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I dont see the point of this thread other than to make us look like a bunch of hot head gun toating vigilaties.
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To any anti who happens to read TFL you already look just like that by virtue of the fact you discuss guns.
I know that most of the posters here are not going out of their way to perpetrate violence but I think in large part that is an artifact of the sort of thinking process required to be a responsible armed citizen. I think that such thinking is different from that of an Anti and I think that although much of Anti thinking is the fear of other's violence a largely unspoken part is fear of their own violence.
Going back to some other permutations of the original question, the television show was played in such a way as to provoke people into intervening or fleeing and one of its unanticipated consequences was provoking at least one of the passersby into a violent attack. It also (whether anticipated or unanticipated) provoked the audience into asking the question of themselves of what would they do. I wrote the question to reflect and self analyse the immediate hot-headed emotional response which occurred as part of the drama of watching the show. I reached the personal conclusion that if I'd been alone on that California street my absolute risk of an inappropriately violent response would have been less than implied by the post but the relative risk would have been as described (unarmed risk > non-lethally armed risk >> armed risk)
I suspect that the process by which such risks become relative includes the fact that people know they can make mistakes in situational assessment and that it is less personally dangerous to them if they make a mistake in under-assessing the potentially violent nature of an assailant if they are armed. (This is somewhat like a test pilot being more willing to fly a plane with potential control system problems if they have a parachute. And I presume some of the natural hesitance in answering might be similar to the natural fear the pilot has in admitting to the flight surgeon that he has any apprehension at all.)
I'm aware of the 'by the book' answers and appreciate them. Yes I understand that if you hit someone you can go to jail; I wasn't asking you to judge whether the teens are menacing or verbally assaulting or violent or whatever. So what about your natural responses and which ones occur with less inhibition. (It does strike me as very peculiar that so many answers were the obvious 'call the police' variety but I can dig up a thousand TFL threads pointing to the risk of that particular response being entirely ineffective. The show didn't emphasize 911 calls and I wonder if many of the nonresponders actually called 911 and were told to ignore the action, its just a t.v. show.)
A set of corollary questions would be:
What emotional changes occur in an armed individual which dampen his/her immediate situational temptation toward violence?
How can such changes be documented and studied?
How can such documentation be helpful to the cause of RKBA?
How can such responses be used to train CCW holders?