Showing posts with label Violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Violence. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 01, 2021
Saturday, November 13, 2021
What on earth have we come to? (apologies to Josh Marshall, what he says is so damning and important.)
Thinking about Rittenhouse and Right Wing Murder Safaris
But the Rittenhouse case shows how that is not really true. Permissive self-defense laws allow a Rittenhouse to have his aggression double as self-defense. You intentionally go into a chaotic situation. You travel across state lines, highly and visibly armed, allegedly to ‘protect’ people who haven’t asked for your protection. Then you feel threatened, which seems likely to happen in a chaotic place when you show up, chest puffed out with a military style weapon. Your perception of danger entitles you to murderous violence, which you arrived locked and loaded to pursue in the first place. In Rittenhouse’s case part of his perception of threat came when people freaked out after he’d shot and killed the first person. And of course only other people get hurt or killed because you’ve got the over-the-top firepower and they don’t.
If you operate within the chain of reasoning here you see the perverse connections. Self-defense laws exist because we as a society believe you are entitled to defend yourself with what would ordinarily be criminal violence if you face imminent, grave bodily harm or death. If someone breaks into your home and is threatening to kill you you have the right to kill them first. But if you created the dangerous or deadly situation the calculus changes. Or at least it should. Rittenhouse likely broke some laws being there with the gun in the first place. He was under 18 for instance. But the basic argument here is that Rittenhouse wasn’t doing anything wrong by just carrying around an AR-15. Wisconsin’s an open carry state. The inherent aggression and menace of carrying around high caliber weapons, which we’re told is only a problem for squeamish libs, becomes a path for the person carrying the fire arm to themselves feel threatened and decide they need to use the gun.
The aggression carries the seeds of justification within it. You show up looking for trouble on yet another of these right wing murder safaris like Rittenhouse, with his mother chaperoning, was taking part in. You’re looking for trouble and when you find it that’s your justification for taking the next step. That’s not how self-defense is supposed to work. But we can see in this case how the interplay of open carry and permissive self-defense statutes do just that.
Sunday, May 31, 2020
Monday, August 14, 2017
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Donald Trump's brown shirts
This is something potentially very bad. Trump has already told his supporters that he wants them to use violence at his rallies against people with whom they disagree. Now, he is threatening to organize them and send them to his opponents rallies, ostensibly, to use violence. That would mean Trump is starting to think of his most ardent supporters as a radicalized force he can use to silence his opponents with the threat of violence. People told to prepare to use force and go to a specific place to take action against the political opposition--this is a next level scenario that would suggest Trump sees violence as a tool for gaining office, which would mean he is having thoughts akin to someone planning not to win an election, but to seize power. He hasn't done all this yet--but that seems to be how his mindset is evolving. If this happens, it would definitely be time to take legal action to end his campaign. #notgood
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