Everyone is entitled to an opinion about the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict that set him free of all charges. I have friends and acquaintances who celebrated the verdict on social media sites saying it was a victory for self-defense and the right to bear arms while others I know have condemned everyone involved in the case from the judge and jury to the boy’s parents to the person who gave the kid the automatic rifle.

I’m trying to put this whole incident through my mind and I keep coming up with the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse is still a “boy.” He’s just a few months older than my son and I asked myself if I would have wanted my boy to carry an automatic rifle into the street where there’s a presence of chaos and potential violence.

If any boy of 17 holding a firearm enters a potentially deadly environment, I believe he’ll most likely act on impulse. He would probably think that everyone who is contributing to the mayhem is an imminent threat. He’s ready to shoot at will, not once, or twice, but shoot three times, like Rittenhouse did. It would not be his courage that makes him shoot the gun. I have interviewed military combat veterans who told me that despite all their training and their ability to operate a deadly weapon, it was the fear of dying that made them pull their triggers.

Rittenhouse made a decision to involve himself in a civil unrest, but a young military man is put in a war by their country with the knowledge he’s going to have to shoot at a known enemy. Unlike Rittenhouse, a soldier knows what to expect.

Author Sara Zarr said, “Everyone has an identity crisis when they are 16 or 17 years old.” It’s called emotional adolescence. At that age, I remember thinking I knew everything about who I was and what I was doing. Once I hit my 20s, I realized that at 17, I had been trying to create myself from the influences of my friends who were as confused about who they were as I was.

Mark Twain said, “When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn’t want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just seven years.”

Having taught 17-year-old high school kids for 38 years, I too discovered how smart they thought they were and how dumb were all the adults. In fact, I had put up this sign on the bulletin board in the back of my classroom. “Since your parents and teachers are so stupid, leave now before it’s too late. Get a job and find your own place to live.”

In a New York Times review of the movie “Being 17,” Stephen Holden wrote, “Even when punching each other furiously, Thomas and Damien, combatants whose senseless schoolyard fights have an undertone of repressed desire, wear the stricken expressions of innocents caught up in a war they don’t understand and would rather not fight.”

Holden’s words that jump out at me are, “… wear the stricken expressions of innocents caught up in a war they don’t understand and would rather not fight.” A boy at 17 is likely to be in a constant emotional struggle between the “adultlike” image he tries to project and the innocent child still living inside him who’s afraid because doesn’t want to bring harm to himself or cause harm to others.

When I was of that age and had a problem with another boy, we’d meet behind the school to settle the dispute. If he came with his friends and I came with mine, we had a public situation and we had to fight. If just the two of us showed up and with no audience cheering us on or building the tension of the moment, we would have some words and walk away without throwing a single punch.

Allow a boy with an automatic rifle in his hands to walk into a mob of people in a volatile situation that’s being reported to millions of TV watchers, well, what should we expect him to do? Add to his dilemma that he has never fired his weapon of choice at a human being, which is drastically different from a father who takes his son into the woods to use a shotgun to kill a deer.

This brings up another question about what effect does killing people have in the long run upon an adolescent boy. In this case, has the jury’s acquittal of all charges absolved Rittenhouse of any guilt that might have been in his conscience? If that be so, then our country is now setting the stage for breeding a teenaged population of vigilantes who have been given a precedent to shoot without consequence as long as they believe they can cry self-defense.

And how does a boy of this age determine exactly what is self-defense? If I approach slowly to speak with him while I’m holding a gun, if I run at him without a gun or if I throw something at him, does he make the right decision in the moment to shoot or to not shoot me?

Author Dave Donovan wrote, “Sometimes the difference between being a boy and being a man is restraint.” We don’t know what he would have done if he were a man, but we all know what Kyle Rittenhouse has done as a boy and he will now become an inspiration for other kids his age.

And at this very moment, another boy waits in Anytown, America, for his chance to lock and load.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.