Hey Sins:
You’ve been around FR for a while. You appear to be an “abstract” thinker. Which is all well and good.
But until you have been by yourself, surrounded by bad guys, there is another side to life.
Let me ask you one simple question: Have you ever had the overwhelming taste of a copper penny in your mouth, when NO copper penny is IN your mouth?
This is not a trick question, not an attempt at humor, not sarcasm, and not a means to ridicule you.
Those who know what I am talking about, need no explanation. Those who don’t, can’t. Until that day they taste it. Then they know, and can never explain it to those who don’t.
The street has no mercy.
I’ve spent years training in martial arts. I’ve being doing Jiu Jitsu for 7 years and Krav Maga for 2. I’ve undergone pressure drills that have built up to facing someone really making a genuine effort to take me out with baseball bats, coshes and metal chains. Its disconcerting at first, but we built up to it. At the end of the day, it was practicable to do so, because cocking it up meant, at worst a trip to the hospital (and I’ve seen it happen many times), and it was unlikely that any bystanders could have gotten hurt by what we did.
I’ve never had to use violence in real life since I left school, fortunately, but I came pretty close last year when I was accosted by three surly tw*ts (insert vowel of your choice) who would have mugged me if I hadn’t made it very clear from what I said and from what I imagine was an angry look of calm on my face that I was ready to kick all their asses or go down trying. I was definitely terrified and I know that if I’d had to fight, it wouldn’t have been anything like as nuanced as anything I’d done in training.
This was happening in broad daylight near a busy road by the way, and let me tell you, the idea that was forming in my terrified mind was to piledrive the nearest one into the path of an oncoming car before dealing with the others (my state of mind wasn’t making any allowance for the consequence for the driver). So I know from that that being scared for your life makes your judgement a lot poorer, even if you are trained.
To be honest, now that I’ve had a chance to read and reflect (even from some of the less polite posters here) I can get that what the lady did was understandable, but the potential consequences to bystanders are still worth considering, and perhaps that is why the police are not happy about the idea of people blazing away at bad guys with guns unless it is a last resort.