Save Our State
Regular Member
Not necessarily.
We can't look at these things from the viewpoint of someone who is trained, and then forget the length and breadth of human emotion and attitude. First, we can come up with the wrong answers. But, even more important in my mind, we can hand the government more power to cage people. Also, I am especially wary of the whole "carrying a gun is an awesome responsibility" thing. Far too often in our society responsibility is put across as blame or a way to avoid blame ("you had better do this or you will be held responsible for any negative outcome!"). Any particular self-defense angle or tactic being put across by a gun guru or self-defense expert is only as good as that instructor's judgement. I'm not willing to take a dictum, for example, "you are responsible for every shot you fire", and use it to hang everyone.
I recall a very good example of mis-used responsibility. In Mas Ayoob's video Judicious Use of Deadly Force, he repeatedly uses the awesome-responsibility angle and the you'll-be-hanged angle. His belief that his students are irresponsible adolescents who need to be hammered and scared positively pours out as an undercurrent from some of his comments. OK, am I supposed to suddenly adopt his attitude just because he thinks he needs to approach his students that way in order to get them to act responsibly?
Do you see what I am getting at? If we take an instructor's principles that include heavy weight on the responsibility angle as a student scare tactic, and turn around and apply them to everybody, we may condemn people who don't deserve it.
Back to human emotion and attitude. In the OP situation, I can easily see an untrained person in such a situation. I can also easily see a scaredy-cat person in such a situation. You know, such people do exist. Not everybody has the nerves of Audy Murphy or John Basilone. Reason deserts them in times of heavy stress. Some of us are basically saying that if such a person is untrained--meaning his never been taught the possibilities in such an encounter--he now has to think up those possibilities at exactly the time his reason is deserting him, at exactly the time his whole attention is fixed on that sound down the corridor in high fear, his ability to think frozen.
There is a big wide difference between an untrained scaredy-cat's mistake and somebody who celebrates in the street and fires into the air.
We are worlds apart on this I'm afraid.