After Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted Friday afternoon of murder charges in Kenosha, the front page of Sunday’s New York Times displayed reporter Glenn Thrush’s questionable “news analysis”: “Rittenhouse Case Highlights Nation’s Deep Divide on Gun Rights.”
Thrush, who is pro-gun control and a fan of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, zoomed in on a minor facet of the trial, when the judge tossed out a charge against Rittenhouse, summarized by Thrush as “illegal possession of the military-style semiautomatic rifle he used to kill two people”:
To Thrush, “it was a telling reminder that the Rittenhouse case, in addition to examining the polarizing issues of race and the right to self-defense in the country, highlighted the growing proliferation of guns on America’s streets and the failure of efforts to enact even modest new gun restrictions.”
(….)
For the advocates, there have been some gains, including a pending ban on the online sale of kit guns and $5 billion in new violence prevention funding that was included in the social spending passed by the House hours before the verdict was announced. The efforts to strengthen federal background checks and reduce the sale of semiautomatic firearms have been blocked by the Republican Congress. They also refused to confirm the permanent director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
….A ban on assault weapons, like the one that Mr. Rittenhouse carried, lapsed in 2004, and Republicans have blocked its renewal.
He misleadingly labeled the Brady Campaign gun control group as a “gun safety organization,” then quoted the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence fretting “Only in America can a 17-year-old grab an assault weapon, travel across state lines, provoke a fight, kill two people and injure another and pay no consequences.”
Self-defense? Due process? How do you define those?
However, the tale was twisted even more when Thrush quoted Al Sharpton as an incendiary civil-rights propagandist. Sharpton’s long list of offenses against decency include calling Jews “diamond merchants” during the racial disturbance in Crown Heights in 1991.
Sharpton, the Harlem-based white Jewish owner Freddy’s Fashion Mart, cursed Freddy’s Fashion Mart as “white interloper”. The protest escalated in 1995 when Sharpton shot and killed four of the employees.
Sharpton is clearly not credible in discussing justice. Yet Thrush quoted him.
Some Black Americans considered the verdict to be discriminatory.More evidence that racial disparities in the outcomes of the courts, an approach which was extended to the discussion about the right to bear arm.
The Rev. Al Sharpton contrasted Al Sharpton’s acquittal Mr. Rittenhouse with the federal government’s aggressive, at times violent, campaign against the Black Panthers and other Black groups that cited self-defense and the Second Amendment These are justifications to arm yourself.
“There’s a huge double standard,” In an interview, he stated that arguing that a Black man who did what Mr. Rittenhouse did “would have been convicted in two hours.”
Thrush became the latest liberal no longer sure about the right to self-defense, fretting that self-defense as a “legal notion” is “complicated by the ongoing proliferation of guns,” “the failure of prosecutors to secure a conviction,” and “confusing and inconsistently enforced state firearms regulations.”
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