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.
Maybe I’m missing something as I’m not from the states. Why the hell is a guy who is famous for murder invites to talk at a university?
It’s insane that the only reason he was noticed and brought into their political organization was through
murdershooting and killing people.That’s how gangs initiate people.
Edit: removed “murder” so nobody whines about whether he lawfully drove to another state with a gun and shot people.
for the express purpose of intimidating people and hopefully getting the opportunity to shoot them in ‘self defense’
Our gun culture is so nuts that it normalizes shit like this.
When you look at it this way, it is utterly unsurprising that we have so many mass shootings.
This isn’t normalisation, it’s celebration.
I’m not going to be coy about why they’re celebrating him either: The pro-gun community spends hour after hour theorycrafting about how they can shoot people with their cool guns and get away with it. Kyle is being celebrated for finding a new “get out of jail free” technique that specifically targeted undesirables for murder.
That’s all there is to it. They shower him with fame and money because he killed BLM protesters with America’s favourite gun. It’s his reward.
Because of TP USA.
I feel now is a good time to pimp our community, !toiletpaperusa@lemmy.world
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !toiletpaperusa@lemmy.world
He got away with it so he’s automatically a power fantasy for Cons.
Don’t forget that he murdered people at a BLM protest, so Cons also think he’s a hero.
Yes, but remember they’re not racist tho. /s
Because having someone else buy a gun for you that you can’t legally buy, traveling to a confrontational hotspot with your guns, failing to leave a situation that was escalating, and that choice leading to one shooting a mentally ill bipolar person is perfectly legal. And the right wing absolutely wants to make sure everyone knows that. So he gets to be trotted out for any occasion where they need a “famous” person who chose to exercise their right to self-defense, despite making every effort to place themselves in a situation where it might be necessary.
But that’s not his fault.
He also managed to escape open carry laws because the judge deemed any rifle above 15 inches was not a “Deadly Weapon” despite Rittenhouse using the weapon to cause multiple deaths, due to loose interpretation of the grammar of the written laws. And the state congress in IL did nothing to correct him.
YHGTBSM. A rifle is not a deadly weapon.
IAIFNSYMDIIVDTTIR.
For those that need a translation:
“You have got to be shitting me”
“I am in fact not shitting you, my dude. It is very disappointing that this is real.”
Because he’s famous for racist murder.
Yeah our country isn’t doing great. Send ethics
calling it a racist murder just shows how much you really know about the topic at hand 🤣 goodness
He went out of his way to go to a blm protest with a rifle to protect shops from protestors. Legally it wasn’t murder according to the jury, but I’m not charging him with that crime, I’m saying someone who isn’t a racist wouldn’t put themselves in that position
Because the actual story fits blearily enough well with republican’s “good guy with a gun” mythos. Trigger Warning: Violence, Death, and Bodily Injury.
If I’m wrong, please correct me and cite your sources.
Correction: Famously accused of murder and acquitted of all charges despite rigorous cross examination and ever increasingly difficult hurdles to claiming self defence… such as assuming provocation incited the first attacker. Also despite intense political pressure from then and current POTUS Joseph Biden, who was vocally in favor of murder charges until after the not-guilty verdict was delivered.
His first attacker, Joseph Rosenbaum (deceased): “The man with a toothbrush.” A belligerent 36 year old bare chested man. Chasing a 17 year old with a firearm, who was running away. A convicted child molester. At the time being tried for assault and out on bail. Shot at close range.
His second attacker, Anthony Huber (deceased): An avid skater, chasing down a presumed murderer fleeing in the direction of the police. Assailed the accused in the shoulder, neck, and head with a skateboard and grappled over the rifle. Shot at close range.
Third, Gaige Grosskreutz the star witness of the trial: a trained paramedic who chased the presumed murderer alongside Anthony Huber. Confronted the 17 year old, who had immediately prior, shot Anthony Huber while wrestling on the ground. Drew his pistol and immediately lost his right bicep upon pointing his weapon at the accused.
The 17 year old, Kyle Rittenhouse, then approached officers with his hands above his head, and was told to get out of the road. Fears of a mass shooter caused the crowds to disperse.
Please stop calling the idiot a murderer. He was acquitted, and the people who attacked him are none too heroic after looking at their part in the events, nor after seeing their criminal records.
Murder apologist who chose the username “Kindness”.
I’m not defending him. But he was acquitted, so he’s not famous for murder. A bunch of people believe that he genuinely acted in legitimate self defense, and thus he is a symbol of the correct use of arms for self defense and a victim of a system that tried to jail him for doing so.
Irrelevant.
He’s famous for being a murderer, whether he was found guilty or not doesn’t matter.
They’re stupid, simple as.
Murder is literally the illegal killing of someone. So yes it absolutely matters whether he was convicted. To claim it’s irrelevant that he was found not guilty of murder just exposes how detached from reality your position is. We can argue that he should have been found guilty, but you have to realize that the people who disagree with you don’t think he’s a murderer.
And I’ve heard plenty of them make the claim anyone who thinks he is a murderer is stupid. In this regard, you’re just like them.
Irrelevant. People know him as a murderer, thus that is what he is famous for. Plenty of people are famous for shit thats not technically accurate.
I do, I just don’t care what wrong people think about shit that’s basic and obvious.
Yeah but those people are fucking stupid, so I wouldn’t listen to them.
Ehh, except you’re wrong. Using terms colloquially is one thing, no one has accepted that the legal definition of murder has changed. Certainly not regarding Rittenhouse.
Yes he is known for being a killer or a shooter but he is not a murderer until charged in a court of law. Make whatever argument for how the decision not to charge him was wrong, I won’t disagree. He is a killer. The distinction is important because the “law” deemed it rightful.
Again, make whatever argument you want for that being wrong.
“Murder” is not an exclusively legal term.
18 U.S.C. § 1111 defines murder as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice
the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.
This is both the legal definition of murder and the dictionary definition.
Next you’ll say “But lAnGuAgEs ChAnGe OvEr TiMe”
Edit: I’d like to point out the failure to recognize that my meaning is the law failed. Should he be a murderer? Yes. Is he? No. Why is that? The justice system failed.
You can apply whatever meaning to whatever words you want, none of that matters in the face of the far reaching power that is the U.S. justice system. You declaring he’s a murderer is the most meaningless form of activism I can think of. You’re an ant screaming at a bulldozer.
“killing black people isn’t murder like killing rats with pesticide isn’t murder” -the least racist conservative
He is only famous because he is a murderer and he got away with it. He has nothing else going for him at all.
He was literally acquitted of murder. I’m not saying he’s famous - he’s really an obscure nobody - but his biggest claim to fame not only is legally not murder, claiming it is murder in a way people might take seriously, like a newspaper article, would open you up to liability for slander, since you’d be making claims it would be easy to prove in court you knew to be false when you made them.
He’s a killer, yes. He killed people. That’s considered potentially distinct from murder in checks notes every country on Earth.