The most revealing thing to happen in conservative politics this week did not involve the Republican National Convention, at least not directly. Instead, it took place in Kenosha, Wis., in the aftermath of a shooting on Tuesday night that killed two people and wounded a third.

The suspected shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from nearby Antioch, Ill., was in Kenosha with a group of armed counterprotesters. After several days of rioting — sparked by the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man who appears to have been paralyzed after police shot him seven times in the back — so-called militia groups arrived on the scene to defend businesses and other properties from protesters. Rittenhouse was with one of those groups when, according to a visual analysis by The New York Times, he was seen running away from several people.

Eyewitness testimony fills the gap. Rittenhouse was approached by Joseph Rosenbaum, who threw a plastic bag in his direction. He ran, and turned to face Rosenbaum with his AR-15 in the ready position. Nearby, an unknown gunman shot into the air. It’s at this point that Rosenbaum reached for the barrel of Rittenhouse’s rifle. Rittenhouse then fired four rounds, one of which struck Rosenbaum in the head. Rittenhouse then fled the scene. Several people chased him, some shouting to identify him as the shooter.

As Rittenhouse is running, he trips and falls to the ground. He fires again — four more shots — as several people run toward him. One of the people in that group is hit in the chest and falls to the ground. Another, who is carrying a handgun, is struck in the arm. Rittenhouse then gets up and walks toward several police vehicles with his hands raised. Although bystanders identify him as the shooter, police pass him by. Rittenhouse is arrested the next day, in Illinois. Authorities charged him with first-degree murder.

This is a complicated situation, but a few things are clear. Wisconsin isn’t a “Stand Your Ground” state, and Rittenhouse was in illegal possession of a weapon — under Wisconsin law, it is a Class A misdemeanor for a minor to carry a deadly weapon in the open. There is also no legal right in the state to use deadly force for the protection of property you do not own. And in any case the “Castle Doctrine” only applies to the use of deadly force in one’s home, vehicle or business.

To the conservative media, however, what happened in Kenosha was eminently justifiable and even cause for celebration. “Are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder?” Tucker Carlson said on the Wednesday broadcast of his Fox News show. “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” Carlson, who has an average nightly audience of more than 4 million viewers, blamed local political leaders for the killings. “Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it. People in charge in Wisconsin from the governor on down refused to enforce the law,” he said. “They stood back and watched Kenosha burn.”

Ann Coulter, a conservative author and provocateur, said that she wanted Rittenhouse “as my president.” Graham Allen, a contributor to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, called the Kenosha killings a “justified shooting” in a video that has garnered more than 150,000 views. Katie Pavlich, another Fox News host, declared that, “When you have no police around to defend businesses, and people who are being attacked, then there is a void that is filled.” According to The Guardian, “fund-raisers, messages of support and celebratory memes” for Rittenhouse are being “shared widely” on social media platforms. And Paul Gosar, a far-right Republican congressman for Arizona’s 4th District, said it was “100% justified self-defense. Do not try to take a weapon away from a man or bear the consequences.”

What happened in Kenosha was a tragedy. Rittenhouse should not have been there, and we should agree — all of us — that the shooting should not have happened. We should also be troubled by police action, or the lack thereof, against armed militias. Tacit support from Kenosha police (at one point, an officer thanks the group for being there) almost certainly contributed to the permissive environment that led to the shooting. It is reminiscent, in that way, of the events in Charlottesville in 2017, where an official review found that law enforcement failed to “maintain order” and “protect public safety” leading to fights, skirmishes and the vehicular murder of a protester.

We should be appalled. But it appears only some of us are. Others are prepared to elevate Rittenhouse as a symbol of self-defense. It’s an ominous reaction, not the least because it might inspire other Rittenhouses to do the same, to travel to protests ready for the use of lethal force against protesters. Put differently, the extent to which Carlson and Coulter and Turning Point are representative of conservative thought on violence against protesters is the extent to which we may have to prepare for further Kenoshas.

I said, at the start, that these events lack a direct link to the Republican National Convention, the headline event for conservative politics this week. They do, however, have an indirect link. The night before the killings in Kenosha, Mark and Patricia McCloskey delivered a prime-time address from their St. Louis home as part of the convention’s opening program. The McCloskeys aren’t politicians or activists, they’re trial lawyers, famous for just one reason: brandishing firearms (Mark an AR-15, Patricia a pistol) at passing Black Lives Matter protesters. Their celebrity in conservative circles has everything to do with their threat of violence against people the president has denounced as a threat to the country itself. However ridiculous the McCloskeys may have looked in the media, the fact of the matter is their actions led to a reward. For threatening protesters with death, they were given a chance to speak to the entire nation.

