But you know…a rifle he was not legally allowed to own or carry.
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Was when he shot and killed him.
FTFY
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Were you in the jury? That would explain a lot.
Reports from witnesses at the time said Rittenhouse was walking around pointing his AR at people, before he started killing. If that didn’t make it into testimony then that’s the fault of the inept prosecution or the judge.
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…with a gun he was not legally allowed to own or carry.
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That’s actually not true.
He was legally allowed to carry and own the gun, because Wisconsin’s law is only for short barrelled. If you think that’s a distinction without a difference, understand that Wisconsin made that law specific that way to allow children / minors to own rifles explicitly.
One of the things that has made me very angry is CNN’s “tut-tutting” article about how we alll made assumptions about the case and that we should do better:
And it’s like, really shocking. Rittenhouse didn’t cross state lines with the gun, because he lived in both Antioch and Kenosha (with his father and brother in Kenosha.) He was living with his friend, Dominic Black, at the time he murdered those people. He didn’t travel 40+ miles to take part in it, he drove there from his friend’s house.
What really upsets me is these are all facts CNN knew and could have told us about at any time before the trial, and now they’re “tut-tutting” us about getting things wrong. It makes them look disingenuous in my eyes.
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He was not allowed to purchase the gun, which is why Black had to buy it for him. That’s a straw-man purchase, which is illegal. If it was purchased illegally, then possession by Rittenhouse was illegal.
Where he happened to be sleeping at the time is also irrelevant. He was a resident of Illinois.
And before someone tries to argue that minors are allowed to carry rifles for hunting, that is only true under direct supervision of a parent or guardian who is responsible for the weapon during transport to and from the hunting area. It’s illegal to hunt within the city limits of Kenosha (or any city, for that matter), so the argument that Rittenhouse was legally carrying that weapon doesn’t hold water.
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There is also the fact that Black is currently charged with two counts of intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to a person under the age of 18 causing death, which is a nice little puzzle…
ETA: IANAL, but it does seem that precedence eliminating any prior acts leading up to the shooting would really fuck up any future prosecutions of premeditated murder.
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The Kenosha County legal system judges people white or wrong.
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In MAGAland threatening to kill people with an AR-15 is a heroic act but protests that threaten to damage property are an existential threat the likes of which this nation has never seen.
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We’re in this perverse situation where if you brandish a weapon to intimidate and terrorize people, you’re in the wrong and might get in trouble, but if you then murder the people you’re threatening, you’re now in the clear. (Of course, certain types of people are most likely to get away with both these things, but…)
@milliefink
It’s interesting how “fear” is the key to self-defense cases. Theoretically the fear of the defendant, but ultimately it’s about what fears the criminal justice system (the cops, the prosecutors, the judges, the juries) find reasonable, i.e. not just their own fears, but the fears they find acceptable for someone to be expressing. So the system can not only accept white people finding Black people to be scary (and thus not the other way around), it’s kind of expected. Conservative politics is completely fear-driven, so they find, well, anything that’s not them to be scary. On top of which, I don’t think women are “supposed” to find men scary, even though that is, of course, an incredibly reasonable fear. Women frequently get criticized for expressing it in any way (“Hey, stop being hysterical - not all men!”), much less acting on it.
So ultimately the most objectively reasonable fears are the ones that the system doesn’t acknowledge because the people ultimately deciding what’s reasonable are themselves the ones to fear.
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This kid will soon be on Tucker.
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Well, white men at least
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That’s the precedent, at least the most recent one:
- Pick a fight, while carrying a firearm
- Cry* “self-defense” when it looks like one might lose** the fight they picked themselves
*(perhaps literally)
**(again, losing a fight while carrying a firearm)
I fear “namby-pamby pantywaist” is an impolite term but I’m otherwise at a loss to describe those who lean on this defense.
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No, I wouldn’t. When you’re on your third shooting of the night it seems no one else gets the right of self defense. He comes, points a gun at people, gets yelled at and stuff thrown at him (people defending themselves from a gunman). He shoots the person, so someone else escalates their defense to the use of a skateboard, he kills them as well. Then a third person pulls a weapon on the gunman who had killed two people, he shoots and wounds that person as well.
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He shouldn’t have any problem telling all his white supremacist/police-violence-apologist/alt-right supporters to go fuck off then.
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I don’t understand who these god damn lies are even for. Tucker Carlson and his crowd oppose BLM. Nobody else will possibly believe that taking an illegal weapon in hopes of shooting protesters is a form of support. So why even bother saying so?
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