I doubt Skald has any doubt about my answer, but, for the record, yes, I can and would kill if necessary for self defense or defense of another. Hope I’m never in that situation.
I’m useless in a fight. I panic and freeze.
I think it reasonable and good to kill to protect, but I am not a person you want watching your back. I am far more likely to be disarmed than to recognize when to pull the trigger.
I have been thinking quite a bit about this, as I have recently rehabbed my late uncle’s rifle, and am the owner of a gun for the first time in my life.
I believe I would- the most concerning thing to me would be that in hesitation I would fail to act in time, not that I would be incapable of action.
I doubt, however, that I would have the thing to hand, as I don’t carry a loaded gun with me, at any time.
I have indirectly agreed to allow strangers to die by accepting the existence of our current police force and its operating police procedures - while I might disagree with individual actions I agree with their overall need to do so at times. If Im willing to agree to that, then I should be willing to do it myself in theory.
So really the only issue is how I would be in the crunch I guess. Given I havent had scads of training, choking has a fair chance of happening, or an insufficient attempt.
Otara
Nothing wrong with that. Even Captain Kirk said he’d rather run than fight. 
Hmm. I know you’re a lawyer; do you do criminal defense? If yes, how would you advise a client who had done what you just described?
The only reason I’m relatively sure I’d risk my life for my sisters, wife, & such is that I have a bad temper I have to fight to control. Having started a shoving match for a stupid reason in my youth, I’m fairly – well confident is the wrong wrong – I’m inclined to suspect that I’d do something stupid.
I made the conscious decision that I am willing to kill in defense of myself or others when I bought a gun and the permit to carry it.
I am also taking martial arts so that hopefully I will have other options should that circumstance arise.
I beg your pardon?
Replied in PM so as not to hijack own thread.
Responding without reading thread.
I would kill without hesitation in all circumstances but that of a stranger. I am assuming of course that my options are limited an I do not have the option of restraining the assailant in any fashion. Given the option I will always choose to attempt to subdue before inflicting lethal force, though I will not hesitate to use it if necessary.
I don’t think it would bother me to kill someone in those circumstances. Certainly not ethically, probably not emotionally.
I could kill them all, then use some sort of Atomic Deity Device to sort them out.
Good on you. If more people trained, we’d have a lot less bullying type crime based on fear of confrontation.
In my discipline we were taught that if you must fight, you do so to protect your own life. You keep going until you are unable to or your attacker is. If that means utilizing a fatal technique then so be it.
I would with no hesitation. I was taking the kids to the babysitters before I went to work, and was on a 2 lane narrow road. I passed some pedestrian and about 40 feet later stopped to make my left turn into the babysitter’s driveway. I’m looking over to the left so I didn’t notice the pedestrian I’d passed by earlier get into the passenger seat. As soon as I saw him in the car my very first thought was “I have to send this son of a bitch through the windshield before he can put his seat belt on.” So I bury the pedal and race towards the intersection about 500 feet down the road.
Now I’m pissed! I don’t know if this asshole wants to rob me or kidnap my kids or what but like hell he’s getting what he wants. So here I am all wild-eyed and crazy staring at him while I floor the accelerator. He starts apologizing and crying that he thought I was stopping to pick him up like a hitchhiker and begged me to stop the car so he could get out. I stop the car and tell him to get the fuck out, which he does not unlike the helicopter pilot in Terminator 2.
So yea. No hesitation.
Ethically, no. But emotionally? That would bother me, I think, probably for the rest of my life.
I thought I’d kill someone rather than be raped. But then when it came down to it, I was terrified. So I’d love to say I would, but I’d probably have to be at such a huge advantage tactically/weapons-wise/whatever.
So, I’ll say I hope I’d kill someone trying to rape or kill me, or my husband. And I’d like to say that I’d hurt someone who was trying to hurt or kill my rabbits, because I am extraordinarily protective of them because they’re helpless.
But I know what happened already.
I selected “choose to kill” although the above is true for me as well. Plus, I’m kind of small and don’t know how to use a weapon. It’s not moral issues that would keep me from killing an assailant. It’s my own ineptitude!
