It’s cop logic. Doesn’t matter whether his life was actually threatened — no evidence thus far that it was — what matters is he can *say* he *feared* for his life, and therefore the use of lethal force is justified.
And in fact, the local authorities are already treating Rittenhouse as if he is a cop, and entitled to language that obliterates his agency and treats the death of two people as the result of forces beyond anyone’s control. (Except maybe their own.)
Pretty explicit in all of this is the extent to which police and their cheerleaders see these right-wing militia types as essentially performing the same work as formal law enforcement, not crime fighting but the maintenance of (racial, gender, class) “order.”
for example
