You need to think about all this BEFORE you decide to carry a weapon. You are not John Law, or Rambo, or the Punisher. You do not have the right to inflict punishment on anyone, no matter what the circumstances. You are only entitled to protect your life, and the lives of the innocent people around you, if there is a grave, immediate and unavoidable threat. If you do anything wrong, you are going to go to jail for a long time.
Like do what wrong? Well, not be able to prove that the person you shot was capable of immediate use of deadly force that you were unable to protect yourself in any other way that responding with deadly force.
- Did you think he had a gun and it looked like he might be getting ready to reach for it before you drew your weapon?
- Did he threaten you with a knife from 10 feet away?
- Did you know who this person was, they had threatened you in the past and you were afraid he might hurt you?
- Had this person just finished shooting a clerk while robbing a liquor store, and was running away from you on his way to his getaway car?
- Was this person outside your home when you arrived, with your 65" flat screen TV and your wife's jewelry box in his hands?
- Is this the guy who had beaten you so badly about 6 months ago that you still ache when you walk after spending 4 weeks in the hospital? Did you see him on the street, confronted him and shoot him during the ensuing altercation?
- Were you walking down the street when you came upon a law enforcement officer wounded during a gun fire exchange? While you are there, an obvious gang banger runs past, the officer yells "Stop Him!!" and you shoot as he runs down the alley.
To be justified in using deadly force, you must be as pure as the driven snow. You can not just be in fear, you must be in so much fear that you are certain that if you do not act you or some innocent person will perish or be permanently and significantly disabled. It doesn't matter what happened 2 months ago, a week ago, an hour ago or 10 seconds ago. If you are not IMMEDIATELY in grave danger, you are not justified. The person could be Charles Manson, Jeffery Dahmer and Adolf Hitler all rolled in to one, but if he is not a direct and immediate threat to you at that moment there is no justification for shooting.
As civilians carrying a concealed gun, we are held to a different standard. We aren't put in situations like law enforcement where we can assume the worst and get away with it. You have to be so sure you had no other choice that you are prepared for actually being hurt in the process (I'm not saying you have to always wait for them to make the first move, but that may be the only way to be sure). Don't be that guy who proudly proclaims "I'll shoot first, and worry about straightening it out later". Or the guy who brashly says "I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6". Its not a game, or something to take a chance on. You are not going to be the guy whose situation becomes a case study every lawyer will study in school Look at it this way; if you make the wrong choice here, even a little bit, someone else will probably deciding exactly where you will eat, sleep, walk, talk and cry for a long time. That place will be prison, and I don't have to have been there to know you won't like it.
Practice with your weapon, so you know you can use it accurately and safely if the time comes. And prepare mentally, for the tremendous stress that occurs in deadly force encounters. But you also have to rehearse in your mind what the very limited circumstances are where you can use this force. There are no take-backs, no do-overs. You can't put the bullet back in the gun, or the life back in the mistaken victim. This is forever we are talking here. Treat it like the deadly serious situation it is.
And if you can't do that, LEAVE THE DAMN GUN AT HOME!!!! You are going to hurt some innocent person, get thrown in prison and make every single one of us that do take it seriously look even more like the gun toting vigilantes the public already thinks we are.
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