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Comment by tarsinge | Hacker News Reader

I am not American and I didn’t follow these events but sorry for me after watching that video it’s still complicated: the self-defense seems justified, but the initial issue of protecting property with guns is not: material possession and private property is not on the same level as human life. I understand a law allows it in that state hence the jury logical decision, but that doesn’t make it right, just legal. Had he not posed with an assault rifle in the first place two people would not be dead today, he is still morally responsible for that to me. So in the end I surprisingly understand Facebook choice.

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The path from protecting property to protecting lives might be shorter than one wants to believe. People usually are not destroying property of others because its moral compared to taking lives, they do so because they left the morals of our society behind in the first place. Wanna take a bet that the guy running at you and screaming just want to tear your shirt?

>Had he not posed with an assault rifle in the first place two people would not be dead today

Had the victim not defended himself the offender could still offend today. I don't understand this victim-blaming, I really don't. If I see a guy with a rifle protecting his property, somehow its his fault I get shot after I charge at him?

I think you miss my point. I’m not questioning the self-defense, it’s pretty clear in the video, but the moral responsibility of someone protecting a property by being in the street with a rifle in the first place (I’m not talking about personal home invasion here).

Agree 100%. Many riots / burning of buildings / lootings were allowed while media spurred them on and called them peaceful protests. Police in many cities gave up on enforcement.

In those scenarios the state no longer has a monopoly on violence.

We believe also that you're responsible for your own actions. That include sthe guys who attacked him while holding the gun. It is also entirely stupid to attack a person with a gun rather than backing away slowly and moving elsewhere. You won't win in the situation 99/100 times so you should extract yourself from the situation. He was not breaking the law by being there with a gun. If he was this court trial would have had a completely different verdict. As with most things in life there are two sides to the same story and two sets of responsibility and expectations.

That’s what separates America from many places. While you say to the property owner, “property is not worth a human life”. We say to the burglar/arsonist, “is property worth [your] human life?”

Also assault rifle isn’t a thing. The term is a made up classification of a weapon.

Assault rifles are certainly a thing, both in the descriptive sense -- everyone knows what the word refers to -- and in the prescriptive sense -- various armies including the US have or had classifications that defined it as a term for selective-fire weapons that fire an intermediate power cartridge like 5.56mm or Russian 7.62x39mm.

A caliber doesn't make an "assault rifle". I can buy a hunting rifle in those calibers as well. In the USA there is no -legal- definition of an assault rifle, it is a made up term to scare people. A semi auto shot gun, hunting rifle, and pistol are all easily within 90% as dangerous as an "assault rifle". Do those get banned as well? I think that's why people say it's ludicrous to say "we just want to ban assault rifles" because we all know what comes after that if you give in to that logic.

As a veteran of the US Marine Corps, I want to clarify this a bit for people.

Yes, caliber does not make an Assault Rifle.

No, it's not a, "made up term."

Shotguns, hunting rifles and pistols are optimized for specific activities and generally become less effective as the circumstances diverge from that optimized range or shooting position.

This makes them less ideal for killing humans everywhere we are found.

Assault rifles are optimized for human to human combat.

They are optimized to deliver a large number effective rounds down range, from a variety of positions at a variety of distances.

These tools are far more effective and efficient at killing human beings over an extended duration firefight in arbitrary circumstances.

It's the shape, flexibility and effectiveness of the platform that we're referring to when we say, "Assault Rifle."

Please don't muddy the waters here simply because the US legal system isn't able to overcome NRA bullshit.

The far left is using “assault rifle” as a scare tactic to get their foot in the door. They absolutely want to ban all guns from civilian hands. That's why I push back. I would be what most people call a liberal (socially and economically), but I also support the Second Amendment, so I know why the NRA pushes back on this non-legal definition. Plain old pistols, rifles, and shotguns kill FAR more people in a given year than assault rifles, so why isn't there push back on those? Because the anti-gun left wants a precedent to take guns and “assault rifle” demonization is one prong of that attack. So I will continue to "muddy" the waters. I guarantee you I have as much experience with guns as you as I have been around them and used them and studied them since I was a youth, so I guess there's that appeal to authority as well much like your own.

