terzmo said:
You had be very convincing that you thoroughly believed you were going to die and with your last act, pulled the trigger.
No, I don't. All I have to do is be convincing that I had a reasonable fear that I
might be killed OR SERIOUSLY INJURED.
The issue is not whether or not I would actually have been killed or seriously injured, the issue under the law of (I believe) every state is whether or not I feared death or serious bodily harm, and then whether or not that fear was reasonable. Part and parcel of the reasonableness of that fear is what I know. If I keep a stash of old magazines with articles by writers like Mas Ayood describing how people have been killed by a single punch, and I can recall news incidents like the soccer referee who just died as a result of a single punch from a 17-year old player, I think I have a pretty good chance of showing that my fear was (for me) reasonable.
For someone who lives in a vacuum and never pays attention to stories such as that and who is blissfully unaware that a single punch or kick can kill you, maybe then the situation would be different.
Many MANY years ago I was in Army Basic Training from November through January. They closed the post for Christmas and sent us all home. For me that was a 14-hour bus trip, followed by a 2-hour train ride, followed by a cab to home. The cabby at the train station asked me if I would mind sharing the fare with another passenger whose destination was between the train station and my parents' home. I agreed -- why would a poor Private E-1 object to saving a couple of bucks? But when we got to the neighborhood where the other fare was going, all of a sudden he couldn't remember the exact address or what the house looked like. We drove around for about fifteen minutes (at 02:30 a.m.) while this doofus played games. Then, at a stop sign, he opened the door and bolted -- without paying.
Cabbie called dispatch, dispatch called the cops, black-and-white rolled up. The first thing the cop said when he saw the cabbie was "Jesus, Bob, you didn't hit him, did you?"
Turns out the cabbie was a Marine Reserve hand-to-hand combat instructor at the nearby reserve training center, and because of his training and experience a punch from him would be considered assault with a deadly weapon. (At least, that's what the cop said.) They never found the deadbeat. The cabbie, recognizing that I was a trainee on the way home, took pity on me and turned off the meter. I got my ride right to the door, for free. But that's all part of my personal history that enters into how my belief structure was formulated.
