shibumiseeker
Grandmaster
Me too, but he can still be thankful that he didn't have to make that compromise to protect his family.
In any combat situation there is luck and there is skill, and it takes both to win.
I've run through the scenarios many times in my head and trained to react to some of the most common, but there will always be an element of luck.
I really don't care if some folks think less of me for what I am about to say next. I've seen a lot of things in my life and had things done to me that have hardened my thinking in this matter:
I really, really hope I never kill someone in self defense (or any way really, but we're talking self defense in this thread). In a big way I hope this. I've devoted a large portion of my life to helping other people and saving other people's lives. But the moment someone makes the conscious decision, drug crazed or any other crazed decision, to harm me or my family physically, I don't care one bit about their life. What I DO care about is the social and legal repercussions afterwards. That's what worries me the most, and when I have bad dreams about defending myself resulting in someone else getting hurt or killed, it's not the "oh, I just took a life" that wakes me up, it's the "oh, now I'm going to spend years in jail and lose what I have" that wakes me up scared. I know myself pretty well, and I know how I react to traumatic events, and I know how I react to stress situations and people dying during them. I'm reasonably sure I would feel no guilt whatsoever about the bad guy dying while I survived. I've said it before, death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Been there, seen it, got a taste of it.