It is important for students of self defense to recognize that there are three battles that need to be won in order to be successful, and in fact loosing any one the battles is loosing the “war.”

The Physical Battle. This is the one that gets the most attention. All of the shooting, striking, grappling, knives and pepper spray happens in this battle. Losing the physical fight in a self defense situation could mean being killed, and the other two battles become moot. We need to win the physical battle in such a way that it sets us up for success in the other two. If you decided to end all social disagreements with gunfire you would win the physical battle and quickly lose the other two.

The Legal Battle. In our modern society if you use force above a certain threshold you will be exposed to the legal system. This exposure could be with both the criminal and civil courts. The old saying “better tried by 12 than carried by six” is true, but getting “tried” isn’t some kind of picnic. We tend to imagine some very obvious good/bad scenario where it is immediately clear to the jury that we were acting in self defense and anyone would have acted in a similar manner. By the time you are in front of a jury you have already paid huge sums of money (especially if someone was killed.) If you bankrupt your family and end up in jail cell for the long-term then you have “survived” but you really haven’t “won.”

The Moral and Ethical Battle. This battle is the most easily dismissed by people who haven’t thought this through. The gun community is full of references to “Scumbags” or “Goblins” and people who think they can kill them without remorse. Maybe that is so, but how will your friends and coworkers view the events? How will the other parents at your children’s school? None of them were there and they are getting the story from the media after the fact.

I recall one story of a private citizen that really did everything right in reporting a crime and only got involved when he felt he had to. He ended up shooting an adolescent male that had already beaten and shot a police officer. If the private citizen didn’t act that cop would have been killed. The local paper in this man’s community then released a fluffy piece about the troubled youth (with prior assault and drug convictions) who was so full of promise and love for his friends and family. This private citizen didn’t want to be a hero, he didn’t want to be a ‘gun fighter’, he didn’t want to shoot a teenage kid, but he wasn’t going to watch a cop get killed and do nothing to prevent it. His reward was having his hometown paper speculating that he was some kind of racist vigilante.

Self defense requires you to have an ethical framework that will let you look in the mirror everyday and know deep down that you did what was required. The actions you took were both appropriate and necessary. I imagine that most people with some kind of conscience will constantly reexamine such an event wondering if there was anything else that could have been done.