At engagements from 1-4 yards, people don't fucking miss that often.
Someone doesn't need to be a practiced marksman to make standard shots at that distance. Anyone can do it, which is what makes guns dangerous in the first place. Ware dumped his magazine into two "trained" guys at close range and they had no time to do anything.
Rittenhouse should have made it obvious, but just because someone is an unathletic nerd without motor skills doesn't mean they can't be dangerous.
Thus, chasing down or tackling a maniac with a gun is a context-specific action. Only worked in the Rittenhouse case because his back was turned.
Don't be stupid.
I'll give you that. From a principled standpoint, we aren't going to overcome systemic violence through sporadic incidents of hyper-individualist retribution. The situation calls for principled, organized resistance, not egotistical acts of self-destructive vigilante justice. The problem is, the working class lacks this discipline, and even among the minute fraction of the working class which employs disciplined, theoretically informed practice, these disciplines vary greatly. We should work to educate and organize the working class, but by the time we have a spontaneous uprising on our hands, the die is already largely cast and we are forced to work with what we've got.
We probably shouldn't celebrate the violence. The violence is just a harbinger of worse times to come. On the other hand we cannot fall into the trap of blaming the movement for the retribution inflicted upon it by the state. I see the celebration as an inevitable knee-jerk reaction against the overbearing social expectation for us to shed a tear for death of people who signed up to execute the repressive functions of the capitalist state. Everything in our culture is designed to make us see the police and armed forces as invincible and omnipotent, so people will inevitably celebrate the rare occasions where we are reminded that this is not entirely true.
Unfortunately, I don't see a way out. With every layoff, every eviction, every medical-induced bankruptcy, and every death caused by Covid, every home turned to ash by climate change, the situation of the working class will only grow more precarious. We were already in an unprecedented state of precarity before the pandemic started. Considering the conditions we are facing, I expect there are many people out there who are reasonably not in a sound state of mental health. Now take all these people and put them in a place where they have nothing to lose, and the violence seems inevitable - regardless of our feelings about it.
If we refuse to celebrate it, even if we deem it as counterproductive, I think it will only continue. The police aren't pulling us over for tag lights at rifle point quite yet, and we shouldn't pretend things are as bad as they can possibly be, but in the grand scheme of things I don't see any options besides capitulation or escalation.
The takeaway for me is that we must choose our battles carefully - but I think we all already know that. Movements are chaotic, and a lot of things will happen which are beyond our control. Even the most disciplined movements are vulnerable to agents provocateur, and the state will certainly respond with these measures if we don't sufficiently reach the threshold of violence they wish to portray in their reactionary media campaigns.
I guess just don't get caught up in the blood lust.
Thank you for stating this better than I could have.