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Rioter’s Actions Are Worth Pointing Out
We’ve had some interesting discussions of various aspects of the Rittenhouse case, mostly focused on his actions. Those who were shot had provoked a confrontation with an armed man who protected himself. I see no provocation on Rittenhouse’s part and, had they not attacked him, they’d be alive. Thier own actions caused them harm.
Our basic rules have to be pretty straightforward. You have a right to defend yourself from serious bodily harm or death by whatever means keep you breathing, provided a reasonable person would agree that your life is in danger. Obviously, there’s a spectrum of threat. Can’t just shoot someone for giving you the stink eye. So what happened?
Evidently, without provocation, the rioting crowd bagan shouting at Rittenhouse, threatening him verbally and chasing him down the street.Threat to his life? Almost certainly. He’s seriously outnumbered and the crowd is hostile. Even in the course of a really good riot, have you ever chased someone down the street with a chain or skateboard or gun when that person had done nothing to you?
Then Rittenhouse got hit in the head with a skateboard. An aoutopsy would describe that as a blunt instrument. Could that have killed him? Is that a threat to his life? Check. When was the last time you chased somebody down a street and hit him in the head with a blunt instrument, when that person had done nothing to you?
Then he got kicked in the head while he was sitting on street as the hostile crowd approched him. Could that have killed him? Sure, and there was more where that came from. Legitimate threat to his life? No doubt. When was the last time you kicked somebody in the head while he was sitting on the ground, and again that person had done nothing to you?
Then the gun gets pointed at him from three feet away. Yeah, that’s a legitimate threat to your life. When was the last time you pointed a handgun at someone who’d done you no harm?
Rittenhouse is on trial for ending those threats. There’s video of it. (With all due respect to the eminently sensible Yeti, there was no video of the Trayvon Martin episode.) The rioters were the bad guys in this picture. Very bad. It doesn’t matter what anybody’s criminal record was, doesn’t matter what Rittenhouse’s grades were, doesn’t matter whether he crossed a state line doesn’t matter what anybody’s color is. The out-of-control aggression of the rioters got them killed, and those facts are not in dispute.
And yet that guy got grilled like he was a trained policeman with the prosecutor literally trying to make his case in a second by second video analysis. I’ll tell you what Rittenhouse’s state of mind was when he pulled the trigger: “Holy moley, my head hurts and they’re coming in for more.”
That’s why this case should never have been brought. Not everything needs to be litigated. Just look at the video.
This case is a Second Amendment issue. The prosecutors want to chill self defense by putting you through hell for defending yourself.
Published in Guns
A really good synopsis of the events. The two dead and the one injured were all engaged in criminal assault. INAL and welcome legal argument against my statement.
I may be wrong, but I suspect that if Rittenhouse were black, it wouldn’t have even occurred to anybody to press charges against him.
Which would have been correct, in my view.
I agree he’s got a good self-defense claim, and should be acquitted, but the fact pattern was not quite as you described. The state had a somewhat better case than that.
The skateboard guy, and the guy who kicked him, and the guy who had the pistol – all chased Rittenhouse after he’d shot the first guy – Rosenbaum. The survivor who held the pistol claimed they were chasing Rittenhouse because they thought he was an active shooter. In other words, from their perspective, they were acting in self-defense, or defense of others, in trying to take out Rittenhouse. That’s plausible. After the shooting of Rosenbaum, it may not have been clear to the crowd what the situation was. If they were on trial for assaulting Rittenhouse, if he hadn’t shot them, they may have a good defense as well. They were trying to stop somebody they thought had just committed a murder.
So, everything hinges on the first shooting – the shooting of Rosenbaum, and whether that was justified. I think it was, given Rosenbaum’s actions and threats to kill him, and if that’s the case, then the subsequent shootings were as well. It’s important for Rittenhouse that this all happened within a couple of minutes – that he didn’t really have time to think and didn’t have an opportunity to explain what had happened, didn’t have time to cool down, before they began chasing him. As Rittenhouse ran away from the first shooting, he denied doing it, which is not a good look but explainable in that he assumed the people asking were Rosenbaum’s friends and wouldn’t accept his self-defense claim.
