My daughter took Tae Kwon Do. At first all the forms looked useless, then he had a bunch of students come at him, and he used the forms one after the other to take them out. Turns out learning the forms is to make fighting second nature, you can react instantly to take out someone coming up from whatever direction and in whatever manner because that move has been burned into your mind.
It’s like learning proper stance, grip and breathing for shooting, not just “pull the trigger.” The extensive training in the basics will save you in an emergency situation.
TKD has some rather flashy kicks, many of them to the head, and punches that are are stylized. As for the TKD forms, those poomsae (basically equivalent to kata in Karate) have a lot of meaning and significance (before I left traditional martial arts and got involved in reality-based self-defense and Krav Maga, I used to be in Shotokan Karate at ni-dan level - 2nd degree black belt), but unfortunately most people only learn the forms and not the reason behind those forms. For instance, at first dan in Karate (sho-dan, or the first black belt ...which is where you really start to learn about the art) you go through something called Kata Bunkai ...where you are shown the reason behind the kata movements. However, most dojos (karate) and dojangs (TKD) are what is known as 'McDojos' where you see kids at age 15 with black belts. They basically sell belts.
However, the biggest problem with TKD is that it is a sparring martial art ...they are a lot of competitions that use the point-sparring system (it is even in the olympics), which is extremely different from a reality-based self-defense system like Krav Maga, Kapap and Haganah (all 3 of which are taught to the Israeli armed forces). If you look at TKD and compare it with Kapap or Krav Maga, the TKD will look far more pretty. However the krav maga moves will be far more brutal. Finally, a lock of the blocks taught in TKD simply do not work ...they came from Karate (the founders of TKD were all Koreans who had learned Karate, primarily Shotokan, during the Japanese occupation of WW2 ...virtually all indigenous Korean martial arts were exterminated by the Japanese, and TKD was formed after the war when the Koreans who had started various martial arts schools decided to combine them into TKD ....some TKD forms, especially ITF, are actually almost identical to Shotokan Karate forms ...only with a focus on kicks). Those blocks were made to be used when the wearer has armor (e.g. a Samurai who has had his main weapon ...maybe his sword -katana, yari-spear, or naginata-halberd taken away from him), and thus the blocks would have worked. However, give a 9 year old girl a permanent marker, and tell her to come towards you and try to 'cut' you. She will be flailing, and it will be impossible to block if you use those karate/TKD style blocks. Furthermore, in a real knife 'fight' (knife fights only happen in movies ....in real life it is knife cutting) you will not even see the knife until you have been stabbed several times by the guy who 'only wanted to talk to you.'
Anyways, I am proud of what your daughter did. However I think it was more of a function of her being a natural fighter, keeping her senses when many people would lose theirs, and acting rather than freezing. Amazing girl. However, maybe she should look into some of the more reality-based self-defense programs (e.g. Krav Maga), which would be great supplements to having a gun.