One other thing. Earlier this summer, as the first protests against the death of George Floyd unfolded, President Trump took to Twitter to warn of consequences for those who damaged property. “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” Trump tweeted on a Friday morning in May. “Any difficulty and we will assume control, but when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Although Trump backpedaled in the face of criticism — claiming, implausibly, that he was making a descriptive statement of what would happen if looting began — his meaning was clear enough: that “looters,” however defined, would and should be shot.

The bully pulpit matters. Presidential rhetoric matters. Rittenhouse was a fan of the president — he took a front-row seat at a January rally in Des Moines — but that connection is less important than the atmosphere created by Trump’s words. A president who speaks of shooting people in the street — who elevates those who threaten to shoot people in the street — cannot be separated from the individual who does, eventually, shoot people in the street.

My daughter argues that as long as she’s seeing all of her friends together in school, they should be able to gather together in their houses as well. Unfortunately, she has risk exactly backward. She’s not alone; lots of Americans do.

My kids, like most in Indiana, have been back at school since mid-August. Each time my 9th and 11th grader head off to high school, they spend more time among other human beings in a day than they had cumulatively all summer. Because of that, they along with many of their friends and those friends’ parents think that there’s less reason to be careful in other aspects of their lives.

But as we loosen restrictions in some areas, we should be increasing restrictions in others. If kids are going to take on more risk at school, they should find ways to be even safer outside of it. Large groupings at a friend’s house are not a good idea.

Too many view protective measures as all or nothing: Either we do everything, or we might as well do none. That’s wrong. Instead, we need to see that all our behavior adds up.

Each decision we make to reduce risk helps. Each time we wear a mask, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we socialize outside instead of inside, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we stay six feet away instead of sitting closer together, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we wash our hands, eat apart and don’t spend time in large gatherings of people, we’re adding to the pile.

If the pile gets big enough, we as a society can keep this thing in check.

But rather than focus on the cumulative benefits of individual actions, our attention too often rests on the few who refuse to act safely. We rage online over a couple of people who throw a fit about wearing a mask in a store. We spend far less time being grateful that so many Americans do wear them.

We don’t need everyone to wear a mask. We need more people to wear masks. We need to be willing to wear a mask even if others refuse, because every little bit matters.

This kind of thinking holds true even for vaccines, which add a huge amount to the pile. We won’t need everyone to get one to reach herd immunity. We just need enough people to do so.

To keep the pile big enough, though, we need to be willing to trade some activities for others. If someone wants to play on a sports team, for instance, they should consider giving something up to do so. Increasing their risk by participating in a group activity should prompt them to reduce their risk the rest of the time.

But we aren’t very good at discussing trade-offs. We want it all. We want to eat in restaurants, crowd into houses, go to work and celebrate occasions en masse.

We could choose to engage in just some of those things. We could decide to get a massage or get our nails done or have a haircut — instead of demanding all of these and more be available to us simultaneously.

From a policy perspective, we’ve been just as unwilling to sacrifice. Almost everyone thinks that opening schools is extremely important (myself included). But too few people have been willing to discuss what we might be willing to shut down to make that happen. If we want to make it safer to send kids back to school, we might need to consider reducing the number of people who can drink in bars or eat in restaurants, for example.

Maybe, right now, we can’t have both schools and Disney World.

Of course, even if society can’t agree on which activities to prioritize, we as individuals can. The Carrolls haven’t seen most of our extended family in months. We’ve canceled a number of vacations big and small. When we eat with people who are not in our family, we do so outside in very small groups. My kids have been denied sleepovers and basketball games and hanging out in basements.

If Americans were willing to invest in bigger-picture solutions, we could all have nicer things. A massive testing scheme would require spending increases and many more public health personnel than we currently employ, but it could make many activities much safer. Providing more people with the means to stay home instead of going to their workplaces in person would significantly reduce close contact. Ubiquitous and affordable high-speed internet would make online education easier.

We all can’t live in bubbles like the one the N.B.A. created so it can finish the professional basketball season. But we could make use of the league’s testing methods. We could note its decision to hunker down and limit exposures. We could acknowledge that those involved felt the season was important enough to make personal sacrifices. I’m sure millions of dollars made the decision easier, but many of us would be happy with much less.

Instead of asking why we can’t do certain activities, we might consider what we’re willing to give up to do them more safely. Even better, we might even consider what we’re willing to give up so others can do them, too.

Hey, tech bro, can you spare a blank check?

Apparently so, given the recent explosion in SPACs — the jaunty acronym for “special purpose acquisition companies.”