So, again, I agree that he should be acquitted, but I don’t think it’s as clear cut as many believe, and I don’t think it’s an attack on the 2nd amendment or self-defense in general.
Self-defense is not dependent on the state of mind of the person who is attacking; when one is being threatened in the manner that Rittenhouse was being threatened there is no third option between defending oneself or passively accepting an assault that could end in death. Rittenhouse chose the option that resulted in his survival. Rittenhouse was not actively shooting anyone when the subsequent attacks on his person were made. To theorize that those he shot were trying to stop an active shooter is not credible given that he was attempting to run away, rather than taking an aggressive shooting stance.
Or, he might never have made it out of the night alive. We just don’t know. There has been an instance of a Black man with a long arm targeting police at a racial justice protests before (a completely peaceful one even). I suspect that many cops might think about that if they were responding to a shots fired call and saw a Black man carrying an AR-15 approaching them.
Again, I agree Ritthenhouse has a good self-defense claim. But that claim does depend on the fact that he did not unlawfully provoke Rosenbaum. If he had murdered Rosenbaum, he loses his self defense claim for the subsequent shootings, even if he was running away. In that case, he’s only running away because he’s trying to get away with a murder. You can’t claim self defense in that situation. I’m sure you agree with this – if someone tries to stop a fleeing mass shooter by hitting them with a skateboard, and the mass shooter shoots and kills them, too, that’s another murder charge, right? Even if he was trying to save his own life, that’s another murder charge because he caused that to occur by his prior shootings.
The left lives in terror of the heavily-armed troglodyte right rising up. Writers who have never been anywhere but NYC and LA write movie and TV scripts about innocent urbanites driving cross-country hunted by redneck knuckle-draggers deep in the interior.
Recall that when white nebbish Bernie Goetz decided not to be bullied and robbed on the NYC subway anymore and shot his attackers the establishment went batsh*t. DA Morgentahau personally handled the case–4,000 murders a year and tens of thousands of other serious crimes back then but this was the guy they feared most.
If leftists are violent, the issue is whatever injustice triggered their righteous anger. If they aren’t white, then they are entirely a product of their environment and not subject to adverse adult judgment. Rittenhouse (a) compelled a detailed look at the dramatis personae doing the destruction, a group that is not “mostly peaceful” (b) he was an armed white kid, an easy target on which to project the feared stereotype.
It is chilling that lefties clearly believe they have a First Amendment right to apply a fatal beatdown to anyone in their way when acting out. Horst Wessel would approve.
This is a case that never should have been brought, but had to be because the media coverage in the US is so biased and broken that they cannot be expected to report on these issues with any reliability. There are people who thought that Rittenhouse killed Black people, why, because the media made it seem like he had gone to the protest to shoot Black people. There were people who thought he had traveled a long way to be at the protest (across state lines) can imply a rather long journey), but Antioch, IL to Kenosha, WI is 22 miles. Many people commute further than that every day. They thought that Rittenhouse initiated the conflict, and escalated the conflict, why, because the media selectively reported on the topic and most people were too lazy to actually watch the raw footage themselves (which, if the media had a scintilla of ethics we wouldn’t have to).
So, the prosecutor is in a tough spot. He either believes that he has a case, or, more likely, he knows that he MUST bring the case because of the public furor if he doesn’t. He figures he has a slam dunk on the misdemeanor possession charge, and he will try to get him on the rest. Its nice to see that the Judge looked at the ill-written law and saw that there was an issue and dismissed the possession charge. Now we just wait to see if the jury is actually afraid they will be doxed and convicts him, or not.
One thing this trial proved is you can’t fire a gun at a mob of Antifa without hitting a violent sex offender.
^^^This
Were the 3 who were shot residents of Kenosha or were they there for the riot? They don’t really fit well into my image of the hero trying to save others from an active shooter since they all had criminal records and may have been there to do so more crime. I guess that has an effect on how I reach conclusions about this event.
