For some reason, the Georgia Legislature has very recently 1) rescinded the Civil War-era "citizen's arrest" law and 2) passed its first Hate-Crime law not larded with poison pills designed to kill it on constitutional challenge. Unanimously. Lead by Republicans. At the speed of light.
As soon as Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted, Right-Wing nitwits will be pouring out of the woodwork to shake AR-15's in people's faces, while being filmed by buddies, so they can gun down whoever loses their minds and rushes them. See, the bloodbath will be bad for business. And Georgia is all about business. Stay tuned.
When my relative was murdered by their spouse. The judge said that the murder was premeditated. Even tho the culprit grabbed their guns moments before the final shots. The judges stated that premeditation does not need to occur in days or hours. It can occur in seconds too. Here in Omaha. A white bar owner (that I knew some) killed a black protestor outside his restaurant after a brief altercation. The bar owner obviously induced the confrontation by approaching the men over them assaulting his father. Whom was standing outside the bar heckling protestors under the guise of defending a rented property. The bar owner was initially released but then charged after a grand jury found the prosecutor to be lacking in his discovery of evidence. You see, the bar owner had Facebooked moments before the incident, "I am going to need to go defend my bar and pull fire duty" (something close to this effect). The judge's words stuck in my ears. This bar owner obviously premeditated murder by giving himself a reason to shoot somebody over property that was not his. Kyle Rittenhouse did exactly the same in both instances. Kyle is obviously going to go free because he was in self-defense. However, he perpetrated self-defense. By our nation's laws, he will go free but don't ever tell me he is a hero (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, loyalty). These are marks of a hero because they require more courage than pulling a trigger. You will go free Kyle. But you will never be free. You will forever be enslaved by the ungodly actions you premediated on that night and I shall pray for you.
I am greatly concerned re: Kyle Rittenhouse. He repeatedly said at trial he did nothing wrong. He was defending himself. He cried about being cornered and chased. He admitted killing and using lethal force. He was well rehearsed.
Did he ever express remorse? If I ever killed someone in self-defense, I would question myself: Did I do right? Could I have prevented it? It would haunt me. I would regret what I had done. Feel bad for the VICTIMS families.
But, Rittenhouse afterwards, initially took the fifth with law enforcement. He wore a t-shirt declaring his freedom with an f-bomb. He flashed the white supremacist ok sign.
His “community” has declared him a hero.
He injected himself into this mess. Why? Why did his mother drive him across county lines with an AR-15 he possessed illegally? To protect property? To help with medical needs? He had no riot control/police training. No triage/medical training. He was a 17 year old for goodness sakes.
What did his mother think? His father? What was their cultural influence to suggest to him that he was doing a great service? Who invited him? Or did he take it on to himself?
What did the police do when they saw him there? Did they welcome him? Did they tell him to go home? He was able to leave the scene?
This whole thing, given our current climate, is deeply disturbing.
Get ready for armed militia men patroling around *any* major left-wing protest in the future, because the courts are about the green-light armed vigilantism in defense of *other people's property* all the way up to killing people who break things or light them on fire. This is how we get to pre-Hobbesian territory, where the rule of law and monopoly on the use of force by the state gets dissolved. Because as soon as we say that "it's okay for gun-owners to defend property *outside of their castle*" we are essentially telling the cops that it's okay for an armed militia to be out on the streets defending someone else's private property. One can go to a protest of the opposing political party strapped with an AR-15, start taunting and antagonizing protestors, and as soon as one of them throws a punch you are allowed to execute them because "I was scared that he was going to take my rifle away from me and kill me with it!" One can start antagonizing a proud boy for lighting a BLM flag on fire via Aubrey-esque "citizen's arrest", and if that proud boy tries to fight you for it you can blast him and claim "self-defense" from the hostile crowd of proud boys around the guy and claim they were going to mob you. This is the society we're quickly leaning toward via courts and bad legal precedents. These justices aren't thinking about the secondary or tertiary effects tomorrow. Things are going to get more politically violent this decade the way the courts and legislators are asleep. We're going to sleep walk into *real* political bloodshed. Get ready to party like it's the 1850's in Kansas.
