1/5/2024 0 Comments Riffle jeans![]() It’s a telling response - Rittenhouse’s main worry was his own firearm. “Other than him grabbing my gun, no,” he answered. Binger asked Rittenhouse how he could have believed that - Rosenbaum “didn’t have any weapon of any kind, correct?” In order to claim self-defense as a justification for shooting Rosenbaum, Rittenhouse had to have believed that Rosenbaum posed an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to him. Rittenhouse pointed his gun at Rosenbaum, but the man kept coming. Rittenhouse denies provoking the attack he says that Rosenbaum and another man, Joshua Ziminski, who was armed with a handgun, “ambushed” him, and chased him when he tried to run away. The prosecution says the killing began when Rittenhouse pointed his gun at Joseph Rosenbaum, an unarmed, 36-year-old protester, prompting Rosenbaum to run after him in an effort to stop a potential shooting. Later that night, Rittenhouse left the car dealership and his armed peers and found himself in a crowd of strangers he suspected might be hostile to him. Drew Hernandez, a right-wing internet personality who was covering the demonstrations, testified that when “rioters” spotted the men with guns, “they immediately attempted to agitate them, to try and start some conflict with them.” Rittenhouse and others in his group said they didn’t intend to kill people that night the main reason they brought the big guns, they said, was to deter attacks. He said he’d chosen a military-style rifle over a pistol because he believed he could not legally possess a pistol and, he conceded, in part because the rifle “ looked cool.”īut as many witnesses testified, the rifles weren’t very helpful at all. Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time and a resident of Illinois (his father lived in Kenosha), said he had come with a friend to protect Car Source on the invitation of the owner. One such business was Car Source, an auto dealership with three locations in Kenosha. An unruly mob had descended on private businesses. 25, 2020, had the makings of a classic gun-rights fantasy. The small city erupted in large protests that quickly turned violent and riotous. Near the end of August, a Kenosha police officer shot a Black man named Jacob Blake, leaving him partly paralyzed. ![]() The shootings took place more than a year ago, in the pre-election, post-George Floyd, Covid-soaked summer of 2020. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. This is self-defense as circular reasoning: Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself - he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true.
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