Ramping up
Kyle Rittenhouse Launches Foundation Aimed At Fighting Gun Control
This is a sick sick sick country.
Kyle Rittenhouse has launched an anti-gun control nonprofit in Texas, according to a filing with the Texas Secretary of State’s office, which was first reported on by the Texas Tribune—a sign the young man who became a conservative star after being acquitted of killing two Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, is ramping up his political activity in Texas.
A star is born! Dude who kills lefties promotes guns!
Rittenhouse filed with the Secretary of State on July 23 to create the Rittenhouse Foundation, a nonprofit based in Fort Worth, Texas, which aims to protect “an individual’s inalienable right to bear arms” through “education and legal assistance,” according to the filing.
Rittenhouse is listed as a director alongside Chris McNutt, president of the gun advocacy group Texas Gun Rights and Shelby Griesinger, treasurer of the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, which has financed the campaigns of right-wing candidates across the state.
Who is Rittenhouse again? Oh yes, the kid who went to a BLM protest and shot two people dead and one not-dead. Excellent example for us all.
The incident was widely condemned by liberals, but many conservatives came to his defense. U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) both offered the then-teenager internships, and then-President Donald Trump hosted him at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Because what is more admirable and worthy of reward than shooting people dead at anti-racism protests?
I can’t remember who published it, but I read a piece in the last year or so about how Rittenhouse had insisted that he just wanted to go back to being an anonymous young person, going to nursing school or something, yet here he was making the rounds of the conservative conference/podcast/fundraiser circuit. There is, of course, an argument that he needs to do this to pay his legal fees (which I believe are still ongoing, as I think there’s still an active civil case against him).
Mild inaccuracy in that story in that one of his victims was just some nutter having a fit, but he definitely injured wounded two BLM protestors… Really we’d all have been better off if one of his victims had gotten a shot off first.
He killed them.
Well he killed the nutter, wounded (and killed) the protester with a skateboard, and wounded the one with a handgun in the arm (Patterson Gauge I think?). He could’ve been shot dead after he gotten that poor sod having a breakdown but it just didn’t happen.
It’s probably a bit misleading to call that event nothing more than “a BLM protest”, in the same way that it’d be misleading to refer to 1/6 as “people walking through federal buildings”.
@Nullius:
Yes, the framing here does seem a bit weird. If I recall, this all started because a man with a criminal record for sexual assault and domestic abuse turned up at the house of his ex-partner (despite a restraining order preventing him doing that), and so frightened and threatened her that she called the police. When they arrived he repeatedly ignored police instructions and eventually went for a knife, at which point the police shot him.
In the ensuing riot much property was destroyed in an inner city area. The net effect of such riots is to make high-black-population areas poorer, partly owing to “flight” and partly because businesses that remain (many black-owned) either pay much higher insurance or can’t get insurance.
And all this is called “anti-racist” and treated as though it’s a peaceful civil-rights march?
And while I regard it as utterly nuts that laws allow 17-yr-olds to wander around down-town with an AR-15, Rittenhouse was not the bad guy here, he was on the side of maintaining law and order (the lynchpin of any society), and he was quite literally running away and running towards police lines for safety, when rioters chased him, knocked him to the ground, hit him with a skateboard, and tried to grab his gun.
It’s interesting how differently the same set of events can be “framed”.
The US police can be under-trained, over-aggressive and trigger happy. But, even given that, there’s a simple recipe for not getting shot by them:
If apprehended by the police, don’t run, comply with instructions, don’t resist arrest.
That recipe isn’t completely foolproof, but reduces your chances of being killed to way under one in a million, below one death a year (for comparison 100 Americans a year die of bee stings).
And given that the US police do have a difficult job, in that anyone they encounter may well be armed, this recipe would seem a reasonable request of any well-meaning citizen.
Oh, right, Kyle Rittenhouse, the guy who showed up at an emotionally charged protest carrying a semi-automatic rifle.
Stupid so intense that even the thought of it burns.
The rioters charged after him *after* he shot someone… You see what appears to be an active shooter and you don’t just let him mosey on. His first victim was a nutter who had just got out of hospital that morning.