There are hunting rifles, and there are sport rifles.

>They are optimized to deliver a large number effective rounds down range, from a variety of positions at a variety of distances.

This is precisely where a blanket term like “assault rifle” becomes pretty impossible to specifically define, and consequently regulate.

>large number effective rounds down range

Based on this comment, you’re referring caliber? And capacity? And perhaps action? So what about a semi-auto 5.56 with a pencil barrel and a 5 round magazine? Still an “assault weapon?”

>from a variety of positions at a variety of distances

How would you interpret this into characteristics of a rifle? Does this mean it has to have a folding bipod? It has to be under a certain weight? *Any* rifle can be more or less effective at a variety of ranges. The cartridge and shooter have more influence over that criteria than the rifle.

>It's the shape, flexibility and effectiveness of the platform

This is feels territory. Because none of these are concrete characteristics inherit to this claim. Define “effective”, or define “ineffective”. Tell me how the “shape” would designate or exclude one specific rifle over another…

This isn't a compelling argument. Those "hunting rifles" are the designs that killed millions from 1910-1950 (probably more than any small arm before or after).

In the US, there are something like 3-400 rifle shootings compared to 40-50,000 pistol shootings. When you look up mass shootings, you'll see pistols used all the time because 20-30 rounds in a tiny pistol are about as lethal as 20-30 rounds in a rifle at close range against unarmored targets while being TONS more maneuverable.

Tavor x95 is 26.4" with a 15.5" barrel. The M1 carbine (already cut down from the M16) is 7.5" longer despite having a shorter 14.5" barrel and although the weight is technically the same, the Tavor seems 2-3x lighter because the weight is right next to the body rather than a foot away.

Tavor x95 Carbine (22.5" long) is almost a foot shorter and 3/4 lb lighter than the M4 carbine. The M4 CQRB blinds the shooter in dark rooms and loses tons of stopping power with the 10" barrel, but is still a quarter-pound heavier and 3.5" longer. Those inches have a huge impact on time to target which is critical indoors.

Despite this, countries like Canada which ban the "assault rifles" like the AR-15 still allow the Tavor. It's not about the style of rifle.

I'd also put forward that if efficiency were the goal, 6.5 Grendel would be used instead of 5.56 as it has almost 2x the momentum, 20% more kinetic energy, and 4x lower ballistic coefficient while only increasing weight 10-15% (still half the weight of 7.62).

The US has tried to move away from the AR-15 platform numerous times (and a ton of special forces who have the option already have). Each time, they run into the issue where the training costs (hundreds of hours for millions of people), rifle costs, and cost to replace billions of rounds of ammo are just too high despite the efficiency increases.

AR isn't the best. It's just the most pragmatic at the moment.

Given the reactions I’m not sure Americans are uniform on this, also it’s especially puzzling that in a country with Christian roots people would say that (I’m not talking about defending your life, children or home of course).

IMO the attackers value their own life less than the acts they tried to do.

Chiming in at the end here. Assault Rifle IS a thing, being "Select Fire" weapons typically at or above a certain minimum.

The ISSUE in this microcosm of the discussion is the CONFLATION of the terms Assault Rifle" with "Assault Weapon", which a a made up term by people trying to vilify firearms, especially scary black ones.

> Had he not posed with an assault rifle in the first place two people would not be dead today, he is still morally responsible for that to me.

So basically Rittenhouse 'morally accountable' for not foreseeing the unforseeable. How silly.

Rittenhouse attended a protest while legally carrying a firearm. 2020 had seen tens of thousands of people do the same. How many people were forced to fire their guns in self-defense at a protest? I can't think of a single one. Any risk he was incurring would have been remote and purely hypothetical. For that you hold him morally responsible for these men's deaths?

