Not many things as peaceful as a corpse.
Case in point... the day of the incident I started the thread with, I was also armed. Yet at what point do you decide that you need it?
Believe me, that day runs through my mind endlessly, especially when I look in the mirror and see that dent. (Over the course of the last few weeks the sun caused one to partially heal, while the other popped back out.)
Yet what would have been a better scenario? I could have stoppec and taken a picture of how his truck was parked, while he runs up and...
This guy had just put two dents in my truck with his fists while I was moving at around 30 mph. Had I tried to defend myself I doubt that I would prevail. So, pull a gun over a dented truck? What about all of the traffic going past in both directions; or somebody's kid out playing 1/2 mile down the road? I was nearly atop a pretty good hill .
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That's why I believe that carrying for self defense means more than being able to buy a gun. You also need to know when and how to use it. For some, that's instinctive. For the rest of us it requires training and practice. How many hours per year does an LEO require to keep up his certification?
I've spent hundreds of hours shooting with, and burned thousands of rounds through the MarkII or it's predecessors in the time I've owned them. It's the gun I'm most proficient with and I can generally hit what I'm aiming at whether it's a paper plate, milk jug, or a bird high up in a tree. (Always with that tree for a backstop.)
Yet that doesn't begin to compare with deciding when and how to take a safe shot at a POed person who is coming at you- possibly on some drug- and ensuring that shot will stop him, or that a miss won't kill some kid eating an ice cream at the stand at the bottom of the hill.
