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11 points

6 months ago

It’s not bear season, and a hunter doesn’t have a hunting license. He takes his gun and drives out to bear country, and starts walking around bear dens waiting for a mother bear to attack him, then he shoots her and claims self defense.

Was he justified, or did he intentionally set up a scenario where the bear was likely to feel threatened and attack him, so he’d have an excuse to shoot her?

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ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world

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-15 points

6 months ago

The fact that no one gave the slightest shit about Rittenhouse’s arrival or presence (regardless of the fact that he was visibly and obviously armed) until Rosenbaum freaked out on him for putting out Rosenbaum’s dumpster fire, makes that not really the best analogy, lol.

He did literally nothing that merited the aggression upon him. Your argument is literally identical, logically, to “she was asking for it by being dressed so provocatively”.

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5 points

6 months ago

Your argument is literally identical, logically, to “she was asking for it by being dressed so provocatively”.

It’s literally identical, logically, to “She dressed provocatively, but was carrying a revolver, and walked into a bad part of town waiting for someone to come onto her so she could shoot them.” In which case I’d be making the same argument.

Look, I want to be clear: I’m not saying he deserved to get attacked. But I also don’t believe for a second that he traveled that far, to a protest where any logical person could have guessed they’d be seen as an aggressor, and walked around for as long as he did, and wasn’t hoping he’d draw some aggression so he could “defend himself”. It’s unfortunate that it happened, and I do believe he was defending himself, but I also fully believe that it went down exactly like he was hoping it would.

The fact that he’s been riding out his celebrity status among the far right since then, I feel, supports that theory.

He can be “not guilty” and still be a piece of shit.

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ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world

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-12 points

6 months ago

“She dressed provocatively, but was carrying a revolver, and walked into a bad part of town waiting for someone to come onto her so she could shoot them.” In which case I’d be making the same argument.

I like how you subtly modified the obviously implied rape attempt to “come onto her”, lol.

You also left out running away at the first sign of aggression, and then only shooting after she’s chased down and has nowhere else to go, and the attacker, who screamed “I’m going to kill you” moments before, is now trying to wrestle the gun out of her hands.

Zero chance you’d be making the same argument in an actually equivalent situation, lmao, who do you think you’re kidding?

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3 points

6 months ago

Man, you’re missing the whole point. I said it in pretty plain text before but I’ll say it again: I don’t believe he deserved to get attacked, and I believe he was defending himself. Clearly the person who attacked him were not justified in doing so. In the analogy you’re quoting, clearly the person attempting to rape the woman in question would not be justified in doing so, and she’d be justified in shooting him.

What matters, though, is intent. In that hypothetical, the woman put herself into that situation intentionally hoping she’d get attacked because she wanted to shoot someone. I firmly believe Rittenhouse did the exact same.

Do you also defend Westborough Baptist Church? Remember them? Group who would protest at soldier’s funerals, shout some really inflammatory shit with the intent of baiting the funeral-goers to attack them, then act like innocent victims and sue their attackers? Legally, they were in the right, too, but that doesn’t make them any less deplorable for doing it.

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ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world

[ - ]

-8 points

6 months ago

What matters, though, is intent. In that hypothetical, the woman put herself into that situation intentionally hoping she’d get attacked because she wanted to shoot someone. I firmly believe Rittenhouse did the exact same.

But the point is that there is literally no reason to believe that, if you’re actually being objective, and looking at the facts of the matter. He cleaned graffiti off a high school, then he showed up, he handed out water bottles, gave basic medical attention on request (literally walking around yelling “medic! friendly!”), and put out fires. He did nothing that any reasonable, objective person would conclude contributed the slightest bit toward ‘hoping he’d get attacked because he wanted to shoot someone’.

Firstly, everything started going south because of an event nobody could have predicted: a guy who set a fire earlier had it put out by Rittenhouse, and his response to that is literal homicidal rage (?!) (later, we learned that he had literally been released from a mental health facility for a suicide attempt…looking at all the evidence and in hindsight, I think it’s reasonable that Rosenbaum was actually trying to get himself killed in a manner similar to ‘murder by cop’, but I digress).

