Possession may not be 9/10ths of the law but getting the long gun back would have allowed Rittenhouse some option for rent-seeking from killing two and maiming another. Kyle, in his promise to destroy it should have claimed he was really a thrasher and was going to grind his picatinny rail once he got the firearm returned, because unlike receiving an illegally transferred gun, skateboarding is not a crime.
A judge in Wisconsin on Friday approved an agreement to destroy the assault-style rifle Kyle Rittenhouse used in the fatal shooting of two men during racial justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
State of play: Kenosha County Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger said the gun will likely be destroyed by the Kenosha Police Department in April. Video of it being destroyed will be given to all parties as proof.
- Rittenhouse was not in court during the hearing.
Rittenhouse's attorney had filed a motion earlier this month asking prosecutors to return the gun, ammunition, face mask and other clothing he was wearing the night of the fatal shooting.
- "Rittenhouse family spokesman David Hancock said Thursday that Rittenhouse wants to destroy the rifle and plans to throw out his clothing so that no one can use any of it to 'celebrate' the shootings,” the Associated Press reported.
www.axios.com/…
Importantly, the expression "possession is nine-tenths of the law" isn't literally true —it is a rule of force and, perhaps, a truism of human nature, but it is not a law. A person in mere possession of something does not, necessarily, have a nine times greater claim to the object over someone else.
In other gun possession news:
Kyivans are not naive. They are making preparations. “Two weeks ago the idea that Ukraine might be invaded made people laugh, but that has now changed,” says Filipchuk. He admits to having stocked up on fuel, conserves and water, and has scanned a map of the city for exit routes through the backstreets in the event of traffic chaos. Some have discussed going to stay with relatives in the countryside and prepared a “go bag” with batteries, money and documents. In April last year the city council published a map of some 3,000 bomb shelters, ranging from the superficial (the pedestrian underpasses beneath the Soviet-era boulevards) to Cold War nuclear shelters (including metro stations such as Arsenalna, the deepest in the world, whose tunnels can be sealed off with blast doors). One widely circulated document advises parents on how to talk to children about the Russian threat, including games involving imitating air raid sirens and throwing oneself on the ground. Yet such measures are treated as pragmatic precautions for something that probably will not happen.
A common explanation for the sangfroid is that Ukraine has already been at war for nearly eight years. Most Kyivans know people directly affected by the fighting but have not witnessed it themselves, so are used to it as a brooding, threatening background presence. “It’s a combination of war-weariness without the ability to imagine Kyiv itself as a war zone,” argues Nataliya Gumenyuk, author of the book The Lost Island on occupied Crimea. We meet in a packed restaurant next to the city’s hip new food market – the setting could easily be Shoreditch, Kreuzberg or Brooklyn – and notions of tanks, shells and air raid sirens do indeed feel utterly remote. Ukraine’s leaders also deserve some credit for setting a calm tone, she adds: “The policy is not to rise to the provocation. It is better to prepare the military but not panic the civilian population. President [Volodymyr] Zelensky has shown restraint where any other leader could easily have whipped up nationalist fervour.”
There is also the reality that Putin would – self-evidently, to Ukrainians at least – be mad to launch a full-scale invasion of the country. Maryan Zabblotskyy, an MP for the governing Servant of the People party, who is active in Ukrainian-US relations, puts the chance of this happening at no more than 10 per cent. “We can’t rule out irrational behaviour from a dictator like Putin, but invading Ukraine would be three steps crazier even than anything he has done so far.” Russia could easily achieve supremacy in the air and in open country, he concedes. But becoming mired in urban warfare – a possibility addressed by Ukraine’s new “On the foundations of national resistance” law – would be a disaster.
“Russia cannot take Kyiv by force. It would be a new Grozny,” agrees Filipchuk, referring to Russia’s catastrophic assault on the Chechen capital in 1994-95. Millions of Ukrainians are prepared to take up arms to resist, and the country has resonant collective memories of past partisan warfare. Where in 2014 it had some 5,000 battle-ready troops, now it has some 150,000. The events eight years ago and since have turned most Ukrainians from being instinctively open towards Russia to being instinctively sceptical. This transformative shift in attitudes makes Putin’s supposed plan to install a pro-Kremlin government, a claim made by the British government on 22 January, look like a hospital pass – a recipe for mass insurrection by a population no longer willing to tolerate Yanukovych-style puppets.
www.newstatesman.com/...