Found this article by Mas Ayoob. It's on topic for your situation:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...g=content;col1
These situations are always reported the same way in the media: "Unarmed Motorist Slain by Police." A full size automobile at fifty miles an hour generates half a million foot pounds of energy. Compute it downward for a small car like a '91 Cavalier and for the lower speed involved--the prosecutor's own expert admitted that the vehicle was accelerating rapidly as it came toward the patrolman--and you still have more body-destroying force than could be mustered if every officer working the midnight shift had fired every round of ammunition in every magazine on their duty belts. Any police officer who has responded to an auto/pedestrian accident knows the sort of horrendous, mangling trauma that such an impact causes. The term "he was strained through the grille" is not just a figure of speech. Avulsions--field amputations--are commonplace when cars slam into humans. Flattened torsos. Skulls literally crushed like eggshells. The cops know what's about to happen to them if they don't use the greatest force available to them to stop it. That's why they shoot at drivers who try to run them down, and that's why the courts generally rule them justifiable for so doing.
I LOVE this quote:
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The great Oliver Wendell Holmes had phrased it perfectly in the first half of the 20th Century: "Detached reflection is not demanded in the presence of an upraised knife." Nor should it be demanded in the face of a drawn gun, or an onrushing motor vehicle.
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...=rbxcra.2.a.11
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There is no question that American Handgunner helped change that.
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