1. How often is the specific type of firearm used by the defender reported? It's often the case, in my experience, that reporting doesn't even differentiate between revolvers and semi-auto handguns, let alone provide capacity information.
2. How often is information provided in reporting about self-defense encounters that would allow one to make the assessment that weapon choice/capacity was a factor in the outcome of a defensive encounter? In my experience, since it's rare to report how many rounds the defender had in the gun, and often how many were fired isn't reported, it's very rare to be able to nail down the cause of an outcome to anything to do with the weapon. Not because weapons never affect the outcome of defensive encounters, but because there's almost never enough information provided to be able to say one way or the other.
This caveat pretty much allows the dismissal of any incidents provided by calling them "random data points that don't occur with any sense of regularity" unless someone can come up with a large number of qualifying incidents. It's worth noting that this is a quite a dramatic departure of the the stance taken just a few posts up this thread with the statement: "I would be happy with just some anecdotes of real events that could be discussed."
The caveat, combined with a rigid definition of what kinds of events qualify for consideration makes it really very easy to disqualify events from consideration if that's the goal.
Anyway with the understanding that it will be pretty easy to label this event as a "random data point", here's an incident, that shows multiple determined attackers who don't break off the attack when surprised by what they thought was an unarmed attacker. They retreated to their car initially but then came back towards him after he stopped shooting and fired additional shots as the engagement progressed. Does this incident qualify? Well, it's a good example of why if one places enough restrictions on what kind of a scenario qualifies that it can be nearly impossible to find ones that do.
Was there a negative outcome? It doesn't appear either of the "good guys" were hurt, but that information isn't provided. It doesn't seem to be from lack of trying on the bad guys' part. Do we disqualify the event because the bad guys couldn't hit what they were aiming at? I guess we can if the goal is to disqualify events from consideration.
Did the defender have to break off and run due to an empty gun or did he run because he thought it was a great tactic or because he was trying to save his truck? We don't really know because we don't know if the gun was empty and we don't know what he was thinking. Do we disqualify the event because of that? Again, I guess we can if that's the goal.
So, for whatever it's worth, here's an interesting real-world scenario to look at. One can learn lessons from it or dismiss it from consideration for any number of quite valid-sounding reasons.
