Can you point to any other riot situation in which a mob chased down someone and, after catching him just calmly pinned him down and waited for the police?
What usually happens in these situations is that the person is taken to the ground and the mob then proceeds to kick and stomp the person until they stop moving, then maybe kick and stomp them a few more times before dispersing, leaving a critically injured or dead person in the street. And they do that to anyone the mob decides to target, not just someone with a gun. Mobs have a mind of their own.
Rittenhouse had every reason to believe that was the fate that awaited him if he did not get away.
A kid, with a gun…who was trying to run away. In fact, a kid, with a gun, who tried to run away before the first shooting.
See, we agree. No one would have said ‘you are under arrest’. They would have just beaten the crap out of him, and if he was lucky he’d have survived. But no one would have formally said he was under arrest, no doubt about that.
You mean anyone who was trying to corner him, like the first guy, right? It didn’t look like the crowd tried to avoid KR at any point, merely that when folks like jump kick guy (I have no idea if he was ever identified btw) tried his awesome flying kick and Rittenhouse pointed a gun at him he backed off, letting rush guy take a shot…who also backed off until the guy with the skateboard actually managed to get in a few licks before being shot and killed. After that, as far as I can tell, you had Rittenhouse shooting the guy with a gun, then successfully getting the fuck out of there (something he’d have been wise to do from the start…i.e. not being there at all would have shown much better judgment) and trying to turn himself in to the cops, though maybe there was more I’m missing.
There have been any number of school shootings and cinema shootings where the perp gives it up, or the crowd disarms the perp. Maybe it’s just me, but I haven’t seen where the crowd disarms an active shooter and then shoots the perp with his own gun. We’re not talking mafiosos fights or gang bangers.
My point being, once you’re the aggressor and become an active shooter, then you have to be disabled and disarmed. No need to execute, and that has not been the standard playbook in all the armed assailant/active shooter situations where the perp is apprehended by the crowd.
Totally true that the crowd sure isn’t going to treat the perp with kid gloves until he is truely and demonstrably out of action and unarmed. And yes every fricking altercation always as a negligible risk the perp hits his head on the sidewalk and dies. But we are talking active shooter.
In KR’s case, if the third guy had actually pulled the trigger and killed KR. Under WI law, it was probably a case of justified defense.
I know if it was me in the situation with an active shooter and had no choice, I would put the perp down as hard as possible with Kenpo Karate skills I learned 40 years ago. Boo fucking hoo. But I would not then take the perps gun and execute him
Just 'cause there is a second amendment and open carry laws, doesn’t mean it is a good idea. Nor does it automatically confer good guy with a gun and justified defense. A good guy with a gun can easily transform into a little man with a gun in his hand with the right triggers.
There is a big difference between the examples you give and what happened…well, there are a number of differences actually, but the biggest one is that this wasn’t just some folks who were watching a movie or going to school, these folks were participating in a protest and, at this stage, it had already started to move into the riot level of protest, especially where Rittenhouse was (which was nowhere near where the police were, where things were still in the relatively peaceful protest stage). I think your spin would be more compelling except there is the video of nearly this entire event, and we can see for ourselves how riled up the crowd was, even before the first shot was taken, let alone in the running fight that eventually lead to another death and another shooting with several other shots fired.
No, we aren’t talking about ‘mafiosos fights or gang bangers’, we are talking about something potentially worse…a large group of riled up and pissed off people. Crowds are notoriously dangerous in these conditions, especially when they have a focus for their anger, which they certainly did. Unless you think that it’s normal and rational for people to charge at someone with a rifle, trying to do flying kicks, hit him with skateboards, and the like.
You are really trying to sell the downplay here, as if large, riled up crowds only hurt someone by accident with ‘negligible risk’, yet I note you aren’t pointing to actual riots as evidence, but at mass shootings, which, this wasn’t. You keep trying to push this incident to that, as if the peaceful crowd suddenly got worked up because someone started randomly shooting, but, again, that’s not what happened. Most of those involved would have seen the original confrontation (i.e., a kid with a gun putting out a dumpster fire and being confronted by a dude who thought that was his personal fire, then said kid pointing his gun at said dude because of threats, said kid with gun trying to run away and being chased, cornered, and said dude being shot).
I agree, it would have been another case of self-defense, and would have been up to Grosskreutz’s lawyers to prove it. I agree it probably would have been deemed self-defense…just like Rittenhouse’s actions were so deemed.
