I appreciate all of the feedback. I know this situation isn't a simple right vs. wrong or a simple win vs. lose scenario. Everyone has their own opinion of what should or should not have happened in this situation. I just wonder if the folks that are saying "you should have never even drawn your weapon" would say the same thing had I been whacked in the head with a ball bat, knocked unconscious and robbed? I have a feeling they would be saying "you should have been ready to fight off the attack" instead. But, I could be wrong. As far as running backwards.....doing so may have given me an extra second, but trying to outrun a man that is running forwards while you try to outrun him while running backwards.....well, you're not going to be able to put that much distance between you and them to feel comfortable enough to be able to think and think and think about what your next move will be. But every second counts so I did it anyways.
As far as SA, when my wife and I were first dating I always caught grief when we were out together. I was often accused of "not listening to her" or "looking at other women" (not saying that she wasn't right a few times
) but the fact was I was just being aware of our surroundings. Now she finds herself constantly scanning her surroundings. Tells me that I've rubbed off on her. But as I have said in a prior post, as well as another poster saying the same thing, it is impossible to maintain absolute SA. Have you ever tried to sneak up on a cat? Nearly impossible to do. Why? Because obviously cats are not like humans. They do not think about taxes, if that knocking noise in their truck is just from bad gas, if they will get that promotion at work or if they turned off the stove before they left the house. Humans on the other hand are always thinking about something. In fact, I don't know for sure that a masked man isn't about to shoot me in the back of my head because I am to busy and to focused on writing this sentence that you are reading right now. (and you don't know if you are about to be shot in the back of the head because you are to busy reading this)
Could this have been a tragedy? Absolutely. The same way that is a tragedy when a teenager sneaks out of his parents house only to be mistaken for a home invader and is shot by his father when trying to sneak back in. All of us has been in a "defensive shooting" in our own minds. We have all thought about it. But we think about being at Wal-Mart and a mass shooter coming in and us stopping him before he can do to much damage. Or we think about that thug that is trying to pull us from our vehicle so that he may car jack us and we blow his ass away instead. Problem is, if any of us are ever faced with a real threat, it may not be quite as obvious as we have pictured in our minds all of these years.
Have you ever seen a video where a man pulls a weapon on a store clerk in an attempt to rob him, and there is an armed citizen in the store as well, but the armed citizen has that deer in the head light look for 10 seconds before reacting? I remember a video of a man pulling a knife on a clerk in an attempt to rob him. What made this video so funny was the would be robber didn't pay attention to the fact that an on duty, uniformed LEO was right behind him standing in line waiting to make a purchase himself. But even the LEO stood there for a few seconds trying to process what he was seeing before taking action. I'm sure both the armed citizen as well as the LEO were in the same mind set of "am I really seeing this, is this really happening?"
My point being is that we are not always, if ever, going to encounter a situation the way that we have played it out in our minds. Life throws those curve balls so we should expect them.