Among other things, America is the only country in which a 17-year-old can set his hands on an AR-15, shoot three people, shed a few tears and then walk off scot-free, plane tickets to Mar-a-Lago and 1211 Avenue of the Americas booked for free.

The verdict that came 13 days ago was at once surprising and all too predictable. Trembling in the stands was, in the end, just a teenager. The prosecution was uninspiring and the defense showed it had done its homework. Rosenbaum, one of the shooting’s victims who had lunged for Kyle Rittenhouse’s rifle, was not entirely an innocent man, either. And only to complicate matters, Grosskreutz — the lone survivor of the three Rittenhouse had shot — offered testimony that cast fellow victim Joseph Huber as the aggressor. Charging Kyle Rittenhouse required an unequivocal proof of unwarranted aggression, which was simply too much to ask from blurry footage and anecdotal evidence.

It’s a frustrating outcome for a case that had more to do with the semantic twists and turns of arcane legalese than what otherwise seemed proper. The trial wasn’t about reckoning with the loss of two lives, but the differences between short and long barreled guns. It succeeded where the narrowest interpretations of the Wisconsin law were concerned but lost touch with morality and just about everything else. By framing his shootings as a measure of self-defense, Rittenhouse exposed the unbreachable power of an argument that’s given cover to far too many police officers. His testimony of pouncing protestors added fuel to the NRA’s age-old fantasies of toting guns in dangerous inner cities. It seems slightly jarring, maybe even a little perverse, how someone with two deaths under his name  — regardless of original intentions — came away perfectly clean in a society where others have often faced life behind bars for a broken tail light or outdated license plate. The verdict scrubbed his bloodstained jeans and returned them newer than new.

Even greater problems arise when we allow Fox News and the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene to wallow in the results. Acquit? Well, the evidence was less definitive than it first seemed and the jury has already cast its verdict.  But don’t fawn over a teenager for tangling himself in a place where he shouldn’t have been and at a time that was not appropriate — carrying a loaded firearm, no less. Don’t parade a bill named in his honor around Congress floors that makes complete mockery of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Theresa or praise him as a mascot of white victimhood. Don’t confuse foolishness with fortitude.  None of this would have happened if a military-grade semi automatic rifle with a 20-inch barrel hadn’t been eagerly dropped into his hands in the first place. What about the underage possession of firearms that had instigated all this? Why had curfew even been violated to begin with? It is one thing to accept the terms of law; it is another to hail our Don Quixotes as heroes. Self-defense and firearm clauses might erase intentional homicide charges, but they can’t suddenly turn senselessness into bravery or courage.

We like to think of every headline-worthy case as some kind of inflection point. Rittenhouse’s trial certainly seemed that way: at the stake was a 17-year-old’s future, but also so much more — gun violence, right-wing extremism and race. The verdict set a precedent that will likely embolden vigilante mobs, give cause for gun rights activists to rejoice and set the stage for even more violent, avoidable accidents in the years to come. But either cringing or cheering — allowing what was essentially a squabble over legal fine print to metastasize and become a stand-in for something greater than it actually is — also runs the risk of forgetting the thousand other daily injustices we have yet to tend to. We must not let the thirst for retributive victory or self-pitying vindication distract us from all the more insidious forms of injustice that remain. A controversial trial won’t singlehandedly reverse the current trajectory of public policy, just as a life sentence in prison wouldn’t have miraculously ushered a change of heart in the Proud Boys or the NRA. History usually doesn’t work that way.

Instead, constructive reform sometimes requires us to look past the breaking news and high-profile trials. Chrystul Kizer shot her adult sexual abuser; she currently sits with a life sentence in prison, along with thousands of others who killed or wounded in the name of self-defense but bear far different consequences. Two million have had their futures cut short by poorly handled confrontations or similarly unintentional accidents, a figure in a system that lies beyond the power of a single conviction or acquittal to ever set right. The time for finger-pointing and gavel-pounding has passed. Now we need to move on and reconsider what justice should truly look like.

HANWEN ZHANG is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College. His column is titled ‘Thoughtful spot.’ Contact him at hanwen.zhang.hhz3@yale.edu.

HANWEN ZHANG