When your fellow lefty tries to murder you, I can see why you would switch pretty quickly.

Why? To put it in concrete terms, the person that tried to assassinate Trump was, by all accounts, a hard-right conservative. Would it be reasonable to expect Trump to make a hard left turn? I've been sexually assaulted by a gay man; would I be reasonable in taking that experience, and extrapolating that to mean that all gay men were just lying in wait to sexually assault straight men?

The truth is that people that truly believe in their core values don't tend to change those values overnight. It's almost always a long, drawn-out process, regardless of how deeply traumatic an event might be. The speed at which Rittenhouse changed course leads me to believe that he was either never left of center in the first place, or doesn't hold any moral/ethical beliefs very deeply. Given that he is, by all accounts, quite dumb, it could readily be the latter.

I support college for inmates, even if they are never getting out. Education is a good thing.

Sure. And I agree. We need significant criminal justice reform, even for people that we've decided are too dangerous to ever get out. But most people will get out, eventually, and they need some kind of opportunities if they aren't going to end up getting recycled right back into the system. I've found that approaching prison reform from a utilitarian perspective appeals more to people that trend conservative than moral appeals about education being good for it's own sake, and therefore something that we should be making available to prisoners. Esp. since there are a lot of people--mostly conservatives--that will say, 'well, I had to pay for it, so why should someone else get it for free?'

By protecting the property

...That's not a very leftist view, TBH. Valuing property over the people themselves is more of a typical capitalist view. To quote MLK Jr., "But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again."

I started my career as a combat medic in the Army. We carried rifles.

Not my point. My point was that he had very, very limited training in dealing with medical emergencies. In a real medical emergency, he would have been absolutely useless. AFAIK, he hasn't taken a basic 'stop the bleed' class, much less a combat lifesaver course. (And, TBH, I haven't been able to find the latter anywhere in my area, which makes it prohibitively expensive, but I'm at least up for stopping most bleeds and have a solid IFAK that I keep on my gun belt.)

I will say the ironic part is only at a Democrat riot can you shoot three people and hit two child molesters and three felons.

And yet, here we are, talking about a Republican presser where the target was both a felon and a rapist, and has been found to be such in court. So ima say no, Dems don't have the lock on felonies or sex crimes.