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I can see by the responses you have been making that you don't know much about real life...even more about protecting yourself.

You assume that the person beating your door down just might have an emergency even though the shooter was told to quit beating the door. Why do you figure that if he heard the homeowner shouting at him he could not do the same and relay his message to the homeowner....a deaf man with an emergency you say?

The other thing that is very telling about you is the naive fact that you think that when you shoot someone they instantly drop dead to the floor just like the movies you have watched. Well, I hate to inform you that it takes a minimum of 11 seconds to kill someone if they are shot in the heart. I seriously doubt that the homeowner in a panic would have both the steadiness of nerve and hand to shoot a charging man at a full run at him directly in the brain.

You need to have some real life experiences and quit believing everything you hear from the movies. Real life is a totally different show.

What do you really think the homeowner should have done?
1. Unlock and open the door to talk to the guy?
2. Ask him if he wanted to hurt him?
3. Ask the guy if he had a knive or gun?
4. Unload his gun so that it would not accidently fire?
5. Ask the guy if the reason that he wanted in so badly was due to having to use the bathroom really bad?

I love people like you who stand back and say what you think you would do if you were in that situation, while having no idea if it really happened to you. In your case, we would be reading about you in the morning obituary.

What he should have done was call the cops, and be prepared to take action until they got there.

True story. I used to work nights and my wife called me at about 3 am one morning because a guy (black man) was trying to get our bedroom window open. She had the gun pointed at him and would have killed him except I kept her on the line talking her out of it while a friend at work called the cops. I wouldn't let her shoot until the guy broke the window. After a couple of minutes he left without breaking the window, and the cops picked him up down the street about 5 minutes later. He was "dead" drunk.

The tone of your reply seems a bit unnecessary and defensive. People here have made perfectly legit arguments that shooting and killing someone banging on your door should not be legal. If the only qualification necessary to kill is fear for one's life, we could have paranoid schizos running around legally killing everybody. As with every other situation, it should be judged on a case-by-case basis, and in this case a full investigation is warranted.

FYI, I've shot at, and been shot at, so don't respond assuming I'm some sheltered ninny who doesn't know what "the real world" is like.