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Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder where the 'we need good guys with guns to stop the bad guys with guns' go when they're talking about Gaige.

He saw Kyle, an active shooter, drew on him to get him to stop shooting people, and so Kyle just gets to shoot him?

EDIT: This flamewar is not worth it (what did I expect in this thread?), but just please try to remember the lessons Batman tries to teach us about vigilante justice (it just encourages more crime by making 'justice' a personal endeavor subject to the follies of the individual).

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Rittenhouse wasn't an 'active shooter' by any stretch of the definition of the word. Further, Grosskreutz knew that Rittenhouse wasn't one because he videod himself running after him asking where he was going, and Rittenhouse responded that he was going to the police. And yes, pointing a gun at someone is threatening their life, which makes shooting them self-defence.

Rittenhouse had just actively shot two people.

Is your argument that he was passive or that guns don’t shoot?

The argument is that he was going to turn himself in. That might be what you meant by passive.

Sure, but we take teenagers (who just shot someone and are RUNNING away) at their word now?

And if you don't, you're justified in being shot while pursuing him?

I only wanted to let you know what the argument was.

You're justified in being shot if you try to physically attack them by repeatedly hitting them in the head and then trying to grab their gun, yes.

As far as everyone knew, Rittenhouse was a shooter (that’s a risk you run carrying a rifle)

What were they supposed to do, let him flee?

Ah yes, the only two options here were to let Rittenhouse flee and to repeatedly bash in his head.

Rittenhouse had shot one person, who had chased him and lunged for his gun, at the time the mob chased after him. He was not aiming his gun at anybody else nor did he fire his gun at anybody else until he was being attacked.

Grosskreutz had chased after him after he had shot Rosenbaum, but Grosskreutz did not witness the shooting himself - none of Rittenhouse's pursuers had. He got close enough to Rittenhouse to ask Rittenhouse where he was running. Rittenhouse doesn't turn around and shoot Grosskreutz, but instead tells Grosskreutz he's going to the police, to which Grosskreutz yells 'stop him'.[0] The fact is, Rittenhouse's pursuers didn't think he was an 'active shooter', they saw that he was running away, and didn't want to let him get away, and were trying to take justice into their own hands. And in fact, if Grosskreutz actually had thought that Rittenhouse were an 'active shooter', why didn't he shoot him right then?

[0]: https://twitter.com/AntifaWatch2/status/1299853616757583872

Did you watch the video? In what world did none of his pursuers not know he had just killed someone? And to be a pedant, he was only drawn on after the second murder, even though they were in close succession.

[0]Mr. Rittenhouse seems to make a phone call and then flees the scene. Several people chase him, some shouting, “That’s the shooter!”

As Mr. Rittenhouse is running, he trips and falls to the ground. He fires four shots as three people rush toward him. One person appears to be hit in the chest and falls to the ground. Another, who is carrying a handgun, is hit in the arm and runs away.

Mr. Rittenhouse’s gunfire is mixed in with the sound of at least 16 other gunshots that ring out during this time.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/us/kyle-rittenhouse-kenos...

> In what world did none of his pursuers not know he had just killed someone?

Didn't say that, I said the pursuers were not a witness to the shooting themselves. That is, they didn't see it happen for themselves. For example, Grosskreutz's story:

> Gaige Grosskreutz testified that he was filming the protest as a legal observer for the American Civil Liberties Union on a Facebook livestream. Shortly before midnight Grosskreutz said he heard gunshots to the south and observed Rittenhouse running in his direction[86] on Sheridan Road.[87] Grosskreutz said he ran alongside Rittenhouse and asked "Hey, what are you doing. You shot somebody?"[86]

> And to be a pedant, he was only drawn on after the second murder, even though they were in close succession.

It wasn't a murder, and it as for 'close succession', that's subjective; Rittenhouse had ran for two blocks after he shot Rosenbaum, and Grosskreutz had already been pursuing Rittenhouse (that's when he recorded the video in the tweet). Grosskreutz would have witnessed Rittenhouse shoot Huber, but he would have also seen Huber slam a skateboard into Rittenhouse's head and attempt to grab his rifle before Rittenhouse had shot Huber since Grosskreutz had been pursuing Rittenhouse prior to this. So 1) Grosskreutz didn't witness Rosenbaum's shooting, 2) Grosskreutz would have witnessed Huber attacking Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse shot Huber. I.e., he would have known nothing about the first shooting, and the second shooting he would have witnessed the entire self-defence case as it happened, giving zero reasonable indication that Rittenhouse was an 'active shooter'.

Cool. I’m not going to convince you, especially not with video you won’t watch, and I guess that’s fine.

Please just try to limit the amount of time you spend encouraging people to show up armed to protests, or even riots if you want to call them that.

Who am I kidding? Never mind.

> especially not with video you won’t watch

Dumb, baseless assumption from you not reading what I wrote correctly. Grosskreutz and the other pursuers didn't personally witness Rittenhouse shoot Rosenbaum. If he had, why did Grosskreutz ask Rittenhouse if he had just shot somebody?