In response to the whole both siderism and not taking issues seriously....hear me out for a second: looking at what twitter pundits or normal folks on twitter think of an issue is stupid and worthless and the basics of failing at journalism or understanding what real people think of an issue. Stop it and do some basic journalism if you really want to know something.
And now for the schools. The recall in SF, of both school board members and the DA, bring out the usual claims that "dark money" is behind it all. Baloney. I live next door to Gordon Lau School in Chinatown and the mothers who circulated petitions did so not because some shady Svengali pressed, but because they want their children to have the advantages that only serious schooling will bring. Grass roots. At Lowell, the chickens are already coming home to roost in the first year of diminished expectation as the student body now seems more interested in protest and grievance than classes and homework. Oh, well, students have been protesting since the age of pedagogues. But, the curriculum is already changing -- with the elimination of Latin in particular, and classical studies generally. So this now means that no SF Public school will offer Latin. This while classics seems to thrive in some of the area prep schools (I interviewed several over the last decade for college admissions). Those who champion "equity" in schooling should consider the diminished opportunity here. There is no better argument for school vouchers.
Across America we have expanded the law to permit the use of deadly and non-deadly force in self defense in far too many ways. We now are routinely confronted with situations where both parties have a lawful self-defense claim, since both parties were legally permitted to be there and to be armed, and both were reasonably afraid that the other would kill them, either can claim justification of the other. We have created a legal regime where you can choose to bring deadly force, to put yourself into a violent confrontation, and to kill someone, and still have the legal justification of self-defense.
One of the fundamental limits on self-defense as a legal justification to the use of deadly force is that the justification is not available to someone who provokes the confrontation. But because in many places we insist on allowing people to wander the streets with assault weapons, regardless of the social context, the definition and scope of “provocation” has become increasingly narrow.
It is clear that Rittenhouse provoked the violence not just by his armed presence, but also by his specific conduct. There is even evidence he intended to be a provocateur (evidence excluded at trial, arguably contrary to the law). Whether or not it was intentional, because his provocation was foreseeable, he bears moral culpability for the consequences of his actions. This is true even if the specific altercation was initiated by the decedent, and even where Rittenhouse reasonably feared he was in danger.
To translate his moral culpability into criminal culpability, we need a self-defense doctrine that can mitigate, rather than exonerate, people who intentionally put themselves in a situation where they know or should know they’re provoking violence, and then do in fact provoke it by their very presence. This revision would need to be complex and subtle, since there are infinite variations of these kinds of situations.
One aspect is to firm up the legal presumptions that apply where deadly force is intended or used in defense of property. It is not, in most cases, lawful to use deadly force in the defense of property (except under the castle doctrine, which covers the home). Even police are not authorized to use deadly force in defense of property. While it often occurs that criminal interference with a property interest rapidly escalates to where police fear a threat to life and are legally permitted to use deadly force, that represents a different justification than the property itself.
Therefore, it should as a matter of law be unreasonable to bring deadly force for the purpose of protecting property. By coming to Kenosha armed with a rifle with the professed intention to protect property, Rittenhouse had an unreasonable intention to use deadly force in an unlawful manner. That should form the basis of a draw back on the availability and force of the self-defense justification. A display of deadly force for the purpose of protecting property is a provocation to the use of deadly force. When the violence escalated perhaps he was justified in protecting his own life; but by bringing the gun for an improper purpose, he recklessly set the stage for its use without lawful justification or excuse. He should not have the benefit of full exoneration by self-defense. He should be held criminally accountable for his role in the unnecessary and tragic killing, even if in the very moment it occurred his decisions were understandable.
It is worth the effort to search the Wisconsin newspapers as to the details on how Rittenhouse arrived at that moment of death. Someone with greater understanding and literary skills will have to parse this out, perhaps not for years hence, as the story continues to unfold.