What about the actions of those men who he killed? Unlike Rittenhouse's attendance at the protest, their decision to attack Kyle Rittenhouse was decidedly not legal. Unlike Rittenhouse's choice to attend the protest, which carried only hypothetical danger, his attackers would have had no doubt that attacking a man with a gun carried risks that were neither remote nor hypothetical.

Remember, when conflict seemed imminent, Rittenhouse ran away, attempting to avoid conflict. His attackers chased him down and forced the issue.

Also being not an American, I'm puzzled as to how there is apparently no requirement to report self-defense killings to the police. I guess when they find dead bodies in the street, they just assume it was self defense?

He literally did report it, though. He walked straight down the street to the police and told them he'd just shot people.

Is there any police record? Or any evidence at all that the police heard that?

There is video evidence.

The two police in the vehicle testified during the trial.

So no police report. Got it.

Video evidence and the sworn testimony of two seems like a pretty strong case here.

Entirely misses the point

You asked if there is evidence. There is.

Commenter was replying to the part specifically about a police report. Here is a link that may help you comprehend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29427563

Rittenhouse did turn himself in to the police. He was running towards them to do so, and when the Kenosha police wouldn't listen to him, he went to the police station in another nearby town.

Did he stop and talk to the police or keep going? How long after the shootings did the "police station in another nearby town" occur? Also, whom did the call after his first shooting-- the police or someone else?

He tried to talk to them and they told him to go away. (I know, that seems strange to me too.) He went to the other police station at 1:30 am, about 2 hours after the incident.

The police pepper sprayed him when he got close.

He called his friend who owned the gun. No need to call the police when they were less than a block away. I'd also imagine that 911 was swamped given how so much of the city was being destroyed.

So in America, the police just kinda stand by while "so much of the city was being destroyed" and two people are killed. Wow.

The situation is more involved than that.

The protests were about perceived police brutality.

Cop's view:

A guy had a knife in the seat that they'd seen previously. He was wanted for raping his a woman and was in the process of stealing her van and kidnapping her kids. Even if there were no knife, you don't allow the rapist to get into the deadly weapon and take kids as hostages.

To them, the riots were unjust and a lot of them probably wanted to stop the city burning, but they were told to cordon off the area and basically forbidden from doing anything. At the same time, if they had to use force against a violent rioter, it would be all over the press and that officer would probably be fired. This leaves the armed citizens as the only line of defense (and a line without the police politics). This seems like the reason why they praise them in their interactions.

Politician's view:

The city is run by one family of Democrat politicians. Their party officially supported the riots with the now current Vise-President actually raising funds for the rioters. Going against the mob would not only go against the party, but it would cause the mob to show up at their houses (this happened in other cities) and might even throw their family's dynasty out of power. They didn't care about the part that was burning because it was the poorer parts of the city.

Citizen's view:

The politicians ordered the police to abandon them. They had signs like "we have little children here" in an attempt to keep their families safe (it seems that even having BLM support signs wasn't enough). The businesses were generally either not insured or under-insured. Lots of people worked at those places and were looking at not having a job. Everyone's cars were being demolished or burned. For many of them, everything they spent their entire life working on was ruined in a few hours.

Amed Citizen's view:

We've been hiding in fear for two days now as the police do nothing. If they won't, we will. Today, we're putting a stop to this.

Rioter's view:

I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm? You know... You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds. Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair!”

Wow, America is far more messed up than I had realized previously. Not sure I know of any developed country where armed citizens can simply chose to do that.

Let your cops leave you alone in that situation and you'll see people with bows, bats, slings, staffs, hammers, knives, shields and whatever else.

Humanity is the same everywhere and looking at history shows this to happen every time a local power vacuum is created and mobs begin to rule.

Only in America do cops allow basically The Hunger Games to occur, while they stand by and do nothing

Only in America? That kind of thing happens all over the world every day. What a silly statement.

Not in developed countries it doesn't.

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