Read any issue of NRA's American Rifleman magazine and you'll find more stories about the good guys winning against the bad guys in a single monthly issue than you'll see in the drive-by media in your entire lifetime...
The point of fighting back is to do your best to
never let the criminal take control of the situation, or to prevent the criminal from escaping...Anh_Minh's little theoretical situation of the possibility of letting a criminal go to save your life or having the police arrest him and risk getting killed in revenge is stupid in that it has the criminal taking control of the situation by psychologically manipulating the victim...Why would any self-respecting law-abiding citizen
let a criminal go when the citizen has the criminal held at point? It's stupid!
How about taking a situation that's more grounded in reality and making a theory out of it? There was a news report in mid-June this year where a veteran from the Lebanese Army was armed and
stopped a would-be bank robber...In Canton, Michigan, Nabil Fawzi is a long-time customer at the Comerica Bank, and was with a teller at the bank when robber Joseph Webster gave a teller a note claiming he had a suicide bomb and demanded money...Fawzi was notified of the situation from the teller he was with, and while the teller turned the silent alarm on, Fawzi pulled out his concealed Beretta 92FS and held the would-be robber at gunpoint...Webster warned Fawzi that he had a bomb, but Fawzi told Webster he didn't care and that he wasn't going to rob the bank, and continued to hold Webster until the police arrived at the scene...It was after he was apprehended was it learned that Webster did not have a bomb...
What if the robber actually had a suicide bomb in reality? At the time when Fawzi was holding Webster at gunpoint, I'm sure Fawzi was thinking of the possibility that Webster could've been telling the truth, and since he was formerly a soldier in the Lebanese Army, I'm sure Fawzi probably saw stuff like this in his past...But he didn't care, and risked lives at the bank to do everything he possibly could to prevent the robbery and keep the criminal at an arm's reach within justice...But most of all?
Fawzi kept control of the situation; Even when Webster tried to threaten Fawzi with an alleged
bomb, Fawzi stood point and
never let Webster even have the chance to move freely...
Officers that are in SWAT or federal agents that are in FBI's HRT see high-risk criminal situations like this very often, even when hostages are involved, and even though they attempt to settle things peacefully through negotiations before scaling their tactical actions, they
never let the criminals take control of the situation by giving into the criminal's demands, and do everything they can to take them into custody without any friendly damage...Even if there are risks involved, when you start letting the criminal order you around, then they have the situation in their hands, and that's not something you want in a situation involving a potentially hostile criminal where the risks can quickly escalate when you let the criminal have things their way...Benevolence is the best weapon one can use to combat crime, and you don't have to be in law enforcement to use it either...