[ursavus.elemensis]

In your scenario, I am not sure how you and the four youths got to the edge of the woods to meet up with the cop. Sounds like you marched the four stooges at gunpoint out of the woods. THAT, my dear self-defending citizen, is called kidnapping, and that's a felony. In PA, the Uniform Firearms Act has very specific wording about holding another person at gunpoint, and I would suspect that the wording has been little tested, if at all, in court. You'd totally be at the mercy of the jury. Once the threat was neutralized, you were no longer justified in using the threat of deadly force on them. And, by marching them out at gunpoint, you were placing them in mortal danger.

I was actually once in a similar situation, many years ago. It was our routine practice, and that of hundreds of other folks, to routinely become uninvited guests onto the private property of the family of a certain former Governor of Pennsylvania to hike along the stream on the property and to swim in the waterfalls. Well, one day we were back in there, about 5 of us, and a "caretaker" comes out of the woods with pistol drawn and demands that we get out. OK, no problem, we were not going to mess with the guy, and we'd have been very happy to walk back down the stream to our cars (about 30 minutes walk, maybe 45), and get out. Nope, he wanted us to go his way, along the ridge line and he made us walk in front of him with him walking behind us with the gun drawn the whole time. This was like about 1982, somewhere around there. I was thinking the whole time that I hope this guy doesn't trip on a rock or something and pull that trigger by accident. None of us was armed. We walked out and there was no incident with the guy, and no, we did not report him, but we could have.