Some reasons why warning shots are a BAD idea.
Last edited Tue May 15, 2012, 05:29 PM - Edit history (1)
From time to time an armed self defense story is posted here and often someone will ask why a warning shot wasn’t fired. Warning shots can go wrong in several different ways and make a bad situation much worse. Here are some ways.
The criminal may not understand your message as you intend it. With the warning shot you are trying to tell the criminal that he is in deadly danger, that you don’t want to actually shoot him but that you will if you have to. Instead he may read your warning shot as meaning that you don’t have the will to actually shoot someone and may attack to take your gun away from you. Or he may believe that your warning shot was really a shot at him that missed and that you are about to kill him. If he is armed he may then shoot back at you.
The warning shot can hit an innocent person. We have recently seen the case of Summer Moody who was killed by a warning shot. While she was totally innocent, she wasn’t the target either. She isn’t the only person who was killed by a warning shot as it happens from time to time.
You can go to jail for a warning shot. A few years ago there was a case in which the defender fired both a warning shot and a killing shot. The warning shot lodged in an apartment wall close to an uninvolved person. The shooter was not charged for the killing but did go to prison on a conviction of reckless endangerment for the warning shot.
You use up some of your ammunition. There was a case in Manila in which the policeman fired three warning shots from his revolver against a knife armed attacker. The knife guy then charged the cop who turned to run because he was too close. He tried to fire over his shoulder while running, missing with the three remaining shots. Then he tripped and the knife armed attacker was on top of the cop, stabbing him to death. While that is an extreme case, you may need all of your bullets. I once personally knew a retired cop in New Orleans who responded to a naked guy with a large knife chasing people in the French Quarter, back in the 1950s. It took all six of his bullets to bring the guy down. The first five hit center mass, number six was quickly carefully aimed, at very close range, for the brain. You may need everyone of your bullets. There have been cases in which a drugged-up offender has absorbed every round from a magazine and still been fighting. I remember a case in New Orleans in which the bad guy was hit over 30 times before he went down.
The warning shot can be used against you in court to show that you resorted to deadly force too early. You opened fire while you had time to observe and judge the effects of your shot so you clearly were not yet in “the gravest extreme”. That you were shooting into the ground doesn’t matter. When you squeeze the trigger, deadly force has been brought into play.
The only reason to use deadly force is that someone is doing something that is so evil that they must be stopped, (Rendered physically incapable of further aggression) even if they die as a side result of being stopped. If things aren’t that drastic yet, keep the finger off the trigger.
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