Militiaman

 A couple of days ago, a 17 year old boy, having decided for some reason that he knew, despite his tender age, what is best for people and for society in general, having concluded for some reason that he possessed full comprehension of the complex issues of law enforcement, social protest, racial tensions and a host of other adult world considerations, forthwith deputized himself and, with the encouragement and assistance of his own mother, carried an AR-15 assault rifle into the hot zone of Kenosha, Wisconsin where a combination of demonstrations and riots were occurring in response to the police shooting of a black man. The result was that instead of protecting anyone or anyone's property, the young man ended up murdering two people and essentially ending his own life. How it happens that plain citizens in Wisconsin are allowed to carry assault rifles, I do not know. At the same time, I doubt whether a black citizen could have carried an assault rifle into a public area and lasted five minutes without being shot. In the back. Seven times. And yet this boy was allowed to freely walk about, in full view of the police, lugging his fully loaded rifle. In any case, Wisconsin laws being whatever they are, the boy will now likely spend many years in jail. The boy has, with the approval of his mother, ended his own childhood and removed himself from the life of his family. He will not graduate from high school, he will not go to college, he will not work an honorable job or contribute to society or marry a woman or raise a family. Nor was he part of any 'well organized militia', as his lawyers intend to argue. He was a boy who wanted to play the part of the heroic sheriff in the wild west town, ill-equipped, and naturally so at 17, to comprehend the deadly finality of real life, to understand that real guns shoot real bullets and kill real people and that the transgressions of real laws bring about real and inescapable consequences. 'He is a good kid', some have said, and he probably is a good kid--a good kid who should have stayed home, grown up, learned about life, expanded his horizons, widened his world of social contacts, matured beyond the simple world of action movies and video games. The last thing our troubled world needed, after all, was a 17 year old self-appointed militiaman.