In this case where you have the drop on me I would very likely just hand you my wallet, or more likely drop it on the floor and run away when you go to pick it up. As long as I felt that was the most likely way to get away unharmed from the situation.
Given the disparity in our hand to hand skills I know I wouldn’t try disarming you unless you made a serious error and left me a significant opening. Even then I would expect you to recover quickly and mop the floor with me:)
In this case we know his intention and disposition after the fact. But what if he was just demanding a case of cigarettes and would have walked out after the employee handed them over? We also don’t know what he was saying and what was said to him. Could things have been deescalated?
Would really suck if either of those were the case but the employee and maybe yourself got burned when your shot or his torch ignited the fire.
I’m not saying taking the shot wouldn’t have been the right choice. Given the outcome maybe it would have been in this case. But then do you get hit with a civil suit for starting the fire with your pistol? In an anti self defense state you might even be charged for killing the “poor disadvantaged” gas wielding criminal.
Just because we have a firearm doesn’t mean using it is always our best option all the time. At least that is what several of my self defense instructors have told me. It’s a tough choice we all have to make in the moment. It’s good to have an array of options considered and practiced so we can choose whatever we decide will work best in whatever situation we get stuck in.
It really is a tough choice. Do we react because of what MIGHT happen or do we try to out guess the perp. I wonder, do you say “DROP THE LIGHTER!!” or do you react more harshly .
Here you wouldn’t have to worry about shooting that idiot… property damage who knows?The guy standing in the vapor cloud would have went up.Takes an amount of time for the saturation to get to the level where a muzzle blast would cause ignition.After i left the army ive been a Master Certified Auto tech ever since…I’m around gas vapor and ignition sources daily.The attendant only got first degree burns because he wasn’t in the vapor cloud it hadn’t engulfed him yet.Imho don’t really think if he shot him soon as he dumped the gas he would have any injury.
I think drawing unnoticed and giving commands is a viable option. You are ready to shoot if he moves to light the fire but might just be able to convince him to leave without lighting it.
Unfortunately the way the courts sometimes treat self defense cases a prosecutor would argue “why did you take the time to demand they drop the lighter if you were truly in fear for your life?” Hopefully your own lawyer can show all the flaws with that question.
And there is also the issue of if you are forced to take the shot does it set off the fire? Is it better to yell to everyone else in the store to run to the back exit while you stay as far from the gas as possible covering their retreat?
If you are really confident in your physical abilities you could maybe tackle and push him out the door before he could start the fire but that would be an incredibly risky move given you would have to cross over the gas puddle. The only way I’m considering that move is if my son is behind me and I’m pretty certain me taking a shot will set the store on fire with no way of getting him out.
But in this case he dumped the gas then partially exited the store while pulling the trash can out before coming back in. The torch wasn’t clearly visible to me until after he reentered.
Think I would have been very confused what he was up to for the first few seconds. I had to watch the video twice to figure out exactly what was going on.
Given he dumped a fair amount of gas over a large area I think it would be vaporizing pretty quickly?
At any rate very little time to recognize and react to the threat
I saw a few people the Taliban had set on fire…guy comes in dumps a gallon or two of gas in the floor of the business I’m working for…he ain’t collecting for the Red Cross.
But until you are reasonably certain he has an ignition device in his hand is he an imminent threat or just a vandal trying to stink up the place?
I’m asking that as a serious legal question. With your personal experience you could certainly argue that based on that experience you felt imminently threatened as soon as the gas was dumped and I would hope the prosecutor or jurors would agree.
Now that I have seen this video I would certainly lean a lot more towards imminent threat over vandal the second the gas was dumped.
You only have to ever see one person who has been burned bad enough to be in the burn unit for it haunt you for the rest of your days.
There is no pain free way to recover (notice I said recover not heal). Your life is changed forever. All they can do is keep you completely blotted on morphine. Debridement with a wire brush is all there is.
Having had to do rotations in a level 1 trauma centers burn unit. Please just kill me.
So yeah, I would treat it as a life threatening event and respond appropriately by trying to stop the threat.
There’s a lot of scumbags on the face of this earth…then there’s the evil scumbags.If you are willing to set somebody on fire for a cash register haul of cash…what you really need is a 200 grain HST in the forehead.Burned people are just one of the many horrors I got to see in that godforsaken place.