{"id":75132,"date":"2020-08-28T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=75132"},"modified":"2021-11-16T10:27:17","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T16:27:17","slug":"rittenhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=75132","title":{"rendered":"Rittenhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I get it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’re a businessperson, a law-abiding citizen, a resident of a place like Minneapolis or Saint Paul or Kenosha, you might be getting a little tired of being siultaneousy treated like a villain, a sucker and a pop-sociology punching bag. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And seeing the entitled, upper-middle-cass, over-schooled, undereducated “progressive” thugs and the depredations they wreak<\/a>, you might just be as mad as hell and not in a mood to take it anymore. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might even take the Second Amendment of the Constitution seirously, with its implied empowerment to defend your life, your family, your property, your community and your freedom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And truth be told, I feel it too. The Thursday night after Memorial Day, when the destruction came to Saint Paul, the temptation to strap up and sit out on the porch with a book and a couple of poieces of ugly black insurance would have been pretty dang tempting if all of my guns hadn’t fallen into Mille Lacs, and they didn’t terrify me besides. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s even ore overwhelming when you have a government that seems, at least in Minnneapolis, Saint Paul and Minnesota at large, to be on the wrong side. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s times like this the urge to get some friends and gun up and find some bit of real estate to protect from the mob – your own, someone else’s, it matters little – is palpable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a lousy idea for two reasons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For starters – in most states, the odds are good that you’ll come off worse, legally, than the scumbags. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the scumbags want <\/em>a civil war. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s look at both problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self-Defense<\/strong> – As we’ve noted in this space before, the rules for claiming self-defense are (intentionally?) a little opaque in many states, including MInnesota and Wisconsin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To sum up the confluence of a little statute and a lot of case law:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. You must reasonably, immediately <\/em>fear death or great bodily harm.  Reasonable means \u201cit\u2019ll convince a jury\u201d.  Immediate means now<\/em>; if someone says \u201cI\u2019m gonna kill you\u2026tomorrow\u201d, you can\u2019t kill them first.<\/li>
  2. You must use appropriate force.  In other words, you can only use the force needed to end the threat<\/em>.  No more.<\/li>
  3. You must make a reasonable <\/em>effort to retreat.  Reasonable.  If you\u2019re pushing your baby in a stroller, you don\u2019t need to leave it behind.  If you\u2019re a 70 year old man with a knee replacement attacked by four youths, you don\u2019t need to try to out run them.  And in Minnesota, it doesn\u2019t apply in your house.  In \u201cStand Your Ground\u201d states, this provision is disregarded.  Minnesota is not <\/em>a Stand Your Ground state.<\/li>
  4. You must not be a willing participant: you can\u2019t start a brawl, and then shoot someone who breaks a bottle.Put another way, you must not be the aggressor<\/em>. <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Berg’s 18th Law is in full effect, here – but given what we might <\/em>know about the crime, it would seem that Rittenhouse may have the same problem as Alan Scarsella, the man who shot at some “protesters” who were chasing him and his friends<\/a> away from the Fourth Precinct in North MInneapolis a few years ago. Scarsella likely met three of the criteria for self defense – but the prosecution painted him, successfully, as the aggressor . He didn’t have to go to North Minneapolis, and he certainly didn’t have to post a stupid video bragging about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    We’ll see what happens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Say You Want A Revolution – <\/strong>In 1933 as German president Paul Hindenburg mulled giving emergency power to a cabinet led by Adolph Hiter, among the biggest supporters of the power giveaway were…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    …the German Communist Party. The Nazi’s “enemies”. They figured extremism woulds benefit them – when the middle becomes untenable, the extremes become self-preservation. It’d worked for the Communists in Russia, and showed promise in other European countries; the Hard Left’s discipline and organization enabled it to win a batte of the extremes over right wings that weren’t anywhere near organized enough to prevail against Big Left’s discipline and regimentation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    They banked wrong on the batatle against Hiter – but got the formula down in North Korea, China, and a fair chunk of the Third World in the fifties through the seventies, and evena few since. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    They are banking on the same thing today. Not without good reason. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I get it. If you’re a businessperson, a law-abiding citizen, a resident of a place like Minneapolis or Saint Paul or Kenosha, you might be getting a little tired of being siultaneousy treated like a villain, a sucker and a pop-sociology punching bag. And seeing the entitled, upper-middle-cass, over-schooled, undereducated “progressive” thugs and the depredations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[442],"class_list":["post-75132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2020-riots","tag-rittenhouse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75132"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75140,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75132\/revisions\/75140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}