Polite Society 2010 - Scenario 2
Scenario 2:
You are at home with a houseguest. You turn in for the night. Your guest goes to the front room to check email and surf the internet on his/her notebook computer.
You hear the front door open and assume it is your guest. Then you hear sounds of a struggle and your guest yelling "HELP ME!”.
With varying degrees of speed, the homeowner moved from the bedroom to the living room to find an intruder beating his houseguest over the head with the notebook computer. The intruder was standing with his back to the homeowner and the houseguest was seated. Any shots hitting the intruder below the upper chest and head are likely to hit the houseguest.
This scenario was the complete opposite of Scenario 1. Because the bad guy continued to beat the houseguest in the head, the desired solution was for the homeowner to shoot the bad guy immediately, to end the violent assault and to preclude further injury to the houseguest.
The houseguest role player had been instructed to drop to the floor and go unconscious on a cue from the bad guy role player. If homeowner waited too long to shoot and the houseguest was knocked out, we explained that the houseguest had suffered severe brain damage and would spend his/her life in a wheelchair.
What occurred in a majority of the scenarios was that the homeowner, once again, got into the verbal challenge loop, shouting "STOP! STOP!" with no result. Some continued to advance on the bad guy, getting within “gun-grabbing” distance without firing. Those that moved into the room ended up in a position where shots were much less likely to pass through into the houseguest.
The intent of this scenario was to first test the participants’ recognition of the danger of multiple blows to the head. Secondarily, the intent was to test the participants' comfort level with, and their ability to justify, shooting an unarmed intruder who is in their house at night and beating someone in the head, “in the back”.
The most successful participant in this scenario still spent additional precious seconds shouting verbal commands before opening fire. No one went straight from seeing the attack in progress to shooting to stop.
In the first CHL-involved shooting in Texas, the shooter was getting beaten in the head by an unarmed person. The photographic paper targets used in live fire training, including our own live fire classes, always show threats with guns and knives. Targets without weapons are considered no-shoots most of the time. The unarmed attack as a deadly threat case is often neglected, as the results of this scenario revealed.