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Does it? Below someone said that because Foster had his gun angled down, but could have pointed it directly at Perry and fired in an instant that Perry was correct to have felt threatened. But we have video of Rittenhouse wandering around gun pointed low where he also could have brought it up and fired at any of the people around him.
If one of those is a threat then surely the other is, even if we removed them from protest situations and just had them standing on the street minding their own business.
Now i'd say neither should really be taken as a threat in and of themselves granted carrying the rifle around is legal. Because it would mean that we have a tension where a legal activity also grants enough of a threat to createthe right to legal lethal self-defence, which just seems problematicly circular.
I'll point to Cornered Cat for a summary that's focused on a not-lawyers-not-legal-advise, but the tripod of ability-opportunity-jeopardy is common to a much broader ethos among Red Tribers. Someone being physically able to harm you can't be a threat on its own, or everyone from a police officer to a car driver to a stick holder is cause for justifiable self-defense. Someone who says they'll hurt you can't be a threat on its own, or a trash-talking Call of Duty player would be justifiable self-defense. It's the combination of both that make for justifiable self-defense.
I think the situation for Perry is a lot more unclear, not least of all because of the low quality of all available video. But having people beating on your car doors and windows is a lot closer on jeopardy than a rando giving out bandaids (as, importantly, was Perry's driving!). Maybe not enough, and I'm disappointed that neither Abbot nor the parole board seem interested in explaining the evidence they found so compelling. But enough that it seems to be a big missing factor in a lot of the discussions and comparisons.
((That said, in turn, Rittenhouse is an obscenely good shoot for reasons that have been covered elsewhere; he set a standard that is wildly above the minimum for lawful self-defense.))
Right, its quite possible Foster was threatening Perry. Or even he was about to shoot him. It's just nowhere near as clear as Rittenhouse and just angling your gun down as you would anyway can't be as clearly dispositive.
I think Foster was stupid for bring a rifle at all, but thats neither here nor there.
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@The_Nybbler is right. You are trying to tie these cases together with some sort of general principle that falls apart the second you tug at it.
Rittenhouse was running away. All his pursuers had to do was let him go.
No, before that, when he was walking around, gun pointed slightly down. That was the focus of the prosecution that he was causing people to feel threatened, which was the contention on why Rosenbaum may have felt threatened and charged Rittenhouse and thus had a self defence claim.
If that is all it takes then Rittenhouse was clearly threatening all the people he walked past. My contention is that is probably not true for either Rittenhouse or Foster.
The problem is the link you're smuggling in between "feeling threatened" and "charging." Not "shoving someone away from you" or "running away" or "hiding" but "charging". Actively running towards the person who you think is threatening you.
As far as I understand it from our very long threads back in the day the law in Wisconsin doesn't specify you have to defend yourself in the smartest way. If someone points a gun at you, running may well be the smart play, but if you choose to fight, you still can claim self defense. That is why the prosecution were trying to establish Rosenbaum had the gun pointed at him prior to him charging.
IF Rittenhouse had openly threatened Rosenbaum, charging him would have been legally permissible, though stupid.
This is a common and extremely perverse pattern in prosecutions of self-defense cases, as well as in the general discourse.
At this point in the altercation, Rosenbaum had chased a fleeing Rittenhouse a considerable distance, and then cornered him. With no further retreat available, Rittenhouse turned and pointed his gun, hoping that Rosenbaum would stop. When Rosenbaum instead charged him, he fired.
As I understand it, the prosecution's claim is that if he were legitimately in fear of his life, he would have fired immediately, rather than trying to warn Rosenbaum off. That makes his threat illegitimate and thus gives Rosenbaum a right to self-defense against him, which he exercised by lunging at Rittenhouse.
This is not how it is supposed to work. Rosenbaum chasing Rittenhouse is an illegitimate threat, and cornering him is an illegitimate threat. Rosenbaum is very clearly the aggressor, and Rittenhouse is very clearly in a position of legitimate self-defense. Pointing his gun at Rosenbaum is a threat, but it is a legitimate threat, because all three elements necessary to establish the legitimate use of self-defense very clearly exist: Ability, Opportunity, and Jeopardy. Giving an aggressor a last chance to back down or surrender before employing lethal force is not supposed to invalidate a self-defense claim, and the prosecution's attempt to do so is appalling.
