- Gun sales are skyrocketing in election season.
- 16. 7 million, to be exact.
- Coinciding with the first pandemic lockdowns,
the protests following the death of George Floyd,
and the aftermath of the presidential election.
- MAGA country! - For whatever reason,
whether it's distrust of government or fear of,
you know, autocrats coming to power in the United States,
gun sales are up.
More people are buying guns.
More people of color, more women are buying guns.
- See how that fits your hand. - It's probably about --
-Americans bought nearly 23 million guns in 2020 --
more than any other previous year on record.
And in 2021, sales have remained high.
- And, you know, one version of that is, "Hey, that's great.
More people with more guns means everybody is safer."
- Whenever a good guy with a gun runs toward the gunfire,
the madness stops quickly.
- But it doesn't take much for misunderstandings
to lead to gunplay, followed by injury or death,
especially in those kinds of contexts
in which you have protesters and counterprotesters,
and they're both bringing their guns,
because they don't trust the other side.
- Armed protesters have become a fixture at demonstrations
over everything from COVID restrictions
to the 2020 presidential election,
as well as during protests for racial justice.
- In many of those places,
there are no requirements for training,
for figuring out when to use the weapon,
under what circumstances, what kind of activity
actually is a sufficient threat to justify deadly force.
- During a night of protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin,
teenager Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people,
two of them fatally.
His murder trial gripped the nation.
- It's a really difficult issue,
because typically, self-defense is not available
to somebody who provokes an encounter.
But what counts as a criminal provocation,
as opposed to some other kind of innocuous provocation
is really fuzzy and unclear.
- And so we're going to have to figure out as a society
what it is we want our citizens to do
when they potentially have guns
and whether or not we want them intervening this way.
- We the jury find the defendant,
Kyle H Rittenhouse, not guilty.
- Rittenhouse was acquitted on all counts.
The jury found he had acted in self-defense.
- Criminal law is not really geared to deal
with everybody policing everybody else
and deciding after the fact
who was the person that provoked the violence,
who was the person that legitimately used self-defense,
who used self-defense wrongly, et cetera.
- Our self-defense laws, our citizen's arrest laws,
and our gun-possession laws
are creating this incredibly difficult situation
where we need clearer,
cleaner rules about how people should behave.
- But in a deeply divided country with more people
arming themselves, legal experts are worried.
- So, obviously, Kyle Rittenhouse has become
a kind of cause célèbre for the right
and especially for gun-rights advocates.
- He's not especially political.
He never wanted to be the symbol of anything.
Kyle Rittenhouse just wanted to keep violent lunatics
from setting fire to cars.
In the America he grew up in, that was considered virtuous.
- Kyle Rittenhouse is not guilty, my friends.
You have a right to defend yourselves.
Be armed, be dangerous, and be moral.
- And to the extent that this simply confirms that if they are
in an encounter where they end up using deadly force
that they can be acquitted of a crime
or having, you know, engaged
in this sort of ancillary law-enforcement activity,
then this will, I think, give them some comfort.
It might actually encourage them.
- You know, whether you are pro owning a gun
or against owning a gun, we should all want rules
that tell people how they're allowed to behave
and it minimize the chance of error,
because the chance of error is a problem no matter who you are.
- Let us in! Let us in!
Let us in!