• GooseFinger@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Why? The circumstances between the two are very different.

    I feel like a lot of people who hold this opinion are unaware of what actually happened with Rittenhouse. The media painted him as a careless kid who used a gun law loophole to take part in riots, where he committed a mass shooting in a state he didn’t live in and got away with it.

    What actually happened, is that he went to Kenosha (where his Dad lives, like 10 minutes from his Mom’s house),to help protect his family friend’s business, help peaceful people that got hurt during the riot/protests, and to clean messes left by disorderly people like graffiti. Later that night, he tried putting out a fire that rioters started near at a gas station, and they attacked him for doing that. Someone threatened to kill Rittenhouse, started chasing him, cornered him, grabbed his gun, and only then did Rittenhouse shoot him. He then immediately went for the police, but was chased down and attacked by more people, where one clubbed his head and another pulled a handgun on him. He shot and killed one, then shot another but backed off after he was clearly no longer a threat.

    This was textbook self defense. We can discuss whether what he did was intelligent in regards to his own safety, or whether the laws he followed should be changed, but point is, a mob was literally running him down with clear outspoken intention to murder him, and Kyle only defended himself when running away was impossible.

    And he wasn’t charged with 1st degree murder, that’s misinformation. A five second search clearly shows this. He was charged with two counts of homicide, one count of attempted homicide, and two counts of reckless endangerment. These charges have much lower bars than 1st degree murder, yet a jury (who judged him based on real facts, not bullshit media narratives) acquitted him of all of them.

    Edit: He was charged with first degree accounts, the wiki doesn’t state this. However, the jury considered lesser charges and still acquitted. Here’s an NPR article that goes into more detail.

    • ZMonster@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Thanks for this. I knew some of this but for some reason just adopted the “Rittenhouse bad” brain worm. Maybe it was things like how quickly he fell into the arms of the alt-right crowd and seemed to be fine embracing them. Who knows. But thanks for the refresher. I think I needed that.