Compare the Arbury case.
Arbury was clearly a case of self-defense because he was clearly not the aggressor: his attackers had no reason to consider him threatening when they initiated their attack, and he retreated from them until cornered. Rosenbaum was the aggressor for the exact same reason that Arbury's attackers were, because he illegitimately pursued and forced an altercation with no plausible justification. In the case of both Arbury and Rittenhouse, assuming that they did nothing to provoke their attackers, retreat should not have been necessary, and they would have been entirely within their rights to shoot their attackers on the spot. Still, to the extent that circumstances may have been ambiguous, the fact that they retreated until their attackers cornered them and forced an altercation should make their claim to self-defense immutable.
Unfortunately, that's not the way it actually works out. Motivated prosecutors and commentators routinely play the salami-slicing game with self-defense cases. It should be obvious that if you are justified in shooting an attacker outright, you should also be justified in pointing a gun at them in warning of the impending shot, provided the situation is favorable enough to leave you the option of a pause. And yet it's common to see this game played, where anything other than an immediate shot fired is used as evidence that the shooter wasn't really in danger, because they had enough time to try for a warning. Alternatively, if the shooter fires immediately, prosecutors can ask why they didn't give a warning first. What it comes down to is that some people don't believe legitimate self defense actually exists, and will twist the facts however hard they must to achieve their desired result.
Well they claimed that Rittenhouse pointed his gun at Rosenbaum twice, once to trigger Rosenbaum's charge and then once during (after/during fleeing).
If the first was true (and this is a big if of course!) then Rosenbaum charging Rittenhouse in the first place was legitimate self-defence. Then Rittenhouse fleeing may have "reset" that, but then pointing his gun at him again again counted as a threat.
In fact its possible Rosenbaum started with the one having the self-defence right (again only if Rittenhouse did point his gun at him first with no provocation) then lost that right when Rittenhouse fled, and Rittenhouse gained it when Rosenbaum kept chasing him.
And that is why although I think Rittenhouse being acquitted was correct, I think him being brought to trial was reasonable. Whether he was the one who kicked off the encounter is potentially the matter of a couple of seconds of time based upon Rosenbaum yelling about not pointing his gun at him. And being based on what a "reasonable" person would have felt such that I think a jury of peers not DAs or cops should be making that determination. Especially when you look at cases like Arbury where they were like, no chasing someone down with guns and trucks seems reasonable to us. No charges!
Having DA's and judges and the like be elected positions and so explicitly partisan seems like a big problem to me. Not sure how you can have a blind justice when they have to keep peeking to see who is voting for them. But that horse has left the stable, won the Kentucky derby three times and retired.
The prosecution didn't have any evidence of Rittenhouse pointing a gun at Rosenbaum before Rosenbaum chased him. They have no witnesses saying so; they based their claim, made in closing arguments, on a video which doesn't actually show that. They made the claim not because it was reasonable, but because they needed something to get a conviction.
Further, even if this had happened, Wisconsin law is pretty clear: "The privilege lost by provocation may be regained if the actor in good faith withdraws from the fight and gives adequate notice thereof to his or her assailant." Running away clearly satisfies that.
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Foster was in a mob of angry people surrounding Perry's car. He wasn't just off in the distance with a gun at the time he was shot.
Each of these cases really needs to be examined on its own merits.
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Even if that were so, and I can find no evidence it is the case, then by running away Rittenhouse terminated the confrontation and any justification for use of force against him.
I would agree with you. Though I think Rittenhouse did himself no favors in his testimony because he said as Rosenbaum charged him, he did point the gun at him to try and scare him off. Then ran, when he kept charging, then shot him when he was getting close. Had the jury felt he HAD initially threatened Rosenbaum, the second (admitted) threat might have been viewed to show that Rosenbaum might have believed Rittenhouse would have got more distance then turned the gun on him again. A podcast I was listening to at the time was concerned he had just given them a reason to convict. Though that turned out not to be the case of course.
Rosenbaum was i think unstable, and looking for trouble, so whether Rittenhouse did have his barrel angled somewhere near him was probably the excuse he was looking for.
