First, NO ONE knows for sure whether he/she can kill, until put in a situation where the decision has to be made. I've seen well-trained soldiers freeze on the trigger.
Second, KILLING IS NOT A GAME! It is not a macho posturing contest, either! War, or a self-defense situation, is not a videogame or a movie. The blood, the feelings, all of it is very very real, and there are no second chances. You cannot undo anything. Those of you who have not had the experience, know this:the first time you pull the trigger on a human target, or slit a human throat, or stick a bayonet in a human being's gut and twist it, YOU WILL BE CHANGED, PERMANENTLY. You may or may not lose any sleep over it, but you WILL carry those changed emotions with you, for the rest of your life, and you WILL carry the memories of it with you for the rest of your life.
You may do it because duty demands it, you may do it for self-preservation, you may do it to protect those around you; but no matter how well-justified you are, legally and morally, you will have to come to terms with what you have done. The act itself is easy, physically; the rest, is the hard part. Everyone who has to do it comes to his/her own way of dealing with it, some more easily than others. It may well save your life, or the lives of others, but it will cost you a little piece of your own humanity.
When I started carrying a gun a little over a decade ago, I sought out the best information I could find on the mentality and the psychological aspects of this topic. One name kept popping up as the best "answer man" in the business at that time.... Massad Ayoob. Thankfully at that time Mas was living and working in New Hampshire and I had the pleasure of shooting with him competitively a couple times a year. Every time we met up I picked a little more of his brain on the topic. He also suggested several other resources in terms of books and articles on the topic. For about 9 months it was pretty much all I read.
Of course nobody knows exactly how they will react in that moment. However, having thought about it ahead of time, having prepared and practiced the techniques and actions does give one a little better chance of survival. Hopefully I will never have to find out if all those practice draws, all those rounds down-range, and all the mental preparation work. However, I am fairly certain of how I would react. Mostly because I HAVE had a loaded gun pointed at me in the past and know how I reacted in that instant....
I was working as a range officer at a competitive pistol match when a shooter moving downrange suddenly realized he'd bypassed a target. Instead of backing up, he literally TURNED AROUND 180 degrees (I was about 4 feet behind him). I saw the business end of a .40 cal Glock coming straight towards my chest as he turned. Without even thinking about it, I reached out, grabbed the barrel of the gun over the slide, pushed the muzzle towards the floor, and proceeded to wrench the gun out of the shooter's hands. Once I had control of the gun, I was able to step downrange, past him, unload and clear the firearm and return it to him before telling him in no uncertain terms that he was Disqualified and that we didn't want to see him at a match again, ever.
BTW - Shortly thereafter I invested in a Level IIA bulletproof vest that I now wear while working all matches.
THe way most of us are raised here in America, we have some pretty strong social, cultural and religious inhibitions against killing. It doesn't come naturally to most of us (which is why the military has to train combat troops to overcome those inhibitions). In the terror and extreme stress of combat, most will revert to trained instinct and react accordingly. Others simply never will. Studies the army did after WWII and Korea showed that about 25% of infantrymen in actual combat never fired their weapon. I would guess, based on personal observation, that that percentage was similar in a typical infantry company in Vietnam as well.
Which is why some of us who place much less value on the great majority of human lives have a little easier time believing that we could and would pull that trigger, Gadfly. That number has been around for years and hasn't changed much over time. There have been Civil War muskets found with 5-8 balls rammed down them because the soldier never discharged the weapon and just kept reloading.
There's little time in combat to give much thought to the matter beyond that. Thinking about what one has done and processing that (along with everything else) comes later; it's there that emotions about it often become a complicating factor (if not a direct cause) of PTSD, just as it does in civilian situations
If you stop to think in those situations it's generally over before your conscious mind can process what's happening. That's why training, both physical and mental is so important.
Pinky swear. Starting now.
