“Most of the time no one gets shot” is not a reassurance, particularly in a country where mass shootings are a regular occurrence.
You can choose the level of fear you want to live in. The percentages on being shot by an AR-15 wielding person in the United States are insanely low.
“Why, the blood scarcely comes up to my ankles!”
Seems to me that the people who feel the need to walk around with an AR-15 are the ones living in fear. The rest of us live in reality.
You don’t live in reality if you think you live in a country where it’s normal to go into a panic because someone has a gun. Or use that as a justification for Rosenbaum attacking Rittenhouse.
You don’t live in reality if you think you live in a country where it’s normal to go around with a rifle held at low ready.
I had a friend in high school from the white Chicago bungalow belt. In 1968 his older brothers and their friends had loaded up their car with firearms and headed to the South Side for the MLK Jr assassination riots. However, the police had set up roadblocks and the guns were confiscated and the young idiots would share a very overworked toilet while awaiting for arraignment.
Not so the Keystone Kenosha Kops 53 years later.
Also the rate of rifle homicides, as per 2019 FBI data, would come out to around 0.1 in 100,000. You have bigger things to worry about.
And yet we excuse many, many police (and some civilian) shootings merely on the basis of the shooter thinking the deceased had a gun or other weapon. You may recall one example being the reason for the protest in the first place.
Black gun-rights groups have started open-carry marches at anti-racism protests (yahoo.com)
Look at the picture in that article–that group went all over the country in the last couple of years, with hundreds of them fully armed and open carrying. I don’t believe there have been any shooting incidents involving them at all.
Here’s video of a large armed group that was at the Michigan capitol in 2017:
Here’s a large armed rally of gun owners that occurred in Richmond, VA:
Thousands of armed protesters turn out for Trump-supported gun rally (yahoo.com)
There is nothing that notable about what Rittenhouse did prior to shooting Rosenbaum. The shooting is what was rare and unusual, not the carrying.
Clearly, you are not familiar with the ‘cop shot by wallet or cell phone’ statistics!
Well…
Only three people wounded! Practically a church picnic!
Another interesting excerpt from that article (bolding mine):
Hmm…
Point remains, these guys and guys like them have been doing this all over the country. No one ever felt the need to charge one of them for no reason until Rosenbaum did with Rittenhouse. The idea that Rosenbaum was acting reasonably is not supported by the evidence.
That point only remains if what they were doing compares to what Rittenhouse was doing.
Rosenbaum may well have had a valid reason to assume there was an active shooter and that it was Rittenhouse.
We have zero evidence he had a valid reason to assume that. We have decent amount of evidence Rosenbaum was the unhinged aggressor. This is the weird narrative you guys keep trying to promote, that somehow Rittenhouse having a gun caused him to be attacked. There is little real-world evidence to suggest that is the normal reaction to armed protesters in the United States, and ample evidence that is not the normal reaction.
Rittenhouse bringing the gun certainly is why Rosenbaum is dead, but there is no evidence any of us have that suggests that it is the reason Rosenbaum attacked Rittenhouse. Nor is there any evidence at all that it would be “the norm” for someone to attack an armed protester because they were armed, there have simply been too many large-scale armed protests where such things do not regularly occur, for it to be suggested that is the normal behavior.
Not just “having a gun” - that’s the weird oversimplified narrative you guys keep trying to promote. What he was doing with the gun and what else was happening around them is important too. Context matters.
(Also: are we handwaving away the three people shot in the article you posted as an example of “no shooting incidents”? Cool. Cool cool cool.)
Good to know that, in this case, not just being armed but open carrying a long gun offered no real protection from being assaulted!
Generally I’m in favor of carry, but I agree that low ready is the equivalent of holding a pistol in your hand with the muzzle pointed at the ground. It calls into question the dividing line between carry and what is called brandishing in some states and fifth-degree assault in MN.
I don’t think you could easily demonstrate brandishing from the way he was carrying the weapon, no.
First of all I want to thank you for the detailed post. It helps me understand your thinking on the matter. Rather than continuing to argue the individual points, I’ll just briefly explain why I think we just have to agree to disagree on this.
Most of those things you listed have in fact been illegal at various times and places. And moreover, in most cases they would have survived judicial scrutiny in the time periods in which such laws were enacted. Times change, and the meaning of certain broad Constitutional provisions also changes with the times. This more or less by definition supports the contention that such provisions are “vague and non-specific”, but if you like, you can use a descriptor like “broad and subject to multiple different interpretations”.
There are two principal points I tried to make in the examples I cited to support this. One is the self-evident fact that a great many of these contentious decisions of the Supreme Court are very often split along ideological lines. So, far from the Constitution allegedly supporting certain non-enumerated principles, in a great many cases you have approximately half the Court saying that it does and the other half saying that it doesn’t. The second point I tried to make, which I would think is about equally self-evident, is that at different times the Court would have ruled very differently on specific issues of alleged non-enumerated rights, based on societal norms at the time and possibly also based on the prevailing ideology of the dominant justices. One doesn’t have to go back very far to envision a time when same-sex marriage, for instance, would not only have been denied by the Supreme Court in likely a unanimous vote, but that ruling would have been overwhelmingly supported by the population.
So I find it unpersuasive that any such alleged non-enumerated right could be claimed to be implicit in some Bill of Rights provision with such certainty that one could be confident it would be upheld by the SCOTUS. In so many cases it’s totally a toss-up.
Yeah, most of my life “open carry” when in town had usually meant slung over your shoulder or holstered.
But, meanwhile, from our pals over at the NY Post…