What if i killed an attacker

[tellner]

I really have to disagree with Mr. E. on large parts of his post. The bits where he says "Even the legal experts can't predict because it depends on circumstances" is dead on.

The part where he says "Assume you'll go to jail, lose everything, and everyone will run in fear" is pure scare tactics. Yes, that can happen. And the whole point of the "choice of evils" doctrine is that you need to be able to tell the judge with a clear conscience "I knew that all these bad things could happen. But the alternative was dying / being crippled / watching some sick bastard rape my three year old daughter with a broken Coke bottle. That would have been worse, so I did what I had to do to stop the crime."

With competent defense counsel and taking the right actions for the right reason it is entirely possible to get through the legal system without losing anything except money.

There are social effects. I've known people who have had to use deadly froce either in the line of duty (police, military) or in defense. Yes, some of their friends turned out to be lightweight jerks (Mr. Ayoob uses a less polite term). They got different friends. A good support network turned out to be vital. There was adjustment. But in the end they integrated the experience and got on with their lives. Sometimes it took counseling. They weren't exactly the same, because it's a life-changing experience. But they got through. And not one one of them, not a single one, said "I'd rather have let him kill me."

Bad things can happen if you use deadly force. The Law in its Majesty can be blind and stupid and roll over you like a triple trailer over a possum. People can be jerks. But if the alternatives are using extreme force or letting yourself be murdered, sodomized or burned to death by an arsonist, you have to do what you have to do then and afterwards.

 

[Mr. E]

With competent defense counsel and taking the right actions for the right reason it is entirely possible to get through the legal system without losing anything except money.

And it is also possible under the same circumstances to end up spending a few decades behind bars. There have been cases like that. Are you familiar with the saying common among your country's law enforcement officers? "You can't make a bad shoot good, but you can make a good shoot bad."

The same goes for the social and psycological impact on a person. There are a few sociopaths in society who can kill children and not lose sleep. At the other end are the documented cases of men who had to kill in WWII who only opened up to therapists decades later the fear and shame they felt. That war was a clear case of having to kill or be killed and the nations that sent their kids off to war went through the rituals of recognizing and honoring those soldiers to tell them they did a good job that was now over and yet there still were cases of people who felt shame and had their lives impacted by their memories of killing.

Until you are there, you don't know one way or the other how you will react or how you will be treated by the state.

The whole thing kind of reminds me of the debate about seatbelts. I wear them and have done so even when they were not required by law. But I do remember my youth when for some strange reason I thought it was silly to wear them. Knowing myself, I probably thought at some level that people woudl think I was afraid if I used them and I was more afraid of them thinking I was not a man than I was of dying. I would never have admited that, even to myself and it is only after a few decades and being the first responder to a fatal accident that let me see what I might have been thinking. I remember the excuses I heard from others and sometimes still hear them. Most of the folks that do not want to wear seat belts trot out the one accident in a billion that seatbelts would have hurt more than help and ignore the 999,999,999 other times that it was a good idea to have one on. But if you take a calm view of the matter, you probably would buckle up whenever you got the chance.

So, when a young student driver asks HYPOTHETICALLY what would happen if they got into an accident without their seat belt, I know that somewhere in their mind the idea of going without one is not far off. They are mainly looking for justification of what they want to do than an answer they might not like. I was there where they were and can admit it now.

In the same way, when some young martial arts practicioner starts asking about cases where they just do not have any choice but to kill someone or use a deadly weapon, those same alarms go off.

I have known people that seem to be into martial arts more for the idea of doing harm to others and being seen as a real man than in honest self defense. But they probably honestly thought they were there to keep themselves safe. Never underestimate the human ability to lie to oneself about intentions. These are the kind of guys that grab an extra knife before they go through a dangerous area, but find some reason to not take an extra five minutes to go around and avoid the danger entirely.

You accuse me of using scare tactics. But you can't deny that some people have killed in self defense and ended up behind bars and some have become wrecks. People do sometimes walk away from accidents unharmed even without wearing a seatbelt- but I do not advise counting on being better off without one. If you were asked by a young driver about seat belts and you thought he was looking more for an excuse than an honest answer, would you trot out the worst case scenario or the best?

I really doubt that anyone would take what I write here and fail to defend themselves and die instead. But if maybe the next time they think they might need an extra knife they instead think of finding a way to avoid a bad area, these posts may have served a purpose. I briefly knew a guy who defended himself and did several years behind bars. He did not think about the situation enough in advance, put himself in a spot he could have avoided and when he was trapped he did what he had to in order to survive. But all those mistakes he made convinced every member of a jury to put him behind bars. If people have a healthy respect of what might happen, they may not put themselves in a position to need to defend themselves and face that choice.