I agree that this is a sensitive subject for most of us who have been through it.
I have often avoided this question, and I have also answered it honestly many times, but I have never threatened anyone who has asked. I'd say that threatening to 'forcefully rearrange someone's thinking' is bit harsh and likely to get you incarcerated.
My first experience with a shooting death other than animals was my best friend in second grade. I wasn't present when it happened, but I lost a friend, and my innocence. His own father wigged out and to killed him with a shotgun. The guy tried to kill his older brother, and his younger sister, too, but they managed to get out of the house.
The kids had barricaded themselves in the bedroom by tipping the bed against the door. The father shot through the door and the bed and killed my friend while the older brother (who was still in grade school himself) was lowering the little sister out the window. The older brother then, seeing his brother dead, jumped out the window and ran into the nearby woods with the sister to hide from the father. The father managed to get into the the room and found his youngest son dead by his own hand, and his other children gone. He then put the 12 gauge into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
That was my first real lesson that those adults trusted to care for children aren't always to be trusted.
The second time I was actually present for the event. My older sister and I were at her friend's house. I was twelve, my sister was fourteen, her friend was fifteen, and his sister was thirteen. While we were there his sister came out of her parents bedroom with a S&W .357. I asked them to put the pistol away because it wasn't a toy. All of the others, including my sister, laughed at me for "being a baby". I told them to put it away or I would leave. The brother and sister begun pointing the weapon at each other and saying bang, that sort of thing.
I was just getting up to leave when the sister laughed and said her brother, and I'll never forget this, "I'm going to shoot you."
The brother replied, "I dare you."
I turned to tell her not to point the gun at him just as she pulled the trigger. The gun was loaded and his brains ended up on the wall behind the chair he was sitting in.
Maybe that's why I had an irrational dislike of the distinctive look of the Smith & Wesson for so long. I guess maybe it is human nature to tend to blame the object in such a circumstance.
I had to shoot people when I was in combat. I used mostly an M-16 but had a couple of instances with a 1911. Both worked quite well. I have no problem relying on the stopping power of a .45 acp. I have also done my job up close and personal with a knife. It's not something I'm proud of, it just is.
The only firefight I have been in since I got out of the military happened when I was working as a currier. I had four guys try and take the bag I was carrying. They had 9mms and I had a Ruger Redhawk .44mag. They went for spray and pray, I kept my cool and place my shots fairly well. Two of them died, and the other two fled in their car. Once that .44 started barking and two of them fell the others didn't like the odds, I guess. I only fired three shots.
They found the car less than two miles away. One of my rounds had apparently gone through one of the bad guys and hit the cylinder head causing the engine to lose its vital fluids. The Buick bled to death a short time later and the remaining bad guys fled on foot. As far as I know they were never caught.
I've also had to brandish my weapon a couple of times and both times the idiots who had threatened me suddenly remembered an appointment they were late for.
Self defense using a firearm is no myth. If it were, firearms would have gone the way of the dinosaur. Behavior that doesn't work goes extinct, especially if it gets you dead.
