> how much is due to the mechanics of gunfights, though?

[snip]

> you think you need to shoot someone with nonlethal, okay, what do you do if it doesn't work?

What matters once you're in a gun fight should be less of a concern than how and whether you get into a gun fight. By emphasizing behavior in the former you're priming people to shoot when there's no need to. It's like bike-shedding some inner loop when what matters most is the larger structure of the program. Focusing on whether to make an inner loop O(1) vs O(2) is inefficient if the outer loop is O(N) instead of O(log N).

It's like with terrorism. What if a terrorist does X? What if a terrorist does Y? That sort of discourse primes society to overestimate the risk of terrorist incidents.

What if 1) a burglar 2) breaks into my home and 3) I shoot and hit and 4) he still comes after me? In that hypothetical #4 is the last thing I should be concerned with, let alone optimizing for. I should be most concerned with #1, that I properly identified the intruder as a burglar and not my daughter sneaking back into the house; then #2, that I'm not an easy target; and finally #3, the decision of whether or not to keep and be ready to use a gun.

#4 should be such a distant concern that most people, perhaps even most cops, shouldn't give it a second thought.

I would go further and say that #1 and #2 so dominate the equation that the standard advice should be to hesitate; for the sake of God, hesitate. There's a flip side to the fact that these situations unfold so quickly--when you're scared and amped up time also slows down. If people are told that they need to make split-second decisions then you're almost guaranteeing that they're going to make premature decisions simply because they'll feel like they're reacting too slowly. And that's precisely what happens again and again with these "accidental" shootings.

I'm not trying to dispute whether guns are useful for self-defense. But I think the dominate narratives within our gun culture are extremely dangerous and lead to unnecessary harm. I grew up around guns and I've noticed that the way many gun owners keep and use their guns is actually in opposition to how they talk about them. That they may say "never hesitate" but if you pay attention they actually do hesitate. They just don't realize it because what's happening internally is that they're quickly and skillfully processing their environment; experience has taught them how to filter and focus on their environment.

If I'm hunting duck I'll often shoot too early whereas my father is far more patient. That patience is learned. I've also been in a couple of physical altercations that could have gone really bad. Time does slow down and I'm glad I intentionally "hesitated" before I escalated.

The advice really should be to hesitate. When you finally have enough skill and experience to make so-called split-second decisions, you'll be relying on discipline and learned environmental cues, not on some heuristic advice. Lacking those specific faculties, the most important thing to remember is to assess the situation, and in a fight-or-flight situation where your autonomic system will try to override your executive functioning you absolutely want to give yourself more time. Again, time will seem to slow down anyhow so it's preposterous to me that we should be optimizing for some unfathomably rare scenario where the extra fractions of a second--if any--would matter.

Gun owners are rightfully taught to respect guns, which is another way of saying they should have a healthy fear of guns without allowing that fear to dictate their behavior. Perhaps what we need is a positive euphemism for "hesitate". But telling people not to hesitate is like telling people not to fear guns. Which would be stupid. Lacking the vocabulary to make finer distinctions, it's better to tell people to fear guns than not to fear them. Lacking a pithy word or phrase that denotes waiting to assess the situation, we should absolutely counsel people to hesitate rather than not to hesitate.