> Please just try to limit the amount of time you spend encouraging people to show up armed to protests, or even riots if you want to call them that.

You're obviously not arguing in good faith.

>Rittenhouse had just actively shot two people.

No he didn't. He had just defended himself against two assailants, while trying to flee. He was never, at any point in time, an "active shooter".

An "active shooter" is "an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area; in most cases, active shooters use firearms and there is no pattern or method to their selection of victims."[0]

He had a pattern of selection. Kyle shot and neutralized those who were trying to kill him (or cause grievious bodily harm). That is, by definition, self-defense, not an "active shooter" event.

[0] https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/active_shooter_booklet.p...

QED.

Trying to flee a crowd that attempted to detain him for shooting someone.

Let's play hypothetical here. School shooter is bullied and hit in a fight. He shoots bully dead and starts running. He then shoots two people tackling him.

Is he not an active shooter?

Why are you doing such mental gymnastics to lionize this kid? You can debate over whether he should go to jail or not, but the reality is he extra-judicially killed 2 people. Doesn't that make you feel weird to defend that, even if you disagree politically with his victims?

Gaige is a convicted felon who was illegally armed with a gun and drove to Kenosha to riot. It is hard to understand how you label him the good guy in this scenario.

Except Kyle wasn't an "active shooter". He shot one person who was attacking him, and then ran away while being chased by a mob. That isn't an active shooter.

For starters, a prerequisite to be a “good guy with a gun”, you need to possess and carry that gun legally, which Gaige did not do. He was a convicted felon, ineligible to possess a gun, much less carry one concealed. However, he was not, and will not be prosecuted for that, almost as if gun control people were not interested in actually controlling illegally possessed guns.

Legalism and moralism are independent concepts.

So, if he was not a convicted felon, would shooting and killing Rittenhouse had been a more or less reasonable thing for him to do?

I don't think that is the main problem. A person can do the right thing even if they so far has done the wrong thing.

The problem here was that he was part of a violent destructive crowd and went even further than the rest of the crowd in attacking an innocent (as judged by the court) guy with a gun.

If you are in a crowd, and an active shooter just killed one or two people in front of you, are you going to sit around and wait for a court to determine that they were legally innocent?

Or would you be completely within your moral rights to defend yourself from the shooter, by any means at your disposal?

In case you weren't aware: Active shooter seems to have a defined meaning and the courts decided he was not. The rest of my comment assumes you were not aware of this and just meant someone who just shot someone else.

Now:

legally it seems in Wisconsin one doesn't have the right to follow after someone and pull a gun on them when they aren't threatening anyone. One does however has a right to shoot if someone attacks with deadly force. If this is a good law or not I'll not discuss - personally I'd prefer if police rounded up and judges handed out some generous penalties to the rioters.

morally, one guy had gone around helping put out fires in a poor neighbourhood targeted by riot tourism while also being friendly towards those as far as possible The others were violent rioters enjoying an opportunity to destroy innocent peoples livelihoods under the cover of supporting the very people they were attacking.

You seem to be missing that when you may be in an active shooter situation, you can't wait for a court to decide whether it is, or isn't one.

Rittenhouse felt threatened, but for some reason, didn't wait for a court to make a determination. The people he shot also felt threatened. And for good reason, given that he killed two of them, in two separate incidents.

If he has the moral right to use lethal force to defend himself against a threat to his person, with imperfect information, without waiting a year for a court to split hairs over who was and was not at fault, so do they. He is incredibly lucky that Grosskreutz gave the question of killing a man more thought than he did.

The relevant legal standard is not “felt threatened”, but that a person must have a reasonable grounds (by objective standards of a reasonable person, not by subjective standards of threat, which might be completely unreasonable) to believe, and in fact believe that there is an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm.

Since Rittenhouse was quite apparently running away, and Grossenkreutz was pursuing him, in no way can a reasonable conclude that Rittenhouse was an imminent threat to Grossenkreutz — if he didn’t pursue him, he’d be completely safe.

> to believe, and in fact believe that there is an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm.

Which any reasonable person in that situation would have believed, with the information available to them at the time.

Had Rittenhouse dropped his gun, he would not have been an imminent threat to the crowd. But he did not. For all anybody on the scene knew, he would start shooting again, as soon as he had a chance to.

Disarming him was one way to remove that imminent threat of death and great bodily harm, which Huber tried to do. Killing him would have been another, which Grosskreutz considered, but did not try to do.

That’s a cool story, but it’s not how law works, so I do not recommend testing this theory.

Which legal theory? The 'wait around to get shot, because it takes three days of deliberation for 12 people to determine whether or not the person running around shooting people in a riot can be defined as an active shooter' theory?

Not waiting around for that determination seems to have worked out pretty well for Rittenhouse. He's both not dead, and a free man.

No, I'd try to retreat first. Unless the person were to aim the gun at me.

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