Charlie, what does "Morning Shots" mean? Does it mean taking verbal shots at your political enemies? Or is taking on a even more confrontational meaning as our politics seems to be moving ever closer to violence? The usual effect on me is to want to take a couple shots of bourbon, so I probably shouldn't read it in the morning.
“I'm really worried about a return of Donald Trump this time, because this time, the Velociraptors have figured out how to work the doorknobs." - @davidfrum on why Trump's second term would be even worse.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? WHY DOES IT ALWAYS FEEL LIKE THE WHACK-A-DOODLE, MALIGNANT, DANGEROUS GQP AND THEIR TRUMPANZEES ARE WINNING THIS WAR?
A bristle a bit at the discussion re crime. It is superficial at best. For example, the so called liberal media have widely reported it. And as someone who works in NYC, what make me angry is not the discussion of the crime numbers but the reporting that makes it seem as if crime is rampant or has anything to do with policing. Having lived long enough to see NYC in the 60s - 80s, i suggest that it ain't rampant. Nor do we believe that it had anything to do with policing - the numbers suggest that the increase started with COVID. The numbers also appear to be reversing.
But truth to tell, it is hard to know why crime increased earlier - so after the 50s and why it peaked in 1990.
So the media are not hiding the story, just as they don't hide the numbers at the border. But the why is a different matter.
The right wing press presents democratic cities as being trashed, burned etc. And there were a few cities that were (and riots have long been a part of our history) but the black live matter protest in Paterson NJ did not even deface the statue of Christopher Columbus.
We struggle in this country to ever get to the "root" of a problem. We continue to gloss over how we arrived at where we are and then clutch our pearls when the shit hits the fan....again and again.
Rittenhouse is the result of truly crappy parents, (which, imo, recieves far too little attention in this country) ignorant politics, a culture that has NO nuance around anything military, and very easily accessible handguns.
The idiots that can't process what CRT actually is and have instead used it as a stand in for "I don't want my kids learning that some of their ancestors may have been on the wrong side of history" are too numerous to count. Again, ignorance. (How can you possibly want to preserve the honor of your long dead ancestors if they were slave owners?)
The left partisans that are unable to see anything except through a victim's lens.....again, ignorant.
The close minded, team oriented, zero sum game, players have taken over the field and they sadly, won't be easily moved.
Rittenhouse is guilty of criminal stupidity. A person who could not buy the gun he used (so someone bought it for him) and that had to commute a long distance to the scene of his overt, criminal stupidity. IIRC his mom drove him there.
The real criminals here are the person who bought a teenager an Ar-15, provided his transportation and, most importantly allowed him to think that doing what he was doing was smart or heroic or necessary.
There are good reasons why law enforcement is left to state agencies and why the state has a decided interest in controlling what is essentially vigilante violence. Doing otherwise is NOT conducive to civilization. Creating a running (often false) narrative that excuses such action as necessary (especially when aimed at political opponents or the Other) is destructive to law and order (something that the people pushing the narrative CLAIM to be all for).
At it's bare essential, State = monopoly of legitimate force, with few and rare exceptions. In situations where this is not true, you end up with anarchy and warlord-ism. See Afghanistan. See Somalia, see any number of third-world failed states.
These idiot militias are under the impression that they would be the top dogs in a situation of anarchy and there is this persistent right wing violence pornography around the whole idea. Just look at the Claremont Institute "study" that came to light a few days ago as a prime example.
I have owned guns for most of my life. I served in the US military. Sport shooter, hunter.
I have never felt the need to be armed during my normal, daily life. I have never felt the need to own the types of weapons that many of this wingnuts believe are necessary for their "self-defense." Most of these people do not live in locations where endemic violence is a problem... they don't live in a gang-ridden neighborhood in the inner city or even get near one.
Remember that the primary focus of militias in their heyday was in the south as a defensive measure against slave rebellion. I think that says a lot.
"But what non-gun owners may not understand is that these men are not your average gun-owning Americans. They are people who have fallen into a cult where it is normal to organize your entire culture around weapons of war." It looks like a lot of gun owners don't understand this either.