While this investment instrument has been around for a long time, it has suddenly become the hottest way to raise capital, especially in tech. More than $30 billion has been raised so far this year through 75 SPACs. That’s more than double last year, with more to come in 2020.

It’s a good sign, since SPACS offer smaller, innovative and big-idea companies — like electric-transportation start-ups, savvy health care firms and space-exploration companies — a way to get enough capital to evade the tractor beams of bigger companies and reach escape velocity as independent businesses.

SPACs are essentially a back door to taking a start-up public, an alternative to a traditional I.P.O. An acquisition fund is formed — the SPAC — with a so-called blank check: Its goal is to acquire an unspecified company within two years. The target company becomes public through the merger.

Once used mostly by distressed companies in need of cash, SPACs are now seen by many forward-leaning companies as a way to go public with a lot less scrutiny and a lot more speed.

They’ve certainly become hot in the tech sector, spurred in part by top Silicon moneybags like Chamath Palihapitiya.

He’s the first person I heard talk enthusiastically about finding new ways to get capital to promising companies. He invited me — trapped me is a better way to describe it — several years ago into his office to wax poetic about SPACs. His goal at the time was to convince start-ups to move away from the more traditional investment-bank landscape to using SPAC “sponsors” like him.

“They suck away all the value,” he said flatly at the time about bankers and their clients. It was one of the nicer ways he described the I.P.O. process.

On the night that his first SPAC went public in 2017, I met him at a fancy New York restaurant where he was celebrating a company that had no assets except a $600 million pile of money he had raised for Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings. At the time, his SPAC was marketed as I.P.O. 2.0, which many people in tech derided to me privately. Mr. Palihapitiya, pricey glass of wine held high, could care less about the doubters.

And, after he finally merged that SPAC with the commercial human spaceflight company Virgin Galactic last October, he raised about $1.1 billion for his second and third SPACs in late April.

Mr. Palihapitiya isn’t the only one. On the investment side, there are lots of different SPAC flavors. They include Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, which has raised a giant $4 billion SPAC that will perhaps target a “mature unicorn”; a $300 million SPAC from the former speaker of the House, Paul Ryan (you read that right); and even one from a sports manager, Billy Beane, whose $575 million sports-focused SPAC is “elephant-hunting in European soccer.”

These many SPACs are finding interesting targets. This week, the 3-D printing company Desktop Metal merged with Trine Acquisition, after saying it had planned a public offering. In June, the fantasy sports and betting outfit DraftKings gambled on a SPAC.

The list goes on. And while it can feel like a shell game, and there are possibilities for abuse, an essay this week by Bill Gurley, a well-regarded venture capitalist, got a lot of attention for declaring SPACs as “Door No. 3” for techies — an attractive third option for raising money. (The other doors are a traditional I.P.O. and the recently popular direct listing.)

Given the boom in SPACs — meaning there will be more competition — Mr. Gurley rightly thinks these financial instruments are a better deal for companies he invests in. They also offer a refuge from the underpricing of I.P.O.s, which leaves billions on the table that should go to the companies and not to Wall Street firms and their clients. It’s a longtime complaint of venture capitalists and start-ups, which are not in complete control of that process.

“The traditional way of going public is systematically broken and is robbing Silicon Valley founders, employees and investors of billions of dollars each year,” Mr. Gurley wrote.

Mr. Gurley is still an admirer of direct listings, which Spotify used in 2018 to much acclaim. Their downside, Mr. Gurley notes, is that a company can’t use them “to go public and simultaneously raise capital.” While the exchanges and regulators are working on perhaps changing that, any company that needs more capital — like a maker of electric trucks, for example — is taking a big risk using the direct-listing method.

Thus, SPACs offer perhaps the most flexible option and, more to the point, if I’ve correctly located the most important sentence in Mr. Gurley’s long essay, with SPACs, “Everything is negotiable.”

Those three words are the kind of sweet nothings that tech entrepreneurs and their venture capitalist friends like to hear whispered in their collective ears. With more choice — from picking board members to setting prices — it’s all up to the core group of investors and executives, with the added plus of having SPAC sponsors who are likely to have a deep understanding of the businesses. And, with more SPACs around, deals can be made among companies; we may even see more “SPAC-offs.”

As for missing out on the cachet that comes with an I.P.O., with all of its loud bell-ringing and fancy road shows, there is hardly an entrepreneur I have met who likes the I.P.O. process; often they compare it to dental implant surgery.

Is a SPAC the answer to their pain? We’ll see soon enough as more and more start-ups have announced I.P.O. intent recently.

So, as Mr. Gurley says, does that mean that more promising companies will choose Door No. 3?

I hope so.