Irrelevant and immaterial. If he intended to use his firearm for self defense he should have been competent enough with it to make it ready under stress without having an ND. I would not have accepted that from one of my soldiers or from one of the police officers I worked with after I retired from the Army. Had his ND went through his door and a window in a house across the street and hit an innocent bystander he would be in serious trouble, so no I'm not about to cut him any slack because he lived in California. California storage laws and stress are not an excuse for an ND.
I don't excuse the ND, although I do think that the CA storage laws could have been a contributing factor. But legally, morally - it doesn't matter what the laws are in CA for storing a firearm, the homeowner owns that ND.
I do have to ask though, in your years in the military and as a LEO, are you saying that you never saw a ND? I'm not saying you had one yourself, but someone around you or on the same base?
My point was twofold: first, that CA storage laws made it harder for the homeowner to react in a high stress environment. Can you agree that having to do more complex things under stress lessens the probability of getting everything right vs. doing a smaller set of things? The fact that he has to find a magazine and load it just gives him more chances to mess it up - not find the mag, or grab it upside down, or not fully insert the mag, or grab the wrong mag, or ...
And lastly, the storage laws slowed him down in his response. Had the guy at the door just kicked it in and started firing the homeowner could have still been trying to find the mag or to get the mag in.
Once again you have to think of where those rounds through the door are likely to end up. The guy lived in a subdivision with houses all around him. Can you predict the trajectory of a bullet after it's fired through a barrier?
To use your words, this is irrelevant and immaterial to our disagreement. I have already stated that firing through the door was a very bad thing that could have very serious consequences to both the homeowner or a bystander, so there is no disagreement there.
Where we seem to disagree is I think that if you put 10000 people in that situation, more than one of them is going to fire back through the door because it is very hard to be shot at, you yourself are armed, and yet you do not shoot back. My impression from your statements is that you expect that the answer is zero. Personally, I would never fire through an opaque door (for many of the reasons that you and other have given), but I am pragmatic enough to realize that many people would. In fact in our very small sample size here, we have already found two...
Other folks have pointed out the LEO/former military comparison is not relevant, and I agree with them. I'll also note that even for former military the level of training varies wildly. Even if one served as a Marine, the level of training and practice is vastly different between someone that has an infantry MOS vs. someone that has a cook or driver MOS.
Getting things as close to 100% right is one of the reasons this forum exists, it's why we have these discussions and it's why we train. We aren't going to get the number of people who get close to 100% right to be the norm if we excuse getting things wrong.
I agree that it's important to strive for 100%. I did not say that the homeowner did everything right or that he was a role model. And I can pick on him too, as I would never have given any form of media the video from my camera. But I stand by my original point that the group here was too hard on him, and that the homeowner also did a lot of things right. It's _striving_ for 100% correct, not _demanding_ 100% correct. And besides noting the things the homeowner did poorly, you also need to note what he did right. Giving positive feedback on things done right is just as important as giving negative feedback on things done wrong.[/QUOTE]