For some reason, the Georgia Legislature has very recently 1) rescinded the Civil War-era "citizen's arrest" law and 2) passed its first Hate-Crime law not larded with poison pills designed to kill it on constitutional challenge. Unanimously. Lead by Republicans. At the speed of light.
As soon as Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted, Right-Wing nitwits will be pouring out of the woodwork to shake AR-15's in people's faces, while being filmed by buddies, so they can gun down whoever loses their minds and rushes them. See, the bloodbath will be bad for business. And Georgia is all about business. Stay tuned.
When my relative was murdered by their spouse. The judge said that the murder was premeditated. Even tho the culprit grabbed their guns moments before the final shots. The judges stated that premeditation does not need to occur in days or hours. It can occur in seconds too. Here in Omaha. A white bar owner (that I knew some) killed a black protestor outside his restaurant after a brief altercation. The bar owner obviously induced the confrontation by approaching the men over them assaulting his father. Whom was standing outside the bar heckling protestors under the guise of defending a rented property. The bar owner was initially released but then charged after a grand jury found the prosecutor to be lacking in his discovery of evidence. You see, the bar owner had Facebooked moments before the incident, "I am going to need to go defend my bar and pull fire duty" (something close to this effect). The judge's words stuck in my ears. This bar owner obviously premeditated murder by giving himself a reason to shoot somebody over property that was not his. Kyle Rittenhouse did exactly the same in both instances. Kyle is obviously going to go free because he was in self-defense. However, he perpetrated self-defense. By our nation's laws, he will go free but don't ever tell me he is a hero (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, loyalty). These are marks of a hero because they require more courage than pulling a trigger. You will go free Kyle. But you will never be free. You will forever be enslaved by the ungodly actions you premediated on that night and I shall pray for you.
Spot on.
I am greatly concerned re: Kyle Rittenhouse. He repeatedly said at trial he did nothing wrong. He was defending himself. He cried about being cornered and chased. He admitted killing and using lethal force. He was well rehearsed.
Did he ever express remorse? If I ever killed someone in self-defense, I would question myself: Did I do right? Could I have prevented it? It would haunt me. I would regret what I had done. Feel bad for the VICTIMS families.
But, Rittenhouse afterwards, initially took the fifth with law enforcement. He wore a t-shirt declaring his freedom with an f-bomb. He flashed the white supremacist ok sign.
His “community” has declared him a hero.
He injected himself into this mess. Why? Why did his mother drive him across county lines with an AR-15 he possessed illegally? To protect property? To help with medical needs? He had no riot control/police training. No triage/medical training. He was a 17 year old for goodness sakes.
What did his mother think? His father? What was their cultural influence to suggest to him that he was doing a great service? Who invited him? Or did he take it on to himself?
What did the police do when they saw him there? Did they welcome him? Did they tell him to go home? He was able to leave the scene?
This whole thing, given our current climate, is deeply disturbing.
Get ready for armed militia men patroling around *any* major left-wing protest in the future, because the courts are about the green-light armed vigilantism in defense of *other people's property* all the way up to killing people who break things or light them on fire. This is how we get to pre-Hobbesian territory, where the rule of law and monopoly on the use of force by the state gets dissolved. Because as soon as we say that "it's okay for gun-owners to defend property *outside of their castle*" we are essentially telling the cops that it's okay for an armed militia to be out on the streets defending someone else's private property. One can go to a protest of the opposing political party strapped with an AR-15, start taunting and antagonizing protestors, and as soon as one of them throws a punch you are allowed to execute them because "I was scared that he was going to take my rifle away from me and kill me with it!" One can start antagonizing a proud boy for lighting a BLM flag on fire via Aubrey-esque "citizen's arrest", and if that proud boy tries to fight you for it you can blast him and claim "self-defense" from the hostile crowd of proud boys around the guy and claim they were going to mob you. This is the society we're quickly leaning toward via courts and bad legal precedents. These justices aren't thinking about the secondary or tertiary effects tomorrow. Things are going to get more politically violent this decade the way the courts and legislators are asleep. We're going to sleep walk into *real* political bloodshed. Get ready to party like it's the 1850's in Kansas.
