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Over the past several decades, the enactment of reactionary, N.R.A.-backed gun legislation has elevated the old football dictum of “the best defense is a good offense” to the level of actual public policy. The theme animating both the Rittenhouse and Arbery cases was a question of what exactly constitutes self-defense. Rittenhouse successfully claimed self-defense despite having ended the lives of two unarmed men with an AR-15-style rifle. On November 19th, a Wisconsin jury acquitted the eighteen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse for shooting three men, two of them fatally, during protests in Kenosha following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, in August of 2020. Perspectives on potential outcomes in this case were freighted with lingering anger and disillusionment stemming from a verdict last week, in a case tried a thousand miles away. This skepticism is anchored in both the far reaches of American history-more than four hundred Black people were lynched in Georgia between 18-and the most current of events. It might not have even been a probability. The fact that a jury, on Wednesday, convicted all three men-McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William Bryan-for their actions in this murderous safari is less significant than the fact that this outcome was never a certainty. Arbery was unarmed, but the gunman sought to declare that he had acted in self-defense. One of those men, Travis McMichael, acting on a belief that Arbery, who was twenty-five, looked suspicious, confronted him with a shotgun and fired the weapon three times.
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In the moments before his death, in February of 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was pursued by three white men in two pickup trucks as he jogged through the leafy, bucolic streets of a suburban subdivision called Satilla Shores, near Brunswick, Georgia. Anything can happen, and the most surreal possibility is no more distant than the most mundane. One consequence of living in our current era of absurdities is that you are cured of a belief in foregone conclusions.