 I was recently asked a question that I think other people than just the person that asked my benefit from, so I thought I would answer this in a video. A friend of mine was involved in a discussion with someone, and one side of the argument discussion was that in a self-defense type situation, anybody that's carrying a gun should be proficient enough not to have to shoot somebody in the head or chest or some place that's likely to kill them, and that that person, the defender, should instead shoot the attacker in the hand or the foot or something just to stop the person from hurting them but not to actually kill the person. And so I was asked, what do you think of this? As a shooting instructor, forum police officer, what are your thoughts about that? Why can't people just shoot a gun out of a hand or such? Is that a legitimate goal? And the truth is there are a number of factors that go into shooting, the adrenaline and being able to hold your hands steady and practice and training and ability to handle yourself in a crisis situation, but kind of long story short, it's not a very exact art. So occasionally a person that is defending themselves can shoot another person's hand and shoot the gun out of it, but it's kind of like getting a hole in one in playing golf. Shooting is just not something that is as accurate, as precise as we all wish it was. And of course I'm talking about pistol shooting in a dramatic self-defense situation where there's yelling and the adrenaline is going. It's just been proven almost every single time that a person is not able to hit a tiny little moving target like a hand just because of delayed reaction times, marksmanship abilities, even the average police officer is not able to shoot an 8 1⁄2 by 11 piece of paper at 25 yards. They can't even hit that 9 times out of 10 under pressure. This is a bold thing I'm saying, but I've done a lot of training. I've been trained and trained others and most people can't do that. So when you think about a piece of paper, an 8 1⁄2 by 11 paper versus a hand and the hand is actually moving and you can't predict which way it's going to move, it's just not possible. So then if we think about the moral aspect of shooting another person to stop them, kill them, whatever, is that appropriate? Is that ever okay? When is it okay? And I don't have the answer for that. Well, I do for myself. I can only answer this for myself, but you have to answer it for you. If someone is attacking you and they have the means to seriously injure you or kill you, my personal perspective is that you have the right as a human being as a critter to survive. You have a right to do whatever is necessary to stop that person. So that is the goal of shooting someone who is attacking you. It is to stop them. It should not be to kill them. You just want to stop them. Well, then we look at a skilled shooter. Even the person that's in the top 5% of shooters, they're probably not going to be able to shoot a person's hand that's swinging a knife. So what part of the person could they hit? The chest, center mass, it's called. That's what you can actually hit sometimes. But look at many of the police shootings. You hear the stories of 36 shots fired and they hit him once in the ankle. I mean, that's what really happens in the street. And that's aiming at the big, huge center mass chest. So again, that is where self-defense shooters are trained to shoot is center mass. And it's because that's probably the only part that you can hit a moving person. Even then you're not going to hit it 100% of the time. And that is the part that is most likely to do substantial damage to stop the person. Now you hope that once you've stopped them, they're able to put a hand over their wound and stop the bleeding and survive. We want this. We don't want anybody to die. We just don't want to get killed. And we just want to stop this person from attacking us. So that's kind of my moral perspective, is we shoot at the only part that we have a chance of hitting, that we have a reasonable chance of hitting, and we shoot that part of the person until they stop trying to attack us. And that could be one shot, it could be 10 shots, whatever it takes, so that that person is no longer able to kill us. So that's my perspective. I'd be curious what yours is. Do you have a different moral perspective? Do you have different principles that you live by?