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A movie that really impacted me was Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven". In one scene the young hotshot who thinks he wants to be a famous gunslinger shoots a guy dead, first time he ever shot anyone. After they get away the kid is distraught. Crying and drinking heavily he says how hard it is to imagine the guy will never breathe again just because he pulled a trigger. Eastwood, the certified stone cold killer who rehabilitated himself but came out retirement for one last score, responds "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have." When they kid then justifies it by saying the guy had it coming because of his misdeeds, Eastwood says "Kid, we all have if coming."

Amazing scene. Whenever I think of someone being put in a situation where they have no choice but to use lethal force I think of this scene and how in that one moment you aren't just stopping a bad guy, you are stopping everything he ever might have done in the future. You are making his children orphans and his wife a widow. You would never steal his car yet in that moment you took everything he ever had away from him.

In the quiet of your mind, even though you know what you did was sound, justified, legal, smart and defensible, well, I suppose that reality that this person is gone is because of that moment and what you did must be hard to get past. For a person with any degree of empathy, the weight of that on your mind must be immense.

I feel for the officer and what he must be going through. He was begging the guy to choose to walk away from the situation alive and go on to live a long life but for whatever reason his pleas fell on deaf ears. And now he has to make peace with that somehow.