Quote:
Originally posted by Drago
If the guy is armed and you are able to draw and the guy turns tail and runs the other way you'd shoot him in the back?
That's a pretty fine line to cross, perhaps you'd like to clarify.
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Would he still deserve to be shot? Hmmm.... would I have sufficiently intimidated him so as to make him reconsider his life of crime? "Scared straight", if you will? Or did I just scare him onto his next victim?
Maybe when dealing with such as would rob us, hoping we are unnarmed and vulnerable, our instinctive rules of fair play and chivalry should be set aside. Just because he turns tail to run, demonstrating the inheirantly cowardly nature of the breed, does that mean he deserves to get away? After all, it wouldn't be "fair" to shoot him in the back, now would it? Or would it...
Unfair to him maybe, but is it a sporting event where he deserves a fair chance? Does his next intended victim not deserve a "fairer" chance? That is the moral dilema of such a confrontation. Good people, even when confronted by evil people, somehow continue to feel obligated to observe the rules of fair play. After all, goes the argument, if we don't we become "just like them". Do we?
Who initiated the confrontation? Is the unwilling participant in this violent encounter required to give the assailant a fair and sporting chance? I don't think so.
There is, however, always the legal side of the issue to deal with. Not that legal=moral and right any more. Legally, of course, you are obligated to let him run away. I submit that it is your duty to not allow him to do so. In doing so, you are simply facilitating his next attack. If the next victim is unnarmed, as he hoped you would be, don't you have some complicity it whatever harm befalls them? You could have, after all, prevented it.