Kyle Rittenhouse traveled from his home state to Kenosha Wisconsin where he shot 3 people and murdered two. He felt threatened by hands, a skateboard and someones feet. Had he not been walking around with a weapon he was to young to own, 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum, of Kenosha, and 26-year-old Anthony Huber, of Silver Lake, Wisconsin would not have died that night. Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, a protester from West Allis, had his arm vaporized. The jury accepted the defenses claims of self defense and he was acquitted on all charges.

The Washington Post reported that  the shooter used his COVID-19 stimulus check to purchase the AR-15 he used in the fatal Kenosha shooting. “The Post found that the shooter, who was too young to buy a rifle, had arranged for an adult friend to buy the weapon for him using money he had received from a government stimulus program.”

That friend, 19-year-old Dominick Black of Burlington, Wisconsin, purchased the weapon for him at an Ace Hardware store in Ladysmith, Wisconsin on May 1, 2020, according to a criminal complaint charging Black with two felony counts of intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to someone under 18, resulting in death. The gun was then stored at Black’s stepfather’s house in Kenosha, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

The shooter said, “I got my $1,200 from the coronavirus Illinois unemployment because I was on furlough from YMCA,” he said. “And I got my first unemployment check so I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll use this to buy it.’”He told the Post he lived with his mother, a circumstance that would typically mean she claims him as a dependent on her taxes. That would make him ineligible for the $1,200 stimulus payment.

He was referencing several weeks of unemployment compensation approved through the CARES Act, said Washington Post Investigations Editor Jeff Leen. He said the shooter’s mother later told the paper that money for the gun came from “special unemployment” related to the pandemic. It’s more likely the shooter was referring to unemployment than the stimulus program itself, based on his life circumstances and description from him and his mother. That is indeed a “COVID-19 stimulus,” but not the one people would think of based on this post’s description.

Regardless you have to wonder how many more guns were purchased with COVID related government funds. As of November 21, the year 2021 has already become one of the deadliest on record for mass shootings. According to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), there have been 637 mass shootings in 2021, and more than 39,883 individuals have died via guns by their own hand or at the hand of another.

There has been a rush to buy guns since the pandemic began. According to the FBI, a record-setting 3.7 million firearm background checks were completed in March 2020, the month COVID-19 shutdowns began in the United States. This record was shattered only a few months later as protests for racial justice following the police murder of George Floyd rocked the nation, leading to 3.9 million firearm background checks.

Now that vigilante justice is the accepted norm in America, you can expect the number of senseless deaths to continue to rise.