I voted “I think I would…” on all questions. What I mean by that, of course, is that I would, given the means to do so, and the certainty that such harm is imminent. I am not at all certain that I, unarmed, could physically overpower an assailant, and I do not own a gun, nor do I usually carry anything more lethal than car keys (though I would gleefully drive over someone in such a situation).
I also would have to take consequences into account. If I am uncertain of the assailant’s intent (What if the stranger is the bad guy?), I fear going to prison. If I am unarmed, I fear getting hurt or killed myself (no fucking way am I getting into a fair fight with someone accustomed to violence, if I can help it). To some extent, I’d have to worry about other social considerations.
But if my conscience were the only consideration? Sometimes I think I’d remorselessly do in people who merely annoy me, and spend days doing it.
I don’t do criminal defense, but I know enough to know that I don’t know enough to give a solid answer without knowing the details of what actually went down in this scenario. (And the case law in the jurisdiction). (In other words, the standard lawyer answer of “it depends.”) The standard for an affirmative defense of self-defense is generally a reasonable belief that one was in danger of death or serious bodily harm that can only be averted through the use of deadly force - I can’t kill you to keep you from punching me, for example, even if I know for a certainty that you’re about to do so.
Nor can I kill you to keep you from killing me if you’re doing nothing to impede my flight - to pick an extreme example, if you said “walk away now or I will kill you,” I couldn’t then kill you and argue self-defense on the grounds that I believed your threat. I would have a self-defense argument, though, if I reasonably believed that you meant to kill me in any event, and simply preferred to do it with my back turned.
Where it gets really nuanced, unsurprisingly, is exactly what constitutes a “reasonable” fear of death or serious bodily harm, and when that reasonable belief goes away. This is the bit where a real criminal defense guy would do better than me. But to play with a few more hypos:
1.) You jump me in an alley with a gun, say, “No one insults Athena and lives,” and I draw my own gun and shoot you once. Assuming I can establish the facts are as I’ve described, that’s a pretty solid self-defense claim.
2.) Same as above, except that I shoot you several times, immediately in a row. Probably doesn’t hurt my self-defense claim - I’m panicked, reacting on instinct, haven’t had time for “the blood to cool” and to realize that you’re down.
3.) I shoot you once, utter some psychopathic quip, then cooly and methodically empty the clip. This makes it damned near impossible to argue I reasonably believed my life to be in danger.
On further reflection, my reaction if threatened with violence would probably be closest to (1) or (2) - I’d either panic and shoot once, or panic and shoot a bunch of times. But my self-defense claim would probably be pretty good in either scenario - except, of course, that real-world facts are almost always more nuanced than that.
By the way, the above discussion is all about self-defense. There are also a lot of states where you can mitigate your offense - from murder to manslaughter, say - if you hold an unreasonable but sincere belief that you are in danger of death or serious bodily harm. For example, going back to the “Walk away or I kill you” example - if a jury found that I genuinely believed you would shoot me in the back, but that my belief was not reasonable, there are jurisdictions in which that would be grounds for finding me guilty of a lesser included offense. I’m not sure if that’s a majority rule, though. Like I said, criminal practice isn’t my thing - I’m more of a hippy-fuzzy-con-law-guy by inclination, and (sadly) a disability lawyer by vocation.
Bottom line - how would I advise my client? Absolutely depends, based on the factors discussed above, plus more I’d know about if I did crim law.
Not to try to sound too tough, but I *think *I wouldn’t kill to save my own life, but it would amuse me highly to kill somebody that was trying to hurt my family. I wouldn’t even think twice about that. I may even celebrate w/a Dunkin Donut in that scenario.
Best wishes,
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Yah. I could easily see myself second-guessing:
“Did I have to kill that guy? What did he actually say? What did he actually do? Did I kill him because I was scared and couldn’t see a way out? What if, instead, I killed him because I was angry? Because I wanted him dead? My God - was I happy that he died? What sort of person is happy at a thing like that?”