Kyle Rittenhouse abruptly departed the stage during an appearance at the University of Memphis on Wednesday, after he was confronted about comments made by Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk.
Rittenhouse was invited by the college’s Turning Point USA chapter to speak at the campus. However, the event was met with backlash from a number of students who objected to Rittenhouse’s presence.
The 21-year-old gained notoriety in August 2020 when, at the age of 17, he shot and killed two men—Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, as well as injuring 26-year-old Gaige Grosskreutz—at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
He said the three shootings, carried out with a semi-automatic AR-15-style firearm, were in self-defense. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest where the shootings took place was held after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was left paralyzed from the waist down after he was shot by a white police officer.
And if some psycho has brought a weapon to a dangerous area to threaten people with you have every right to defend yourself by attacking them and trying to take their weapon.
It is possible for situations to exist where both parties believe their life is in danger could claim self defense for killing the other. That is the situation Rittenhouse created here by going somewhere he had no business being with his gun. If any of those people he shot had killed Rittenhouse they could have claimed self defense and it likely would have been successful because their lives were quite literally in danger, evidenced by the fact that he killed them.
I don’t know if this is different in the land where property is king, but I worked in retail and was told “If someone tries to rob you, let them. It’s not worth risking your life for. property can always be replaced.”
So if the correct course of action if someone claims to have a weapon in their pocket is to hand over all the money in the till, how does it make any sense at all to try to stop looting during a riot with a fire extinguisher?
No, they should not have been looting. Also, he shouldn’t have been there attacking people with a fire extinguisher, what did he think was going to happen? The person punching him was also wrong to do so. It is possible to have situations where everyone is wrong.
The point is, why was the riot happening? Ignoring the cause (cops freely shooting black people unnecessarily) and focusing on “but but but THE PROPERTY!” to try to distract from the issue at hand really shows people’s values.
You can’t just attack people because they have a weapon wtf. There is also no indication that kyle threatened anyone with their weapon to begin with, you’re just grasping for straws at this point.
edit: Also you can’t really claim self defense if you CHASE someone for what? having a weapon? good luck with that. Recent example was the people that chased a black person in Georgia because they thought they were a burglar.