As someone who carries a firearm every day and is not law enforcement, it's situationally dependent.
If my family is with me, my first objective is to get them to safety. If that's not possible I'm certainly not leaving them to "hunt" the shooter.
If someone is actively engaged in shooting innocents and I'm alone, I'm going toward them under cover or concealment. I'm going to try my best to be as accurate as possible, and accuracy is proportional to the time taken to take the shot. The best resolution here would be firing before I'm seen and preventing the shooter from being able to continue their assault. That said, most mass murderers don't intend to survive to be captured, and someone returning fire is often enough for them to cut their massacre short through suicide to avoid that - so if I don't have a means to get closer, taking a shot that is unlikely to be effective is better than waiting and doing nothing. Even if they attempt to return fire at me, that means that innocents being targeted by them have more of a chance to reach cover.
Finally, and by far the most likely, I wouldn't be close enough to the shooter to immediately stop the situation. In that case I would keep my firearm holstered and try to help others flee to safety.
For what it's worth, I don't see any of this as being at all likely. On any given day I'm extremely unlikely to need a firearm; over the course of a year, a decade, or a lifetime, that chance goes up to merely "unlikely". By far the most likely circumstance I will ever use a firearm is self-defense is demonstrating the ability and motivation to defend myself, probably by merely preparing to fire by reaching for the gun.
I'm 36, and this has held true in the handful of situations I've encountered thus far; I've had one instance where I made the decision to draw and fire, and in the second or so before I had drawn and began to pull the trigger my assailant had stopped their assault and began to flee.
If my family is with me, my first objective is to get them to safety. If that's not possible I'm certainly not leaving them to "hunt" the shooter.
If someone is actively engaged in shooting innocents and I'm alone, I'm going toward them under cover or concealment. I'm going to try my best to be as accurate as possible, and accuracy is proportional to the time taken to take the shot. The best resolution here would be firing before I'm seen and preventing the shooter from being able to continue their assault. That said, most mass murderers don't intend to survive to be captured, and someone returning fire is often enough for them to cut their massacre short through suicide to avoid that - so if I don't have a means to get closer, taking a shot that is unlikely to be effective is better than waiting and doing nothing. Even if they attempt to return fire at me, that means that innocents being targeted by them have more of a chance to reach cover.
Finally, and by far the most likely, I wouldn't be close enough to the shooter to immediately stop the situation. In that case I would keep my firearm holstered and try to help others flee to safety.
For what it's worth, I don't see any of this as being at all likely. On any given day I'm extremely unlikely to need a firearm; over the course of a year, a decade, or a lifetime, that chance goes up to merely "unlikely". By far the most likely circumstance I will ever use a firearm is self-defense is demonstrating the ability and motivation to defend myself, probably by merely preparing to fire by reaching for the gun.
I'm 36, and this has held true in the handful of situations I've encountered thus far; I've had one instance where I made the decision to draw and fire, and in the second or so before I had drawn and began to pull the trigger my assailant had stopped their assault and began to flee.
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