If causation is necessary for liability, only the rifleman with real bullets can be liable. But this seems counter-intuitive. If Victim can escape only by killing one of the causally ineffective riflemen, it seems hard to believe that this would be much harder to justify than killing the causally effective rifleman (Christie 2020: 382). This suggests that merely attempting to pose a threat may be enough for liability to harm, at least if the attempter is culpable (Tadros 2016a: 121–124).