That said, I've read a lot of books, and I listen to a lot of lawyers who focus in this space.
It's hard to blame the average person for being completely ignorant. It's easier to blame people who couple the complete ignorance with displays of certainty. It's also weird when people in places of authority say things that they should know are simply logically wrong.
The Rittenhouse case brought heaps of ignorance to the forefront, even moreso than the Zimmerman case. The thing with most of the rhetoric coming from the "Hang Kyle!" crowd is that it came from willful ignorance. The illiberal Left doesn't like guns carried by anybody who isn't LGBT. They tend to think that everybody who does something bad is only doing it because of poverty, unless the person is a cop. Even if it's a white guy shooting another white guy in self-defense, they try to bring intersectionality into their evaluations. Overall, they have a fundamentally Stalinist interpretation of proportionality in regard to self-defense.
I expect the illiberal Left to not know their assholes from a hole in the ground on this issue, because they don't believe in any of the principles that led to the legal philosophy of self-defense. Also, what became clear in regard to Rittenhouse was that most of them are just looking for excuses to throw political opponents in prison.
What gets to me is that I've met firearms and self-defense instructors who get simple principles wrong. The dude teaching my class yesterday was aware of the Rittenhouse case, and he still said three times that you can't use your gun against a person who is attacking you with his fists.
Granted, a lot of students wanted some strangely pointed answers about what you can and can't do when you're defending yourself, and this guy wasn't a lawyer either; but, you've at least gotta get the basic concept behind proportionality.
It's an uncomfortable reality that, if you do have to use a weapon to defend yourself, your fate is largely predicted on the DA, and possibly twelve people, agreeing with you that your actions quality under the parameters of innocence, imminence, proportionality, reasonableness. So, it's not an easy thing to tell people who want a gun for self-defense.
Basically, you're telling them that they can do everything right and still go to prison for the rest of their lives if Alvin Bragg or Kim Foxx is their DA, and they don't get lucky with the jury.
Still, it's wrong to make the blanket claim that proportionality means that you need to follow a strict "pistols at dawn" principle.
A few years ago, a guy in Chicago was attacked by an unarmed man who gouged his eyes and bit off an ear with his bare hands. Of course the victim would have been allowed to use a gun if he had one, and he didn't live in a city with dumb gun laws. He also wouldn't have to wait until the attacker started gouging his eyes.
Women who carry guns don't have to wait and see if the rapist has a gun before they take the bastard out.
Of course we need qualify under the four standards of innocence, imminence, proportionality reasonableness, and, in some really dumb states, the fifth factor of avoidance to justify the use of deadly force. But, again, these are principles and concepts. My ex-girlfriend was five-foot nothing and about ninety pounds. If she were being accosted and aggressively threatened by somebody my size, of course I would deem it reasonable and proportional for her to use a gun. God created man; Samuel Colt made us equal.
Still, I can't deny that there are ideologues out there who seem to believe that the law should be that proportionality should be about the weapon. It's a popular enough idea that it was the policy of the Soviet Union for decades. It seems to be the desired policy of the illiberal Left that people on the perceived bottom of the privilege chart, and political allies should be allowed to defend themselves; but, anybody to the right of Bernie Sanders should just "take the beating."
The reality is that, as somebody who does carry a gun for self-defense, I know the risks that remain even if I acted in self-defense and was clearly and completely in the right. The problem is when people on my side, who stand up for the right of good people to defend themselves, get this stuff wrong even in our own circles.
There are enough people in this country who even wanna Eli Dicken serve some jail time, or support laws that would have landed him in prison for several years just on possession charges. There are more people who simply think that, in any fight, no matter what, the person with the gun is immediately the bad guy. It's not helpful for fellow 2A people to get any of our rhetoric wrong when it comes to the philosophy and the laws of self-defense, and create any confusion about when it is right to use a gun on another human being, and especially when it's wrong to use a gun on another human being.