Also, weren’t the secondary attacks done on the path to the police barricade a short distance away? That’s where Rittenhouse said he was headed, doubtful action for an active shooter.
A friend of mine came to visit me several years ago, while I still lived in the mountains of Tennessee. He got to my house, looked around, and said, “Man, you’re in the middle of frickin’ nowhere, dude! I hear banjos! Do you feel safe here?”
I said, “Safe from what?”
He answered, “Rednecks with guns!”
I opened my eyes wide and responded, “Dude, you live in CHICAGO. We don’t have violent crime here. In Chicago, it’s just a part of everyday life. What are you even talking about?”
He laughed as I shook my head.
He really was freaked out being in a rural area. He felt safer in Chicago.
I don’t understand…
I was told underground militia member Kyle Rittenhouse came from another country to murder black people and shot Dr. Jacob Blake in the back 60 times and immediately went to a bar with white supremecists after to celebrate. All that and PowerBall at 11!
A long time ago, my wife and I used to leave for vacation at night so the kids would sleep in the back of the van for most of the trip. One summer I was stuck at work on a project so she left me to drive up by myself a couple of days later. Around 1 AM the old van sputtered and died. She rolled off the highway into a closed gas station well outside of the urban areas as the engine conked out completely. Four guys she described as deeply country-looking were playing poker using a square board on an oil barrel as a table in the lift bay. They came out, popped the hood, cleaned the fuel filter, made some other minor repairs, and produced some wrapped hard candy in case the kids woke up. The old van ran better than before, They refused payment and gently chided her for being out so late. If it had died an hour earlier while still in a metro area I doubt the ending would have been as happy. Although, it’s hard to say: My wife has always had astonishingly good luck–heck, she married moi, after all.
Among the things the prosecution has done that surprised me was arguing to the jury that the men who were shot were “heroes” pursuing a person they thought was an active shooter. Maybe they truly did think Mr. Rittenhouse was an active shooter bent on causing mass harm, and were trying to do “the right thing,” but given their background, where and why they were there, and what they have been reported as saying during the event, a “good” motive seems implausible.
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That one surprised me also. I suspect it will play well with my liberal friends and will be how this event goes down in history. Rittenhouse may or may not go to jail. I suspect he will get off on this one and the feds will come get him on something else. But from this point forward he is a marked man with a destroyed life.
It looks to me like the jury is trying for some kind of compromise verdict or will be hung. Still, I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario where he’s convicted or acquitted on one murder charge and not the other. I’m thinking deadlock.
Two jurors fearing “ backlash” and doxing reportedly holding up verdict, per Jack Posobiec.
When I heard the jury is majority women, my heart sank. The likelihood of acquittal dropped precipitously at that point. It’ll either be conviction or a hung jury.
I’ve seen the dynamic of certain feminine personality traits (which today we associate with the proverbial “Karen”) during jury deliberation when they find the defendant to be threatening or intimidating. The response was GUILTY with no consideration of the facts or law. The more women on the jury, the higher probability of having a Karen or two, though men can sometimes be Karen-ish, as well.
On the other hand, a late-middle-aged black lady who was obviously not intimidated by the big, burly, white defendant was one of the most insistent on acquittal in that trial.
I hope that in the case of a hung jury the judge dusts off the pending motion for mistrial with prejudice and sets Kyle free.
How on Earth does he know that? They should not be communicating with anyone except the court.
He wrote: “Two jurors holding decision up, outright citing backlash, per US Marshal in Kenosha“
Nobody fears violence at the hands of supporters of Kyle Rittenhouse.
We all know the threat comes from Antifa–and by proxy from the “peaceful” journalists and professors who propagandize on behalf of the thugs.
Allegedly per a Marshall. Ah I see that above.
From wisconsinrightnow.com on social media:
Concealing evidence? Prosecutorial misconduct?
If he gets off the Biden DOJ will get him. Him being a racist and all.
They should worry. I would have refused to be on this jury because of it.
You probably know better than I…but I wonder whether Kyle’s obvious youth will help? Compared to the “victims” he doesn’t look threatening at all.