At least with this guy, he hit the bystander after firing 10 shots with one going astray as it were - not 600+.
My goal is to do the best that
I can.
It would be simpler to rationalize my screw-ups by finding someone who has screwed up even worse, but that's not how I approach life.
If in all cases, in your lifetime, it's call 911, and you sleep good at night, go with it.
It's hard for me to imagine a more useless response.
Do you think that the shooter, driven by his sense of moral obligation will sleep well tonight, knowing he has shot an innocent man?
This part is really, really simple.
The wrong guy got shot.
Someone got shot in a situation where no one should have gotten shot at all.
Someone shot their carry gun when they shouldn't have.
Someone shot someone with their carry gun when they meant to protect him.
That's bad and it shouldn't happen.
This part is not so simple.
Since we all carry guns, it would be very smart for us to see if we can look at what went wrong, how it went wrong, and to try to learn lessons from it. Lessons that might help us prevent, or at least reduce the chances of, our screwing up in a similar manner. That is productive and that should be our goal.
Saying it could happen to anyone is not productive. There are, as I've pointed out, ways to completely prevent it from happening. Sometimes calling 911 might be the best choice and it completely prevents the possibility of shooting the wrong person because there's no shooting at all taking place. Sometimes deadly force may be the only reasonable alternative, but now things are more complicated because once the shooting starts, there's always the chance of someone getting hurt who shouldn't. But that's real life. Real life is complicated. Real life sometimes requires hard decisions that can have terribly negative outcomes if the decision is wrong. In this type of situation, those who must have a
simple answer are going to be much better served with the simple answer of: "Call 911." than the simple answer of: "Do whatever your sense of moral obligation tells you to." If you doubt it, look at the case under discussion.
Saying that we don't need to worry because we'll have civil immunity is not productive. For one thing, it's not generally true. For another, if our goal is to live up to our sense of moral obligation, then shooting the wrong person is obviously NOT a way to achieve our goal, even if we aren't sued as a result.
Trying to dismiss further discussion by implying that those who advocate caution when intervening with deadly force simply aren't moral enough isn't productive. The fact is that sometimes even a strong sense of moral obligation to intervene needs to be tempered with an understanding of how wrong things can go if a person makes the wrong decision. It is NOT always true that it's better to do SOMETHING than nothing. In this case, it would have obviously been far better had the shooter done nothing at all. People who can't understand that
sometimes the wisest course of action is to do nothing at all shouldn't be carrying firearms.
Does that mean we should never intervene? No, but it does mean that extreme care is required to insure a positive outcome because it's so easy and there are so many ways to screw up. It doesn't meant that once we decide to intervene it's ok to stop thinking, draw and start directing rounds in the general direction of the threat because we're acting out of a sense of moral obligation, or because we believe we won't be sued, or because we think that shooting the wrong person can happen to anyone.
While it's easy to see that something went wrong, it's much harder to see the lessons to be learned and to understand how to apply those lessons in our own lives. But that's part of the responsibility that we take on when we choose to go armed.