In response to the whole both siderism and not taking issues seriously....hear me out for a second: looking at what twitter pundits or normal folks on twitter think of an issue is stupid and worthless and the basics of failing at journalism or understanding what real people think of an issue. Stop it and do some basic journalism if you really want to know something.
And now for the schools. The recall in SF, of both school board members and the DA, bring out the usual claims that "dark money" is behind it all. Baloney. I live next door to Gordon Lau School in Chinatown and the mothers who circulated petitions did so not because some shady Svengali pressed, but because they want their children to have the advantages that only serious schooling will bring. Grass roots. At Lowell, the chickens are already coming home to roost in the first year of diminished expectation as the student body now seems more interested in protest and grievance than classes and homework. Oh, well, students have been protesting since the age of pedagogues. But, the curriculum is already changing -- with the elimination of Latin in particular, and classical studies generally. So this now means that no SF Public school will offer Latin. This while classics seems to thrive in some of the area prep schools (I interviewed several over the last decade for college admissions). Those who champion "equity" in schooling should consider the diminished opportunity here. There is no better argument for school vouchers.
Across America we have expanded the law to permit the use of deadly and non-deadly force in self defense in far too many ways. We now are routinely confronted with situations where both parties have a lawful self-defense claim, since both parties were legally permitted to be there and to be armed, and both were reasonably afraid that the other would kill them, either can claim justification of the other. We have created a legal regime where you can choose to bring deadly force, to put yourself into a violent confrontation, and to kill someone, and still have the legal justification of self-defense.
One of the fundamental limits on self-defense as a legal justification to the use of deadly force is that the justification is not available to someone who provokes the confrontation. But because in many places we insist on allowing people to wander the streets with assault weapons, regardless of the social context, the definition and scope of “provocation” has become increasingly narrow.
It is clear that Rittenhouse provoked the violence not just by his armed presence, but also by his specific conduct. There is even evidence he intended to be a provocateur (evidence excluded at trial, arguably contrary to the law). Whether or not it was intentional, because his provocation was foreseeable, he bears moral culpability for the consequences of his actions. This is true even if the specific altercation was initiated by the decedent, and even where Rittenhouse reasonably feared he was in danger.
To translate his moral culpability into criminal culpability, we need a self-defense doctrine that can mitigate, rather than exonerate, people who intentionally put themselves in a situation where they know or should know they’re provoking violence, and then do in fact provoke it by their very presence. This revision would need to be complex and subtle, since there are infinite variations of these kinds of situations.
One aspect is to firm up the legal presumptions that apply where deadly force is intended or used in defense of property. It is not, in most cases, lawful to use deadly force in the defense of property (except under the castle doctrine, which covers the home). Even police are not authorized to use deadly force in defense of property. While it often occurs that criminal interference with a property interest rapidly escalates to where police fear a threat to life and are legally permitted to use deadly force, that represents a different justification than the property itself.
Therefore, it should as a matter of law be unreasonable to bring deadly force for the purpose of protecting property. By coming to Kenosha armed with a rifle with the professed intention to protect property, Rittenhouse had an unreasonable intention to use deadly force in an unlawful manner. That should form the basis of a draw back on the availability and force of the self-defense justification. A display of deadly force for the purpose of protecting property is a provocation to the use of deadly force. When the violence escalated perhaps he was justified in protecting his own life; but by bringing the gun for an improper purpose, he recklessly set the stage for its use without lawful justification or excuse. He should not have the benefit of full exoneration by self-defense. He should be held criminally accountable for his role in the unnecessary and tragic killing, even if in the very moment it occurred his decisions were understandable.
It is worth the effort to search the Wisconsin newspapers as to the details on how Rittenhouse arrived at that moment of death. Someone with greater understanding and literary skills will have to parse this out, perhaps not for years hence, as the story continues to unfold.
Charlie, what does "Morning Shots" mean? Does it mean taking verbal shots at your political enemies? Or is taking on a even more confrontational meaning as our politics seems to be moving ever closer to violence? The usual effect on me is to want to take a couple shots of bourbon, so I probably shouldn't read it in the morning.