YOU maybe wouldn’t have, though when you are in a large, worked-up crowd it’s hard to say what you would have done. Crowds tend to feed on their own energy and do things that, ordinarily individual people wouldn’t do. Think of all of the accounts of large rioting crowds and what they have done historically. Maybe you would have disarmed the kid, but then what would you have done when someone in the crowd started to really beat him? Would you have defended him until the police arrived…or stood back? What if 3 or 4 people had started working him over? Would you have pointed his gun at them to get them to back off or stood aside? And if pointing the gun wasn’t enough (it didn’t work on Rosenbaum or any of the others after all)? Would you have shot or let the crowd do what they would?
I’d like to see if you have examples of where the crowd takes away a perps gun and then executes the perp. I think that’s fantasy 2nd Amendment territory but would be open to see where it is actually real life. The third guy shot by KR could have just killed him with his pistol, but held his fire and got shot for the effort.
For me personally. I would have disarmed the active shooter by putting him down as hard as necessary if I could have. Then I would call it in and do what I can to keep a crowd blood lust from going. I’ve done that with bar fights FWIW. And no, I would not take his weapon to threaten the crowd. Once the weapon is out of the active shooters hand, then secure it and the crime scene as well as possible until LEO arrives.
I’m old school. Once a perp is truely down, then it’s done. You don’t let someone curb the perp or take his gun and murder him.
Sure, anyone can be killed whenever there are fisticuffs. And a crowd can go wild. But just like the Ahmed Arbery case, it seems to be a widespread belief amongst 2nd Amendment enthusiasts that they will get murdered with their own weapon. I think that is BS and not backed up with real life evidence. If you’ve got some evidence instead of conjecture, please do share.
That wasn’t exactly what I said. But I did a quick Google search on crowds beating someone to death. This was the first hit:
A 40-year-old man was beaten to death by a crowd of people he nearly ran into on Saturday. Melguin Lopez Santos of Los Angeles veered at several groups of people shortly after midnight before a group of his potential victims pulled him from his pickup truck and beat him to death, NBC news reports. “Surrounding patrons attempted to take the driver out of the vehicle, but the driver was able to accelerate and drove his truck into a nearby building,” according to a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department statement. “Patrons again took the driver out of the vehicle, and a physical altercation ensued, at this time, Hawthorne police arrived on scene.” Paramedics tried unsuccessfully to revive him.
Whether they would have taken his gun and shot him or beaten him to death is, basically, all the same. As you can see from reading what I wrote above, I was talking about the crowd beating him to death. There are plenty of examples of this if you want to Google it yourself…the one I provided is simply the first hit and I didn’t really read through it that much nor check the source as, to me, this is something on par with the sky is blue. Crowds, historically, have had minds of their own and often do violent things when worked up. And just watching the video of the events that transpired, the crowd was really, really worked up. You don’t get people trying to chase and bring down someone with a rifle if you are just mildly pissed off. Had someone managed to take the gun away I’m pretty sure the best Rittenhouse could have hoped for was just a major beatdown.
I seriously doubt the gun would have just been left there for evidence…someone would have picked it up, even if they wouldn’t have used it.
That’s fine and I respect that. I would also be old school…once the guy is down and basically immobilized it would be the police’s problem, and I’d want to make sure the dude got to the police alive and intact. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the crowd would go along. By you not taking the gun it means it would have been out of your hands to affect the outcome, which, again, is your right. I can honestly say that I don’t know what I would have done wrt gun. On the one hand, if indeed the crowd was beating the crap out of him to the point of real danger, it would be best to ensure the gun was, at a minimum, secure. On the other hand, taking the gun puts me in danger as well of someone similar happening to me wrt someone in the crowd trying to take it from me. Then there is…what do I do when the crowd really starts working the kid over? Do I act or stand by? It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.
I guess I’m not seeing a lot of distinction here. Ok, so the 2nd Amendment enthusiasts are worried that their guns might be taken from them and used against them. What, exactly, is the difference between that and being beaten to death by the crowd from the perspective of the guy dying? Only thing I can see is being beaten to death is almost certainly going to take longer and be more painful, but YMMV.
I’m fairly certain it’s happened (historically, just about anything involving crowds and guns has happened), but I’m not bothering to search that, mainly because I didn’t make this claim but really because, right now, you’d have to wade through pages of Google hits talking about this or other recent cases to try and find something that isn’t politically charged. I also see this as basically irrelevant. To me, what difference between Rittenhouse’s fear the crowd would take his weapon and kill him with it and them to me more probable outcome where the crowd disarms him and beats him to death or at least severely? Either fear enables self-defense, which was the key part of the trial.
That seems to be the consensus among the legal types I’ve either talked to or seen (including Legal Eagle, who I follow on YouTube), and also seems to my non-lawyer mind the best evidence for. He would, of course, had to have a similar trial and his defense would have had to make a similar case for self-defense, but seems like the outcome would have been similar.