The Unarmed Man with a Knife

“Instead of standing there and teaching a cop, when there’s an unarmed person coming at them with a knife or something, you shoot them in the leg instead of in the heart is a very different thing. There’s a lot of different things that could change,” Biden said in a meeting with community leaders at Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Del.

[https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-bidens-terrible-gun-advice/]

I actually had to look that up because (and I hate to admit this) I couldn’t believe that even Joe Biden said that, but apparently he did. The article quoted above provides some very apt, very common sense analysis on why this is patently stupid advice, so I’m mostly going to stay away from that, but I will say that in my opinion, the article was just a little too soft on the “patently stupid” observation. It takes about two seconds for a man (even an unarmed man) with a knife to charge you from ten feet away and mortally wound or instantly kill you. If you are not in mortal danger, you don’t use deadly force. If you are in mortal danger, you shoot to kill. Even leaving aside the stupidity of risking your life, shooting to wound would leave the shooter open to the charge that he was not actually in fear for his life and therefore the use of deadly force was not justified.

Off to prison you go!

But I sat down at my keyboard tonight to record one simple observation: of all the stupid, nonsensical, totally incoherent thoughts that former Vice President Joe Biden has expressed, surely this one has to rank near the top. An unarmed man with a knife or something? Something like a sword? Something like a handgun, maybe? Or a hand grenade? Maybe the unarmed man has a chainsaw? Or perhaps the unarmed man is armed with a semi-automatic “assault weapon” with a “high-capacity magazine”?

We all know that Joe Biden is a walking gaffe machine, but this is just too much.