This is what Rittenhouse says in direct testimony:
On cross-examination he's asked about the video by the prosecutor, Binger:
This was during the chase, not before it. Rittenhouse (by his own testimony, which was not contradicted by other testimony) pointed the gun at Rosenbloom once; Rosenbloom was not deterred so Rittenhouse shot him. Rittenhouse did not run, point the gun at Rosenbloom, run again, and then turn and shoot him. He ran, pointed the gun at Rosenbloom, and then shot him.
It is contradicted by what the video shows though. https://youtube.com/watch?v=BEbcLqBE-ts&t=14360
From 3:59:20 when they start, Rittenhouse is already running away. The bag gets thrown at 3:59:21. By 3:59:23 Rittenhouse has turned and raises his gun. The persecutor then asks at this point you have turned around and are pointing you weapon at Mr Rosenbaum. Rittenhouse says correct. Then they continue the video and we see Rittenhouse turn back around and continue to run. Then at 3:59:46 (because the pause the video they are watching for a bit) they reach the cars and Rittenhouse (presumably feeling boxed in) turns again as Rosenbaum lunges at him and fires.
The video is clear at this point. Rittenhouse points his gun at Rosenbaum twice. The second time is when he shoots him. Rittenhouse agrees with that series of events. The prosecution claims he pointed the gun at Rosenbaum THREE times, the first time being the movement he does with his arms after he puts down the fire extinguisher, the one that is extremely blurry and hard to see and happens before this part of the video. That one Rittenhouse claims is not correct. You can see that on the video starting at 3:55:14.
I'm not disputing here to say you are wrong about Rittenhouse in toto, but you are wrong about the specific series of events here. And that is why (referencing your other post) I am not sure Rittenhouse does give adequate notice of his withdrawal (assuming he did provoke the incident), he is running for about 10 seconds and in those 10 seconds he has the gun pointed at Rosenbaum twice. If Rittenhouse had actually threatened Rosenbaum, I think it is plausible the jury would not have felt this counted as a good faith retreat.
But I don't think the evidence did prove that he provoked the incident in the first place just to be clear. The reason the prosecution point to this is because at an earlier confrontation what set Rosenbaum off (where he yells "shoot me nigga") is he claims someone pointed their gun at him where Rittenhouse was there with another man.
As a point of interest, this did not happen as described.
The earlier confrontation where Rosenbaum engages in unhinged screaming was at the gas station. There's a man in a green shirt with an AR on a sling on the opposite side of the argument from Rosenbaum, but despite several visual points of similarity, that wasn't Rittenhouse. You can see this most clearly by looking below the waist--from what I recall, Rittenhouse was wearing khaki cargo shorts, and the man at the gas station was wearing long black (or at least dark) pants. There are a couple of other minor visual distinctions--I want to say the guy at the gas station was several inches taller than Rittenhouse--but the pants difference is the easiest to verify.
I don't know for sure if it was Rittenhouse, but Rittenhouse was wearing dark trousers of some sort (blue jeans maybe?) not khaki cargo shorts.
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OK, looking at the video, that looks correct. Rittenhouse is running from Rosenbaum, turns and points his gun at Rosenbaum, turns away and runs further, is blocked, turns and fires. This isn't clear in the testimony but it would have made sense to the jury seeing the video at the same time.
Right, and that is where I am not sure if that would count as withdrawing and giving adequate notice, if it had come down to whether or not he was trying to disengage in good faith. It happens very quickly, and I assume the adequate notice clause is to avoid people baiting someone into attacking them, taking a couple of steps back in a couple of seconds and then claiming they were disengaged. You have to give the person time to understand your position has changed, and turning back to point the gun at Rosenbaum again could be seen as renewing the threat.
In the end though I agree it doesn't matter, as the prosecution was not able to show that Rittenhouse had actually threatened Rosenbaum in the first place, so the rest of the discussion is basically academic. All he had to so was satisfy the minimum of an attempt to retreat in order to not trigger the failure to retreat part of the law. And that, the video clearly shows. Arguably he could have fired the first time and that still would have been satisfied.
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The comment was that Foster had his gun angled down, from a standing position, which did point it at Perry, who was sitting in a car. Foster was also advancing on him while doing this. Rittenhouse did not point his gun at anyone until immediately before shooting, and he ran away rather than advancing.
