Thank everything you can possibly thank that the laws surrounding self defense are not this vapidly dumb.
This is the uno reverse dark mirror variant of Magic Talisman syndrome.
What is Magic Talisman syndrome?
It is the belief that owning a device changes your circumstance, not the proper use of the device.
Owning a car, a violin, a fire extinguisher, a first aid kit, or even a gun, only makes you one thing. An owner.
Risk compensation effects come into play, more on that soon, but the short of it is that ‘buying a gun makes you safer’. False.
The title concept, espoused by Binger most recently, is the bizarro opposing view variant of magic talisman syndrome, the idea that bringing a firearm into a dangerous or contentious situation makes you liable for any and all chaos that comes post arrival or a specific negative outcome by mere possession.
It is a degrading vein of thought that removes the human behavior equations and the communicative equations of threat perception and response. It instead replaces that nuance with a giant game of, ‘He started it!’
It most egregiously commits one sin above all though,
It seeks to codify that someone with a firearm has nothing to fear, physically, from anyone without a firearm. It’s utter nonsense but it is the crux of one of the arguments Binger used to try and illustrate that Rosenbaum was not a threat to Rittenhouse.
You have just as much physically to fear from another human being if you are armed as if you are unarmed, their ability to cause harm to you or to others is not altered in any way by you being armed. You are simply in possession of an effective response to stop immediate harm. That response is in no way limited to being harmed only by other firearms, it is the degree of harm that you are under threat of.
In addition, they are trying to use the ‘Why’d you shoot X many rounds’ when the first shot to the pelvis could have been disabling. This, again, completely disregards the human elements of the equation. The perception and processing speed of what Rittenhouse (or anyone else) could understand between the time they began firing because they felt they must and then choosing to stop because they’ve perceived an effect on the threat source.
All the shots Rittenhouse fired at Rosenbaum were in quick succession, they stopped when Rosenbaum was down. It wasn’t shoot, pause, shoot, pause, shoot, and it shouldn’t be. That isn’t how any modern defense is taught, because to do so would be dangerous to the defender. It would put the defender’s life in more danger than it already is (life threatening) by mandating that they take an action that extends the length of time they are at risk to ‘check’ the threat and see if they are reasonably disabled between shots.
It is a nonsense defense, it relies on third party knowledge that nobody can possibly observe in the time frames involved in a fight. The reason defensive shooting emphasizes multiple effective shots and watching for a positive reaction is just that you are already in a situation where seconds count.
You wouldn’t be asked to use a fire extinguisher this way. It isn’t use one little spritz into the very dangerous flames and see if that takes care of the fire, you fire the extinguisher at the base of the flames until the fire is out. You use it until you observe a positive effect on the problem.
You wouldn’t use a tourniquet this way either. You wouldn’t wrap up a bleeding limp (or where a limb once was) and then click it or twist it one turn at a time and wait to see the exact pressure you have a positive effect, you crank it down and stop the bleeding.
We are talking about emergency situations where we have already left behind the possibility of a measured response. The response we need to utilize instead is one that has immediate or near immediate desired effect on the problem. The possibility that we use more force against the problem than was strictly necessary is nearly certain, conservation of resource is not the concern until an immediate positive effect on the problem is observed. At that time people can switch gears back to measured responses.
