[pax]

dayman,

I guess my real concern here is that when we start playing the coulda-woulda-shoulda game, it's usually because good people want guarantees of a good outcome. If only he'd done it our way, it would have ended well.

Two problems with that:

1) We don't know how it would have ended if he'd done it our way, and

2) We don't know if he could have lived with the choice we would have made in the same circumstances. Your choice to walk away may be a valid choice for you and still be an absolute, no way, I can't-live-with-that!, bad choice for someone else. His choice to get involved may be a valid choice for him, even in hindsight. Too bad we can't pull him out of his grave to ask if it was worth it... by his measure and meaning of "worth it." Because maybe it was.

The horrifying reality is... there really aren't any guarantees. To be really prepared to protect yourself and your loved ones means that you have accepted all possible outcomes of acting in self defense, including the awful ones, without glossing them over or shoving them aside in favor of a fantasy where it always only ends well.

If you can't save your family, if it's a no-win situation no matter what -- what do you want your family's last memory of you to be? Do you want them to remember you cowering under a table alongside them? Or do you want them to remember you bravely facing danger, running toward the sound of the guns, determined to save lives? (Alternately: do you want them to remember you holding them and comforting them and sheltering them with your own body? Or do you want them to remember you abandoning them to rush toward danger in a doomed, foolhardy attempt to stop the killer with whatever tools you have?)

Those choices, choices like those, are something we all have to look at an internalize for ourselves, but it's so much easier to retreat into a fantasy: "Well, if he'd done it this way, everything would have ended up good."

And that's ...not good at all.

pax