And yes he was (and is) a bad guy, but that fact doesn’t make the rioting good; too bad he survived that mess he made much worse.
I feel a slight sympathy for that silly young man Kyle Rittenhouse (young men can be remarkably silly), though not for his actions and subsequent behaviour, as I do not for, say, the poisonous little murderer of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, the killers of Emmett Till, the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, or the January 6th rioters. All these people drew on the blood-stained tradition of vigilante justice which has resulted over a great many years in huge injustices and terrible crimes. To pretend that this sort of thing has anything to do with ‘law and order’ is ridiculous. But kudos to Coel for telling us how to behave when confronted with under-trained, trigger-happy U.S. policemen – what a pity that Philando Castile & Tamir Rice were unable to read his banal advice before bring shot and killed.
@Tim:
You’re very welcome Tim, and yes, it is rather obvious and “banal” isn’t it? And yet very many do not follow it, and, in particular, many of the BLM “martyrs” did not follow it. And yet we’re still supposed to have sympathy for them such that they are worthy of riots in their memory.
And note that I said “That recipe isn’t completely foolproof, but reduces your chances of being killed to … below one death a year”.
So pointing to two incidents 7 and 9 years ago isn’t a rebuttal.
There are tens of millions of interactions between US cops and citizens each year. And, given the prevalance of guns in the US, in each one of them the cop has to be on-edge, wondering if a gun is about to be pulled on them (and 30 cops a year are killed that way).
So yes, the cop who killed Philando Castile (7 years ago) was in the wrong. But isn’t there a remarkably low prevalance of such incidents, given that everyone involved in human, and humans make mistakes, especially when under pressure and afraid, and given the prevalence of guns in the US?
And, yes, the cop who killed Tamir Rice (9 years ago) was in the wrong, though isn’t it utterly dumb (in the US environment) for adults to let a boy play in a public park with a realistic-looking (though toy) gun, such that passers by suspect it is real and call the cops? (And yes, police do have to regard 12-yr-olds with guns as a threat.)
So you want to highlight two incidents over a decade (well over 100 million cop/citizen interactions) where police made bad mistakes?
This is evidence of what exactly?
Any reason you didn’t mention (just for example) Daniel Shaver? (Which was a more blatant injustice than the two you mention.) Is it because he was white? Because it shows that police mistakes under pressure also occur with white suspects, and that doesn’t fit your agenda?
There is no actual evidence of police bias against blacks here (if that’s what you were trying to insinuate). There is evidence that US cops have a difficult job, policing a populace brimming with hand guns. And, inevitably, there are (suprisingly rare?) bad mistakes.
Part of this is a human cognitive bias. Our brains are evolved for interacting (over most of our evolutionary history) with a thousand or so humans. So, when we hear of shocking incidents, we process them as though they were occurring in a population of a few thousand. And yet, today, the news and social media brings to our attention incidents that that are actually hyper-rare one-in-ten-million likelihoods. But, owing to our cognitive bias, we process them as though they were one-in-a-thousand incidents.
I am well aware, Coel, that there are also white victims of police shootings, and was appalled by the killing of Daniel Shaver. I notice that you take care not to respond to the principal point that it is ludicrous to equate ‘law and order’ with the activity of vigilantes, just as you have failed to respond to my comment on your wholly dishonest ‘interpretation’ of the tweet that Elon Musk thought was so wonderfully true. I suggest that before going on about other people’s supposed ‘agendas’, you might take a look at your own.
Yes, vigilantes are the very much the opposite of “law and order” and as a big believer in that concept as well as police it’s utterly unacceptable that a murderer be uplifted on that basis.
@Tim:
Vigilante action, protecting property during a riot, is rather different from the other incidents you referenced. The vigilante attitude is at least understandable where law-and-order breaks down.
Anyhow:
Sorry, what did I fail to respond to? Can you point me to it? There has been a heck of a lot of comment on Musk on various threads recently, and obviously I haven’t responded to everything.
And why is my “interpretation” (as you put it) “wholly dishonest”, when it is fully in line with the surrounding Tweets by the poster, and by Musk? Are you claiming to be psychic in that you can discern the mental state of those two and me?
Stop. Defending Rittenhouse and vigilantism is disgusting. Just stop.