I think you did “get used to it”. It wasn’t that long ago that people understood that being confronted by an angry man with a gun was, in itself, sufficient reason to be concerned for your safety.
The last ten years or so, though, that’s gone out the window. The proliferation of open carry and “stand your ground” type laws have made it such that “Hey, this guy yelling at me has a gun!” has been accepted as normal by far too many Americans, and is no longer considered a legitimate reason to consider that person a threat.
Hell, you’ve gotten to the point where crowds of armed men storming into State legislatures with the stated intent of intimidating the members of the legislature has happened several times, and no one was arrested or charged with anything.
Even carrying pistols seems like a gigantic pain it the ass. What with all the responsibilities it entails and the extra lbs to cart around day in and day out for what should only be a very low percentage chance of having to use it if you’re using appropriate situational awareness skills in an appropriate way.
If they had managed to overpower and disarm him, a scared kid, I’d expect their inner badassness would have surfaced once they gained the upper hand and now it’s lesson time.
Rittenhouse, at 17, was probably the size of a grown ass man but covered in fear and without any real fighting experience, a man of equal size 10-15 years older than him and already familiar with the use of violence has the upper hand, and there were several of them present. The kid would have been severely injured, crippled or killed in the mayhem by men who would have disappeared long before the cops arrived and who might or might not have ever been identified later.
Obviously what would have happened was a citizen’s arrest. An actual one. Because that’s what you do, if you can, when some lunatic with a gun is trying to kill people, or has already killed people.
There has been a lot of violence and criminal activity at riots, including people being shot. If a citizen’s arrest is the obvious outcome of such people being chased down, there should be oodles of accounts online, but my search turned up empty.
How many citizen arrests at riots have you seen? On what do you base your ‘obvious’ assertion? Because it seems obvious to me that those guys would run like hell if the cops showed up.
I have to call BS on this 2nd amendment hero wet dream fantasy little man with a gun in his hand justification. This isn’t between gang bangers or mafios, where getting popped with your own weapon may legitimately be a fear. This is an active shooter scenario in a crowd with bystanders reacting to disarm and hold the perp for the police. Haven’t seen school and Walmart shootings where perp gets killed by someone taking away his gun. Heck, in this thread has a firearm takeaway during Seattle demonstrations.
Your average citizen that jumps in to stop an active shooter certainly ain’t gonna think twice about a violent take down that dislocates the shoulder and breaks a jaw or give a few kicks to make sure the perp stays down. BUT they are not thinking gonna grab his gun and pop a cap in his brainpan.
It was a lot closer to the first scenario than the second but I agree it’s unlikely they would have used his gun against him.
Equally unlikely as imagining they were legit going to detain him for the cops. Rittenhouse was going to get fucked up if they managed to disarm him. Perps, plural. They travelled there for the mayhem. They found it.
He was also a trained EMT carrying medical supplies - luckily for him, as it turned out. As already noted, he wasn’t prohibited from carrying the gun he had, and was carrying it for self-defense, just as Rittenhouse was.
Usually the targets of right-wing smear campaigns determined to portray the victims of shootings as “violent thugs posing an imminent threat”…
…suffer from being deceased and thus unable to tell their side of the story. But here the evidence supports Grosskreutz’s story. As per the above link:
Also:
As it happens, the tourniquet and bandages he was carrying turned out to come in very handy indeed; otherwise he might not have survived and we’d only have the representation of him as a violent criminal to go by.
If the person who shot can show they were justified in shooting, then whoever forcibly took his rifle could be charged with 943.32 (Robbery).
One can possess a handgun at 18 in Wisconsin and open carry it at that age as well. You do not need a license to open carry. OC is protected by the state constitution and recognized as legal by state statutes. Cannot receive a concealed weapons license until age 21 however one can carry concealed on ones own land, residence, or place of business without a CCW license, this includes 18-20 year olds. You cannot conceal in a vehicle unless you have a CCW license. This includes having it in the glove box or center console.
Wisconsin does not issue licenses to non-residents.
The tricky part is school zones. If you carry within 1000 feet of a school you are required to have a CCW license even if you are open carrying. However, as long as you don’t actually go on the grounds itself the violation is only a Class B forfeiture which is not a criminal charge.
The entire licensure thing is ridiculous. You can freely carry a gun around in the open but if you cover it up you need a license? How absurd!
Rittenhouse was 17 at the time and could not legally posses a handgun in Wisconsin. Hence the rifle.
I think the rationale is that if the weapon is carried openly everyone around the person is aware of the potential threat, but only trustworthy people can be allowed to carry a concealed weapon. You’re correct in that it doesn’t seem to make that much sense.
Well, they could have but not everyone holding a gun is looking for any excuse to open fire. Some people would rather not shoot another human being and may hesitant to do so unless certain there is no other way to resolve a problem.
I have a friend who was armed when someone physically grabbed him and attempted to rob him. He opted to hit the guy over the head to disable him rather than open fire, although he could have easily done so and it would have been more clearly self-defense than what Rittenhouse did, with no ambiguity.
The other thing is that if you fire at someone in a crowd and miss you’re very likely to hit someone else in that crowd. Someone you might not want to hit, or have a reason to shoot.
So… refraining from shooting, even if you can, is sometimes the moral and rational thing to do, or at least a defensible thing to do, and not “public gun fondling”.
I wasn’t there and I certainly haven’t seen all the evidence here. I’ll wait for what the jury decides.
In the case of my friend - he has worked in some extremely bad neighborhoods where he had encountered people with guns intent on harming him. He’s inclined to respond to a gun pointed at him with a gun of his own, but not always inclined to escalate a non-gun situation to one with a gun.
A LOT of Americans go around armed in a manner I, personally, find unnecessary.
I suspect the ‘it’ we are discussing is different. The ‘it’ I was referring to was the concept of a right to keep and bear arms, and exercising that right. I suspect the ‘it’ you and others are referring to has to do with the perception that gun violence is massively out of control but that we have gotten desensitized to it. I think that’s incorrect.
Anyway, had a long post to respond to this, but reading through it I think it’s a hijack from the OP so not going to post that. I’ll leave it that I disagree with your assertions and concede that you will definitely disagree with mine and move on.