It is difficult to overstate how absurdly perfect Rittenhouse's actions were, and how minimal the ambiguity was due to the abundance of clear video evidence. The fact that he was still charged and tried for murder despite the well-established facts was profoundly radicalizing for me, and I imagine for many other Reds. Rittenhouse should not be accepted as a minimum standard for what legitimate self-defense looks like. He is an example of how even complete, obvious, absolute innocence will not be accepted by the Blues as a tribe.
Carrying a rifle is not a threat. Aiming a rifle at someone while advancing on them, while they are already being illegally assaulted by your companions, is a threat. If there is ambiguity here, it seems to me that it is not coming from the facts but rather from a tribal tendency to refuse those facts when they are inconvenient.
I'm given to understand that other motorists reported that Foster threatened them with his rifle previously. If that were the case, would you agree that it undermines a claim that his actions were legitimate?
But if you can't have your rifle pointed down, because that threatens a person seated below you, then that means the general freedom to open carry a rifle is severely circumscribed. In a city there will always be cars around.
In fact in the hours that Rittenhouse was walking around we have images him of gun angled down walking past an occupied car. If that is enough to trigger threat then the occupant could have shot him!
My point is that on its own should be ok. If it is ok to open carry a rifle then we must accept some people will have it angled towards them. Rittenhouse in the image has his gun pointed at the legs of the man next to him. Unless you are always pointing your gun directly vertically down, its just a statisical certainty. So if open carrying rifles is legal, then that cannot be the standard.
You can legally in Texas walk up to a car with a rifle open carried. The question is does that mean when doing the safe thing, and pointing it down, you are automatically threatening the occupant because you could shoot them in seconds? I say the answer logically has to be no, in order for the legal carry right to make any sense.
Now to be clear that does not mean Foster wasn't actually threatening Perry! He may well of been and certainly previous testimony might make that more likely. But it can't come solely from walking towards an occupied vehicle with your gun angled down. Because that is I am given to understand (and as Rittenhouse did!) the safer way to point it. Is he supposed to raise it? Because that seems more likely to trigger a response. If open carrying is legal you can walk towards people legally, you can walk past them, you can ealk up to their car window and knock on it. You can ask them for the time or pet their dog.
My point is not that Foster was not threatening Perry, but that the description of WHY it was a threat seems biased. If Perry was threatened it was not because the gun was simply angled down and he is lower, it has to be because it was actively pointed at him. That was the determination in the Rittenhouse trial, that merely turning with your gun angled down such that it is passing a trajectory where you could shoot someone can't count as being actively threatened so Rosenbaum could not have been defending himself. Whether the gun is pointing at your leg or your body because you are sitting down doesn't matter.
If we want to claim that Perry was legally threatened then it has to be because Foster was aiming at him. Not just holding the gun in his general direction. And the problem is, from the images we have we can't see that, which is why Nybbler has to fall back to the gun being angled down being a threat because that is all we can make out. He is inflating the level of evidence we have. Again to be clear it is entirely possible Foster was pointing his gun right at Perry. And if so Perry would be justified in seeing that as a threat. Likewise in a state where open carry of rifles is not permitted maybe the walking towards you carrying a rifle pointed close to you might be a threat. But if you are going to legalize open carry of long arms, they WILL be angled towards people at some point (seriously go watch the pre-shooting footage of Kenosha, particularly when some of the "militia" are standing and walking together, their barrels are angled down but pass trajectories of peoples legs all the time) and if that legally counts as a threat, there is a serious mismatch, that risks inciting incidents. (Assuming we are allowing open carry, I don't think it should count for the record.) That is true even if Foster was about to shoot Perry in cold blood (and he might have been!).
I'm not complaining that people are defending Perry. More that they are pitching certainties or potentially reasonable things as absolute proof. Such that there is no chance the jury was actually correct.
To be clear, just as I think it was dumb of Rittenhouse to be wandering around a protest with a rifle regardless of whether he did anything legally wrong, then Foster was just as stupid, possibly more so. I don't think its a huge loss he got shot. Though I am sure as it always is it is a loss to his family. Attending protests has risk, attending openly armed inflates the risk that someone will take exception. Possibly Rittenhouse is only alive because Rosenbaum was not armed. And in the US, that is not a good gamble, as Foster perhaps learned...well briefly.
Also I keep typing Genosha instead of Kenosha, so if any made it through, I apologise.
