Rogerborg

Why do you keep bringing up the issue of the media during the trial?  That has nothing to do with how he is viewed after the trial?

How many riot situations have you been in?  Personally, in a career of over 20 years in one form of police or another I have been in several.  And the last thing I would want in those situations is to have a loaded weapon.  Absolutely reckless.

"Why do you keep bringing up the issue of the media during the trial? "

Because that's the part that interests me, as it's most relevant to us.  Anyone with a slightly outré hobby or outlook is ripe for being smeared by the media as an extremist, and it could happen to any of us.

I received a very light and impersonal smearing several decades back when I appeared in some stock footage in a piece on xenophobic extremist Scotch nationalist.  That the footage was from a Historic Scotland reenactment of Bannockburn was neither here nor there to STV: it was enough for them to declare that my hatred for the English was so much that I liked to dress up and fight Englishmen with swords and axes.

Oh, and they actually showed footage of the English side, which I happened to be on that day to even the numbers.  But again, reality is irrelevant to the media when they're selling a story.

"And the last thing I would want in those situations is to have a loaded weapon."

Colonial rules apply to this one though.  Rittenhouse's first assailant was armed with a chain, his second or third with a skateboard (which are now habitually used as weapons), and his fourth assailant was armed with a pistol, and has expressed regret that he didn't shoot Rittenhouse, and was in the act of trying to do so when he was literally disarmed.

It comes down to whether we believe that him being armed was the cause of all that kicking off and him being attacked in the first place, and whether he'd have been safer being unarmed.  It seems that another mostly-peaceful-protestor had just fired nearby and that both Rittenhouse and the deranged child rapist arsonist attacker (who had made repeated direct threats to kill him) may have believed that the other had fired.

However, the jury decided otherwise, and that Rittenhouse's provocation was putting out the fires that deranged-child-rapist-arsonist had started.

Given that, his only real choices were to go armed, or not go at all.

Funnily enough, it was following the publicising of the attacks on him that the National Guard was finally sent in to settle the situation down, so Rittenhouse did actually achieve his goal bigly.

You don't go at all then.  Leave it to the professionals.