Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong. He has a right to live. And the people who wanted to take away his God-given right to live that horrible night did not have the right to take it.
The once-funny Stephen Colbert “joked” on his late-night comedy political program this week that, after the Kyle Rittenhouse case, there should be a change in the law. He’s right: the law should change, but not in the way he had in mind. Self-defense law expert Andrew Branca has proposed “Kyle’s Law” as a way to prevent political show trials of people who, evidence shows, were lawfully defending their own lives. The road to getting there will be a rough one, but it shouldn’t be.
Colbert claimed on his program that if what Rittenhouse did was legal, there should be a law to prevent people from doing it. Predictably, his adoring audience responded to the applause sign like the trained seals they are, but real life isn’t in a studio. It’s on a street, running away from people who want to kill you, like Trayvon Martin, “Big Mike,” and the four men bent on harming or killing Rittenhouse.
What Colbert didn’t know, or didn’t want his audience to know, was that Kyle Rittenhouse had a right not to be beaten, bloodied, or killed on Aug. 25, 2020. Rittenhouse used self-defense laws that have been imbued in the human species since time immemorial. The right to not be murdered — the right to life — is inherent in natural law, assumed, and breathed into the founding documents of our country and all laws that flow from them. Indeed, it was declared so in the Declaration of Independence, the soul of the country.
