This subject is kind of a hobbyhorse of mine, but . . .

It seems to me that in self-defense circumstances it's always far, far better not to have to fire the gun at all. As the late, great Darrell Mulroy used to point out, and as I believe Joel still does today, if you have to shoot somebody, you can count on spending $10,000 in legal fees no matter what.

So, in certain circumstances, the badder and meaner-looking the gun, the less likely you are to have to pull the trigger. That doesn't apply to carry, of course, so this discussion is somewhat out of place on this forum, but still of general interest, I think.

There was an account in a recent American Rifleman by a guy who was caught in New Orleans during the recent unpleasantness, who (to oversimplify a bit) came out of his house to find some badasses looking over his car, functioning cars being rare in the neighborhood just then, the car he was planning to leave town with his family in.

They took one look at the AK he just happened to be carrying, complete with banana clip, and decided to leave. My point is, they might have been less inclined to leave if he had been carrying, say, a PPK, or a J-frame -- both highly carryable guns.

(Of course, if he had needed to fire the AK, it would have served him well, so there's that.)

I'm saying that if I ever need to scare somebody off from around the house, a shotgun, an AK, or even a .30-30 might be a better choice than a 1911. I'm also saying that I think these endless discussions I see in gun magazines about the relative stopping power of the .45 ACP versus the .357 Magnum are very nice, but they always glide right past something important, namely what happens before shots are fired.

Anybody else feel the same way?

I don't know for sure, but I get the impression that brandishing a weapon is often all that is necessary to deter a lot of people. I think pump action shotguns are fairly (in)famous for the deterrence value of their racking sound alone, let alone that big opening at the end.

A downside is that I think it's only effective on people who are otherwise rational actors -- ie, they care about outcomes beyond what happens in the next 5 minutes. Unfortunately I think a not-insignificant number of irrational actors are the kinds of people you would need to pull a weapon on, which means that any act of brandishing must also involve a willingness to pull the trigger. And don't also forget that a lot of the "bad guys" have been exposed to a violent world where getting a gun pointed at them (by the police or other bad guys) might actually be not uncommon and thus has a lot less impact on them. For some, being *shot* might not even be all that shocking.

I also think that from a legal perspective, the County Attorney gives only slightly less slack to people who brandish weapons vs. those who fire them. In other words, if you can't justify deadly force, you probably can't justify brandishing, either.

What I'm curious about though is if brandishing somehow fits into the "lesser force" category implied by lethal force's requirement of "no lesser force will do". Are there situations where actually shooting someone wouldn't be legally justifiable but brandishing would, or is it merely that brandishing just lacks the outcome that shooting someone does?

Personally, if brandishing a weapon is yet enough to quell an otherwise deadly situation, I'm all for it. If ya can't retreat, brandish and maybe yell something about go away or I'll shoot, if that don't work, pull the trigger. As far as the legal intricasies go, I ain't got a clue. I would think the law would rather see a situation resolved with as minimal force as possible, but THAT would make sense!!

Well, I sat down with some balistics charts a while back and compared 120ish grain 7.62x39 to 120ish grain 9mm and decided that if I were to need to put 120 or so grains of lead into a nasty person, I like having the significant advantages in muzzle velocity and muzzle energy that the 7.62x39 has coupled with the 7.62x39 still boasting almost twice the velocity/energy at 100 yards as the 9mm at 50.

Of course all that means little to your basic violent, motivated/ drugged, perpetrator. If I have a choice, I will grab the big nasty rifle. I don't care about the sound of shucking a shell. . . . there is already one in the chamber. The 7.62x51 I am refering to specifically sports a handy 16" barrel, looks evil , and doesn't have a thing out front to mitigate that fireball when something goes down range. I may or may not deter the first individual to get in my sight picture, but it is hard to imagine self preservation not kicking in for other thugs after the first one bites the bigger and faster .308.

". . . Are there situations where actually shooting someone wouldn't be legally justifiable but brandishing would, or is it merely that brandishing just lacks the outcome that shooting someone does?"

What I'm hoping (hoping being the key word here) is that "brandishing" ends the encounter, without the involvement of any authorities, and thus the question about whether the brandishing was legally justified is moot.

And I certainly agree that one has to be ready to fire the gun if need be.

Brandishing may well end the immediate encounter; but then somebody (perhaps the person brandished against, perhaps some bystander) calls the cops (or maybe they were already called, just being slow to show up).

That's where I'm just a little skeptical. I'm not comfortable generalizing from me, not usually, but I do know that I wouldn't stand around to get shot by a Jennings .25. If somebody shows me a gun and suggests that I leave, I'm outta there.

I would assume that one would generally want to call the police and tell them that you've had an encounter -- ie, win the race to the courthouse. What you don't want is a legitimate encounter that results in your arrest because the perp or even a third party witness gave the wrong story.

It also buys you protection -- if there's a second encounter, the police will know about the first. It's never bad to be able to point to an official record and say "this guy keeps harassing me". I'd rather the previous encounters had some official record if I ended up shooting the bad guy on the third encounter.

But I can also see where "no harm, no foul" would make sense and that avoiding entanglement with the legal process is never a bad thing, providing you're *sure* you're going to avoid it, since probably cheaper to pay David Gross to solve a problem at the beginning than it is to try to get him to solve it halfway into it.

Yup. It's why the conservative thing to do is to make the 911 call that I recommend in class.

There are situations where I think the best roll of the dice is not to make that call -- I'll talk about a specific situation privately over coffee with pretty much anybody here, but not publicly -- but I only go into those in class when somebody insists, as the risks are real, and the calculations are both complicated and imprecise.