“I'm really worried about a return of Donald Trump this time, because this time, the Velociraptors have figured out how to work the doorknobs." - @davidfrum on why Trump's second term would be even worse.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? WHY DOES IT ALWAYS FEEL LIKE THE WHACK-A-DOODLE, MALIGNANT, DANGEROUS GQP AND THEIR TRUMPANZEES ARE WINNING THIS WAR?
A bristle a bit at the discussion re crime. It is superficial at best. For example, the so called liberal media have widely reported it. And as someone who works in NYC, what make me angry is not the discussion of the crime numbers but the reporting that makes it seem as if crime is rampant or has anything to do with policing. Having lived long enough to see NYC in the 60s - 80s, i suggest that it ain't rampant. Nor do we believe that it had anything to do with policing - the numbers suggest that the increase started with COVID. The numbers also appear to be reversing.
But truth to tell, it is hard to know why crime increased earlier - so after the 50s and why it peaked in 1990.
So the media are not hiding the story, just as they don't hide the numbers at the border. But the why is a different matter.
The right wing press presents democratic cities as being trashed, burned etc. And there were a few cities that were (and riots have long been a part of our history) but the black live matter protest in Paterson NJ did not even deface the statue of Christopher Columbus.
Amazing. The same people who claim Ashley Babbitt was wrongly killed because “she didn’t do anything” are cheering this dumb kid on as a hero.
We struggle in this country to ever get to the "root" of a problem. We continue to gloss over how we arrived at where we are and then clutch our pearls when the shit hits the fan....again and again.
Rittenhouse is the result of truly crappy parents, (which, imo, recieves far too little attention in this country) ignorant politics, a culture that has NO nuance around anything military, and very easily accessible handguns.
The idiots that can't process what CRT actually is and have instead used it as a stand in for "I don't want my kids learning that some of their ancestors may have been on the wrong side of history" are too numerous to count. Again, ignorance. (How can you possibly want to preserve the honor of your long dead ancestors if they were slave owners?)
The left partisans that are unable to see anything except through a victim's lens.....again, ignorant.
The close minded, team oriented, zero sum game, players have taken over the field and they sadly, won't be easily moved.
Rittenhouse is guilty of criminal stupidity. A person who could not buy the gun he used (so someone bought it for him) and that had to commute a long distance to the scene of his overt, criminal stupidity. IIRC his mom drove him there.
The real criminals here are the person who bought a teenager an Ar-15, provided his transportation and, most importantly allowed him to think that doing what he was doing was smart or heroic or necessary.
There are good reasons why law enforcement is left to state agencies and why the state has a decided interest in controlling what is essentially vigilante violence. Doing otherwise is NOT conducive to civilization. Creating a running (often false) narrative that excuses such action as necessary (especially when aimed at political opponents or the Other) is destructive to law and order (something that the people pushing the narrative CLAIM to be all for).
At it's bare essential, State = monopoly of legitimate force, with few and rare exceptions. In situations where this is not true, you end up with anarchy and warlord-ism. See Afghanistan. See Somalia, see any number of third-world failed states.
These idiot militias are under the impression that they would be the top dogs in a situation of anarchy and there is this persistent right wing violence pornography around the whole idea. Just look at the Claremont Institute "study" that came to light a few days ago as a prime example.
I have owned guns for most of my life. I served in the US military. Sport shooter, hunter.
I have never felt the need to be armed during my normal, daily life. I have never felt the need to own the types of weapons that many of this wingnuts believe are necessary for their "self-defense." Most of these people do not live in locations where endemic violence is a problem... they don't live in a gang-ridden neighborhood in the inner city or even get near one.
Remember that the primary focus of militias in their heyday was in the south as a defensive measure against slave rebellion. I think that says a lot.
"But what non-gun owners may not understand is that these men are not your average gun-owning Americans. They are people who have fallen into a cult where it is normal to organize your entire culture around weapons of war." It looks like a lot of gun owners don't understand this either.