Wood: Armed Self-Defense Videos Instill a Dangerous, Unrealistic ‘Sheepdog Mentality’

The [self-defense shooting video] channels aren’t sinister in themselves. [John] Correia combines old school moralism—together with common reminders that you’re accountable to Jesus and the legislation for each spherical you hearth, and that acts of brutality towards the susceptible are among the many worst you’ll be able to commit—with excessive violence. I got here away from a day with Correia considering that the world might be a safer place as a result of he’s packing warmth.

But the movies themselves are insidious. Most folks within the United States, permitting for wild variation in race, class, and formal training, are victims of violence solely very hardly ever. Watching the movies, nonetheless, invitations you to simulate violence at a rare fee, much greater than we’re mentally outfitted to handle. (Correia himself has seen tens of 1000’s of them, and he posts a brand new one to his channel about a few times a day.) The impact of those movies is to habituate viewers to that violence, to coach them to think about themselves in it. Training your self to think about one thing makes it appear extra more likely to occur, and primes your instincts to react to it—and, I believe, provoke that violent response and overdo it when circumstances could possibly be resolved extra peacefully.

Rittenhouse seems to have been residing in a fantasy world what place police and automobile dealerships are extra endangered than unarmed Black males in site visitors stops, and what place he was a warrior and self-defender, relatively than a teenager who foolishly enrolled himself in a midwestern model of the Children’s Crusade. I can solely think about his concern when he noticed the gang coming for him—and the gang’s concern, when it noticed {that a} near-child was wildly firing a rifle higher suited to an individual with judgment and good coaching. I don’t count on that the jury will likely be forgiving.

– Graeme Wood in Kyle Rittenhouse, Kenosha, and the Sheepdog Mentality