“Never point your gun at anything you do not intend to shoot.” — Firearm Safety: 10 Rules of Safe Gun Handling
There is a false logic that has been embedded in gun laws. That logic is that the having a gun gives the holder the right to use it in self-defense, even if the holder creates the threat situation in the minds of everyone else merely by having the gun.
WI is an open-carry state. Therefore it would be legal for someone of age (let’s ignore that issue) to legally (and ignore that one too) possess and carry a firearm, even a weapon of war such as an AR-15. The fact that someone doing so is implicitly threatening others merely by possessing and displaying the weapon of war in virtually any context, such as a grocery store or even a street during a protest, not only is not acknowledged in such open carry laws — in fact the threat could arguably be the intrinsic intent of the law.
So if others understandably see the holder of the AR-15 implicitly as a threat — or worse yet see that person shoot somebody else in cold blood and therefore explicitly as a threat — it would be those others who legitimately could claim self defense in forcibly disarming the holder of the AR-15. This is precisely the logic presented by the NRA in the specious argument that “all it takes to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” One wonders what would have happened if someone had gunned down Kyle Rittenhouse in the street where he executed two people.
However, the basis of “stand your ground” laws and the “logic” employed in the Rittenhouse case is that armed people are entitled to use their firearms to defend themselves, even if they create the threat situation, say by stalking a teenager on the way home from a convenience store, or by roaming streets in a protest and shooting other people. It is almost impossible without the most perfectly timed and captured video evidence to prove that armed person instead provoked the violence and therefore cannot claim self-defense, and usually by then it is far too late for the person on the receiving end of the firearm.
This fallacy is impossible to defeat unless you break at least one of its premises, the most obvious one being that individuals who are not part of a well-regulated militia nevertheless have the right to own military hardware and parade it around wherever they feel like. And deaths are the result.