Kyle Rittenhouse abruptly departed the stage during an appearance at the University of Memphis on Wednesday, after he was confronted about comments made by Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk.
Rittenhouse was invited by the college’s Turning Point USA chapter to speak at the campus. However, the event was met with backlash from a number of students who objected to Rittenhouse’s presence.
The 21-year-old gained notoriety in August 2020 when, at the age of 17, he shot and killed two men—Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, as well as injuring 26-year-old Gaige Grosskreutz—at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
He said the three shootings, carried out with a semi-automatic AR-15-style firearm, were in self-defense. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest where the shootings took place was held after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was left paralyzed from the waist down after he was shot by a white police officer.
Yeah, I feel like most people didn’t watch the full trial. You can have the opinion he shouldn’t have been there, but putting yourself in a dumb situation doesn’t automatically forfeit your right to self defense
I dunno about that. If you needlessly insert yourself into a dangerous situation and you kill people in self defense, there should be consequences.
He went looking for violence. He found it.
I don’t agree, that seems like it would be giving official journalists for example special privileges over citizen journalists. Give free reign to racists to lynch counter protestors, etc.
Do most journalists carry illegal guns in the course of their work?
I don’t think it was illegal, or at least the court didn’t.
Idk, I assume not
Well that’s what our legal system is for, to hash out individual cases. If someone’s going as a citizen journalist that’s very different from going to “keep the peace and shoot looters” and very intentionally bringing along long guns, vs pistols.
He couldn’t legally own a pistol. He was determined to have legally possessed a rifle.
If I’m on my way to sell crack and I get attacked by some psycho do I lose my right of self defense?
If I’m breaking curfew and I get attacked by some psycho do I lose my right of self defense?
At some point you will see that it makes no sense, the legal system already forbids killing looters, so you want them to lose their right of self defense because you don’t like them.
I watched the trial, and I saw the footage. I don’t agree with the verdict one bit, but we live in a society and I just have to accept that outcome.
However, I don’t have to change my opinion about the guy just because he was acquitted in court. He went out looking for trouble, found it, and two people died because of it.
Nah, he is a murderer. Shitty laws in a shithole state does not change that fact.
In what state are there laws that would lead to his conviction for double homicide?
What shitty laws are we talking about? He made a pretty basic and straightforward self defense defense. He didn’t invoke Stand Your Ground, in no small part because WI doesn’t do Stand Your Ground (and all Stand Your Ground generally means is that you don’t have a duty to try to flee from an attacker if possible, and it was only really possible for Rosenbaum and he did try to flee from Rosenbaum).
The only case where he got off on a charge because of “shitty laws” I can think of would be the weapons possession charge and that’s because WI has different ages for different classes of guns, and the kind of gun he had was in the 16+ rather than 18+ category. Ironically, there was at least one person with an illegal gun on the scene, and it was Grosskreutz, and then it was because it was a concealed carry with an expired permit.
I can go into detail if you’d like to know why I agree with the self defense argument made for each of the shootings, but for now I’ll leave you with the point where I knew Rittenhouse would be found not guilty for Grosskreutz, since that one had a single question that changed everything:
Because that question was the difference between self defense or not self defense.
Context matters. He went looking for a fight and found one. One lawyer I heard pointed out that had he lost the fight and died whomever killed him would have been able to argue, probably successfully, the same thing. Self-defense.
Why should the law support murder if the murderer is better at it?
Grosskreutz (the one who survived) could have shot Rittenhouse and justifiably claimed self-defense under the law. He had a gun pointed at him by a dude who had just wasted two other men with it. The law’s fucked.
You’re not wrong on this. And Rittenhouse mostly got off with a self defense claim on shooting Grosskreutz because Grosskreutz approached in a false surrender, lowered his hands and pointed his gun at Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse shot him. Grosskreutz answered a question to that effect during the trial, and that answer was likely the deciding point on that charge.
Last man standing justice system.