If you read NRA Women, you know by now that the best way to survive a self-defense situation is to avoid it in the first place. There are lots of ways to do this and lots of reasons why it’s the best possible outcome, but I’m about to give you yet one more reason why you want to avoid using your firearm in self-defense if you can: Reasonableness.
The word “reasonable” shows up in several places relevant to the use of deadly force in defense of self. Most notably, the generally accepted standard is that you are justified in using deadly force if a hypothetical “reasonable person” would have a “reasonable belief” that they’re in immediate danger. There’s also “beyond a reasonable doubt” if you’re faced with a trial.
The trouble with “reasonable” is that it’s subjective. The idea behind the hypothetical reasonable person is to try to create some sort of standard by which these things can be judged or determined—but reason will always be open to some interpretation. Every citizen, police officer, lawyer, district attorney, and member of a jury will have their own definition of what was reasonable that usually boils down to something like, “Would I have done the same thing?” We all bring to this table our own life experiences, knowledge base, political ideologies, ethics and values that affect what we personally see as “reasonable.” This means that if you find yourself using deadly force in self-defense, whether your actions are eventually deemed “reasonable” can be a little bit of a roll of the dice. We can all recall some high-profile trials that have been in the news where people (DAs, juries, the media, the public) have trouble agreeing on whether a person’s actions were reasonable.
Reasonable applies in all kinds of ways beyond just the “Was deadly force justified?” question. Whether it was reasonable to fear for your life is one thing, but it goes deeper. Was it reasonable to fire six shots, or were the first two enough to stop the threat and the last four were fired after the threat was down or running away? Was it reasonable to shoot center mass, or would it have been better to just shoot the bad guy in the leg to make him stop advancing? Anyone who is familiar with defensive firearms know that shooting someone in the arm or leg is a bad idea and literally no one teaches this as a sensible option, but to one of your peers who knows nothing about guns beyond what they learned on TV, it might sound perfectly reasonable. Was it reasonable for you to stand your ground and fire your CCW, or would it have been more reasonable for you to just run away? Is it reasonable that your home-defense firearm has a 15-round magazine, a night-vision scope and Punisher stickers, or are those things indications that you were overly eager to shoot someone? No matter how crazy that sounds to us, these are questions that could be brought up at trial to try to sway a jury, and we all have our own definition of “reasonable.”
Now, I’m not trying to convince you that deadly force isn’t worth it—we absolutely want you to protect yourself by any means necessary when you have no other options. But understand that the cost of self-defense is high, and the standard by which you will be judged for your actions is at least a little bit subjective. This is yet one more reason to use avoidance, escape and de-escalation—and non-lethal force when appropriate—to stay far away from situations where your gun might be required to solve a problem.
George Carlin famously said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” George was a comedian, but his words are really profound when thinking about the reasonable person standard. If a jury of your peers ends up deliberating over your actions, first of all, the jury members are already in a bad mood because jury duty is a not fun, and second of all, let’s be frank: Some of our peers are just not that smart, or at least they don’t think like we do. Their definition of reasonable might be very different than ours, and staking your entire future on someone else’s definition is a gamble you don’t want to take if you have any options to avoid it.