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I really really don't want to engage in 'chan' behavior, so I'm going to try to write something more than just pointing at your paragraph and saying 'this'. But seriously, this.
The more I found out about the Rittenhouse case, the more I felt that someone really needed to give that kid a medal. Running away from attackers at every turn, only firing in the last possible resort, firing the fewest number of shots possible to end the threat, with nigh-immaculate aim at every step (e.g., shooting the bicep of a man pointing a handgun at him), and with precisely zero bystander casualties. He did everything right.
Personally, I felt that Rittenhouse would have been a prime example for progressives to use, to persuade conservatives towards a greater skepticism of police and especially of prosecutors. Something like:
That's a lay-up, and now we can have a conversation about prosecutorial discretion, qualified/absolute immunity, and 'anarcho-tyranny' -- reforms far more palatable and meaningful than 'defund the police'. But no, we had to have a conversation about how Rittenhouse crossed state lines (seriously, how was that the major talking point?) or how he shot three black guys (two of the three were white, and the third's identity only became public knowledge months later).
The point has never been skepticism of police, and especially of prosecutors. The point, at least for the largest bloc of the Democratic coalition, was that the police hate black people. I suspect many on the center-left who boosted these ideas, especially the elite ones, would be shocked to encounter police in a negative interaction. Many middle-class+ white people have no fear of police. And somewhat ironically, it was these types who boosted "defund the police."
Because their history of no or positive interactions with police contrasted with the stories they hear from civil rights activists about black interactions with police, they assumed the problem really must be racist police. They assume it was not a broader problem of police misconduct, necessitating the racially-sensitive reforms they were told were necessary by activists. (And there's also a reason these were the people who turned immediately from defund the police as soon as even the slightest crime problem emerged.) This is why something as mainstream as Family Guy had the skin color police chart as a gag. This is "common knowledge," really a common belief.
There is a contingent of further-left people who hate police more generally, from anarchists to activists. This comes either from ideology or experience. And there's also a group of white conservatives and libertarians who are incredibly skeptical of police, and hate things like no-knock raids. This could form a coalition for real, enduring police reform if reform were made as a government power issue, not a racial issue. But it's been massively polarized along racial and tribal lines, and I now know people with thin blue line stickers on their trucks who hate the police and think they're bumbling idiots who are having a good day if they're just being stupid, not malicious. You had natural allies and you alienated them, making them believe your reform proposals were a call for literal anarchy. The "fiery but mostly peaceful" protests didn't help one bit. And I'll say one thing about libertarians, at least they aren't anarchists.
I read an article by a black activist once, who was frustrated that, despite cases in which white people were mistreated by police, there was no large contingent of white people won over to the police reform cause. "Don't you care that police are going after you guys too?" I recall him asking, to paraphrase.
And I wanted to scream at him: this is because for seven million years you've been screaming at the top of your lungs: "This is a Black Issue! This is a Black Issue! The racist cops hate us! Our equal rights are being violated! This is a legacy of slavery! White people could never understand what we're going through! You can never understand how it is to be mistreated by the police as we have been!"
And white people, especially those inclined to sympathy for the plight of African-Americans, took you at your word. Negative white interactions with police don't register to them, because the civil rights movement has spent forever describing the problems with policing as a racial issue, not a broader issue with police misconduct. The bailey of BLM, or at least the cry from terrified activists on Twitter, was "Black people are being hunted down like escaped slaves by police and systematically murdered." This is decidedly not a message conducive to expressing police reform as a cross-racial issue, especially when the rallying cry was "Black Lives Matter" and not "Police Misconduct Matters," and even "All Lives Matter" was considered an insult. The goal was "centering the Black experience of mistreatment," not talking about the issue as something that could, even in theory, impact whites. What has been sowed is being reaped.
Police reform and accountability would be a winning issue in the US if the left would stop making it exclusively a racialized issue and the right would acknowledge that at least some police corruption hits black people worst.
But hey, at least we have more body cams.
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Any time during before, during, or after the trial the Blues would smear Rittenhouse as stupid or immature my eyes would pop out of my skull. The boy handled himself in a crisis situation with outstanding discipline. Those who criticized him would rather our young men be locked in their rooms playing xbox and masturbating than defending their communities from outside invaders.
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