Secondly, if he was hoping to get attacked because he wanted to shoot someone, why didn’t he shoot Rosenbaum right when he started chasing him down? This was already after Rosenbaum had literally been screaming “I’m going to kill you”, so it’d be a very strong self-defense argument to put him down right there as he charged at Rittenhouse. But instead, he ran away, and continued to run away as Rosenbaum chased him. This course of action makes NO SENSE for someone who is ‘hoping he’d get attacked because he wanted to shoot someone’.

He also didn’t shoot when he got cornered and was no longer able to flee. At that point, Rosenbaum had not only threatened his life, but had chased him down, leaving NO question he was intending to make good on his threat. Rittenhouse could have very justifiably shot him dead then as well. But he didn’t.

Rittenhouse only fired when Rosenbaum had COMPLETELY closed the distance between them, and was LITERALLY trying to wrestle the gun of someone he had just threatened to kill, out of his arms. Objectively speaking, he did everything he could to keep the situation from escalating to the point of using his weapon.

His actions toward his other two attackers was similar–no aggression from him, and when he encountered aggression toward him, he didn’t ‘take advantage of the opportunity to shoot someone’–instead, he fled. Consistently. Every single person he shot had literally put him in a position where he had to choose to either protect his life, or forfeit it. And he never used his weapon a moment before he was in that position, all three times.

The argument that Rittenhouse was ‘hoping he’d get attacked because she wanted to shoot someone’ simply does not hold water.

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3 points

6 months ago

First off, I want to be clear that I’m not the one down-voting you; I haven’t voted (up or down) anywhere in this thread, but it always makes me self-conscious when I’m having a disagreement with someone and the posts I’m replying to consistently have 1 downvote at the time I’m replying.

Rittenhouse was already breaking the law by having a firearm; he was 17 at the time and not legally old enough to possess one.
He claims he went to the protest “to protect businesses” if I recall, which seems reasonable on the surface, except that:
- He was a staunch supporter of the ‘blue lives matter’ movement, a rally-attending Trump supporter, and otherwise very openly far-right leaning, and…
- He was attending a protest populated primarily by far left-leaning individuals.
- I’m not aware of him attending any other protests, since or prior, under this premise; if he was the good Samaritan he tries to make himself out to be, why did he choose this, and only this, protest to “protect businesses” at? Where was he during any non-politically-polarized national tragedy where his services could have been used?
- Why did he feel the need to bring a gun in the first place?
  - You could argue that it’s “just in case” - which may make sense, except that he drove an awfully long way to a very specific protest with a very specific population that had already become very heated. If he felt he needed a gun “just in case”, a reasonable conclusion could be that he expected things to go south, and chose to go anyway.
- He (to my knowledge) didn’t have any personal affiliation with any of the businesses there.
  - This is like me going down to the local Walmart with a gun to protect it against people protesting big box stores.
Since the incident, he’s used the fact that he went to a leftist protest and shot people and was acquitted to become a bit of a far-right celebrity, and he’s really milked that celebrity status:
- His likeness has been used to sell memorabilia, including guns.
- He’s been a guest of honor (or equivalent, I’m not sure what the term is) at GOP rallies.
- He’s got at least some kind of association with the Proud Boys (though I’m not sure what the nature of that association is.)
If he was truly an innocent good Samaritan who was caught up in something unfortunate and regretted what happened, wouldn’t he be speaking out against any of this, rather than letting them hold him in high regard because of it?
- He’s basically earned celebrity status because he shot people. And I realize it’s not his fault that people are doing that, but he’s playing right into it. Profiting off of it, even. That is not something a remorseful person does.

The result of all of this, in my eyes, is that he went to an awful lot of trouble to put himself in a situation where I feel a reasonable person would have believed they would end up in an altercation, and he made sure he had a rifle with him at the time. I will accept that he could have used it sooner than he did, but I, as someone who actively does not want to have to shoot someone, wouldn’t bring a gun to a Trump rally while publicizing that I was there to keep the peace and enforce local noise ordinances. That’d just be asking to get attacked. To be put in a situation where I’d need to use that gun.

Of course, if I was going to go to that rally, and I was hoping I’d have to shoot someone, I’d make damn sure I made it look like I had only the best possible intentions.

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