Kyle decided to insert a rifle into a situation that neither he, nor the rifle, was invited to.
He had orders of magnitude more justification in being there than any of the three who attacked him. His father lives there, for crying out loud–it’s part of his community. Also, those three came from further away, and have zero ties to Kenosha. They fucked around, they found out. If they had left Rittenhouse alone, he would have continued with his graffiti cleaning, fire extinguishing, water bottle dispensing, and basic medical aid giving, until the end of the day, and gone home. That’s literally all he was doing until a maniac went into a literal homicidal rage in response to a fire he set being extinguished.
got in too deep and like the untrained and dangerous fool he was, shot his way out of it.
On the contrary, the way he handled the threats to his life was admirable and respectable, and I honestly don’t know how he could have handled it better than he did:
His first response to aggression was consistently de-escalation/fleeing
He waited until that absolute last moment to fire his weapon. If he waited literally a moment longer in any of the three instances, he likely would have been killed himself, either by his own rifle (Rosenbaum), another full-swung strike to the head by a skateboard (Huber), or by an illegally-possessed handgun (Grosskreutz)
He fired accurately and conservatively, hitting no one and nothing other than his target every time, and firing only a few times. No ‘mag dumps’ here, as you’ll often see police do.
His trigger discipline was immaculate in the one video where you can see clearly enough to observe it. The moment Grosskreutz is no longer a threat to him, his finger is immediately off the trigger and back around the guard, as he slowly gets back up to his feet
If every cop in the US was as disciplined in their firearm usage as Rittenhouse was that day, we’d have way fewer police shooting scandals in this country.