a two-pronged approach to oppression. People are taking the law into their own hands, without proper knowledge of it or regard for human life, and then they are being legitimized by established institutions. Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman both did this.

And so, when I say that this won’t end well, I don’t mean that I feel these civilian-vigilante movements are doomed to fail. I mean that I am worried about what will happen if they succeed.