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Although I have been pessimistic about American race relations since President Obama held a press conference on national television to insert himself into an otherwise unnewsworthy local crime by informing the country that 'if [he] had a son, he would look at lot like Trayvon' - it seems to be a good bit worse than I had feared. There's a truly open and unabashed fervor behind the death of white people, which I had in some ways previously chalked up to still being just a bit of 'those kids on tumblr'.
Read some of the comments in the last few hours from Karmelo Anthony's givesendgo fundraiser. Karmelo is suspected of stabbing a young white boy to death. His family has already raised more than half a million dollars with no end in sight.
https://www.givesendgo.com/HelpKarmelo
It's worth noting that in at least one place (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1jzgmzs/please_explain_karmelo_anthony_support/), the response to this from self-professed liberals has been pretty uniformly, "stabbing people is wrong."
that is worth noting, but it's also worth noting that their fundraiser was allowed to operate, in contrast to those of, for example, Gardner and Rittenhouse. This is a concrete way in which our society observably treats red-tribe lawful self-defense as strictly worse than blue-tribe lawless murder.
It's really not that concrete at all. In the rittenhouse case, rittenhouse claimed to be provoked into acting in self defense (credibly) but his opposition claims (also credibly) that he deliberately created a situation such that that provocation would happen and he would have an excuse to commit violence. In this case, the stabber also claims that he was acting in self-defense (unknown credibleness), but no one (so far) claims that he was looking for an excuse. Plus there's the additional matter of him using a knife, rather than a gun, and killing one person instead of many. The situations at hand are neither symmetric nor complementary.
Personally speaking, I do martial arts, and I would consider pulling a knife on someone who wants to throw hands a reasonable, proportionate act. There are far too many ways to get permanently injured or killed from blunt trauma. I would not consider it reasonable to then attack them with that knife if they backed off-- but maybe the football player saw the knife, assumed there was going to be some stabbing, grabbed for it-- and as a consequence, got Rittenhouse'd. Is that what happened? I don't know. But I'm content to say, "stabbing people is bad" and let the rest sort itself out through the legal system.
(I don't know anything about the gardener case. When I look up "gardener murder" I get a convict who committed a bunch of rapes and murders.)
What? What martial arts do you do where it's acceptable or proportionate to pull a knife? Kali?
I think I could beat up the "average" person (inclusive of women, I'm not good enough that I can confidently claim I would beat up the average guy.) But if I got into a heated argument with someone weaker than me, it would be ridiculous to expect them to just concede to my physical prowess. Therefore, I would consider it a proportional act for them to pull a knife on me. Similarly, if I'm in a reversed situation, where I'm facing a black belt or prizefighter in their prime, I would rather pull a knife than let them give me brain damage. In full space of hypotheticals, I think the fight would de-escalate from there the vast majority of the time-- few martial artists are stupid enough to actually fight someone who'd afraid and has a knife, including myself, but I can't strictly exclude the chance of conflict.
I do not know of any place on Earth where a woman or a weaker guy pulling a knife in response to someone bigger "unconsciously clenching their fists" would be seen as anything but an unstable psycho as opposed to "acting proportionally". It is not in fact ridiculous to expect people to prefer being slightly intimidated rather than go for mortal threats.
It would be a context-dependent response, and I'm not convinced that it was the right context in this exact case, even if the defendant's claims of bullying were true. But it's really not that hard to imagine scenarios were even motivationally innocent behavior from a physically threatening individual can be reasonably perceived as a threat.
Human imagination is a wellspring that flows eternal. Can you point to actual cases of knife use against bullies, even non-fatally, where the knife-wielder was considered in the right?
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If it was one-on-one in a dark alleyway and prime Mike Tyson is coming at me, I may pull a knife to attempt to de-escalate. But Karmelo Anthony was the one trespassing to begin with, with no real threat of any meaningful physical harm beyond his removal from the premises, and he chose to massively escalate the situation by pulling a knife and then to actually use the knife.
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