“What animates these groups is anti-government, but it’s also anti-left,” one expert said. “They are often drawn to these events.”
Prosecutors say Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, killed two people and injured another person on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, when he opened fire Aug. 25 during protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Wisconsin law stipulates that the minimum age for legal armed carryis 18. Even though Rittenhouse is just 17, he stood that night with other armed civilians who declared that they were out protecting property.
It remains unclear whether he was part of a formal militia group. In an interview with the conservative news website the Daily Callerearlier that day, Rittenhouse, who is from the Illinois, laid out way he was in Kenosha. “So people are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business, and a part of my job is to also help people,” Rittenhouse said, without specifying any authority to do so. “If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle because I need to protect myself, obviously. But I also have my med kit.”
Within hours, the patrolling turned deadly. Rittenhouse is charged with two counts of first-degree homicide and one count of attempted homicide.
His attorney said Rittenhouse was exercising his right to defend the community.
“Kyle and all able-bodied males between the ages of 17 and 45 are part of the unorganized United States Militia,” the lawyer, John Pierce, said in an email. “He was in Kenosha as part of his right and duty to protect his community where the state and local government had totally failed in their most basic responsibility to provide law and order.
“Specifically, he was there to protect the people and property of Kenosha from rioters bent on destroying it and burning it to the ground,” Pierce continued. “All United States citizens have this right and obligation where government fails. No American is too young to possess a rifle when state and local government refuses to protect them.”
Unorganized militias are not a new phenomenon, but they have gained increasing attention and support over the last few decades. Modern militias and individual vigilantes appeared in the early 1990s positioning themselves as contrary to the federal government. After a period of relative quiet, they re-emerged over the last decade in a more visible role not only in several high-profile protests, including those by Black Lives Matter supporters, but also in less-known local disputes in towns around the country from Utah to New Mexico. The groups are self-anointed, weapons-bearing so-called enforcers of order with very little stopping them, experts who study militias say.
“They consider themselves part and parcel of the enforcement regime,” said Robert Futrell, a professor of sociology who researches far-right extremism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “They are self-appointed groups of local citizens who become law enforcement in their community. They may not have legal authority, but that does not matter, because, to them, they have moral authority.
“But militia means military, and militia also means a capacity for violence,” he said.
Two waves
In 2019, the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center documented 181 active anti-government militias operating across the U.S. The groups cover a wide spectrum of ideologies but historically center on stopping the overreach of government.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/where-protesters-go-armed-militias-vigilantes-likely-follow-little-stop-n1238769?cid=eml_nbn_20200901