The people Kyle Rittenhouse shot can’t be called ‘victims’, a judge says. Surprised? | Akin Olla

Though he crossed state lines with a semi-automatic rifle and shot three people, Rittenhouse has been treated with an alarming degree of grace

In the midst of the unrest following a police officer's shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old boy from Illinois, shot and killed two anti-police brutality protesters and wounded a third. This week the presiding judge in Rittenhouse's trial has decided that the men that Rittenhouse shot cannot be called victims" during the trial.

Despite purposefully crossing state lines armed with a semi-automatic rifle, Rittenhouse has been treated, before and after the act, with an alarming degree of grace. Rittenhouse's case is about a lot more than just one armed vigilante seeking to protect the status quo at the expense of human lives: it is about an entire system that pushed him to violence.

Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian