Let me take this from a design standpoint:
You have a problem: Someone is acting or threatening to act in a way that would harm or destroy you and/or your family?
What is your goal?
Your goal is not to kill this person. Revenge is not factored in here, so your only goal is to save you and/or your family.
Your goal is to protect you and/or your family. His goal is to harm you and/or your family.
By transitive property, your goal is to stop him from accomplishing his goal.
Now, there are many ways to stop an attacker, ranging from trying to bore him to sleep (highly ineffectual, and quite frankly, stupid as Hell
) to trying to stop his major body functions (highly effective).
The logical person (and the person that values his and his family's lives) will choose the most effective method: stopping the attacker's body altogether.
Now, this may change in the future, but the most effective way to stop a person's body entirely is to kill them.
Thus, also by transitive property, your goal is to kill them.
I think the most effective way to accomplish
that goal has been hashed out again and again on this forum.
Now, I broke this down to its most basic parts not to be insulting to any boardmember's intelligence, but to illustrate something you all already know:
It's not about the perpetrator
deserving to die or any such emotional dilemma, thinking like that leads down the road of the conscience, which really has no place in such an absolutely do-or-die scenario.
It's about what you are trying to accomplish. I've already demonstrated that your goal, through some assumptions is to stop the perpetrator.
Now, aiming to merely harm someone, as opposed to aiming to kill them, is more difficult, has a lower incidence of successfully completing the goal (stopping the attacker), and may actually be less humane.
I will not tell you whether to attempt to harm or to kill, I accept that you may have mitigating or complicating circumstances or preferences that may change things a bit, but for me the choice is relatively clear.
I would shoot to kill. For the same reason I would choose caliber X over caliber Y: it accomplishes my goal.
DISCLAIMER: This post is written in a very authoritative fashion. It breaks the situation down into an
overly simple equation to illustrate a point. I do not assume anything about the intelligence or experience of anyone on this board. I merely wanted to illustrate how I see the issue: as a problem, plain and simple.
May you all have long and uneventful lives (unless, of course, eventful is what you wish for),
-Nolo