Hopwin wrote:
What is the magic number police use? 20 feet? I don't think a handgun is worth **** against someone you know unless you're willing to cap them from quite a distance.
21 feet, but that number is subject to quite a few caveats.
As for whether a handgun is worth **** against someone you know, distance isn't really relevant. What makes it worth a **** is the willingness to cap them, period, especially since handguns aren't really designed for use at much of a distance anyhow. That can be harder against someone you know, and it won't necessarily be easy against someone you don't. The bottom line, however, is that you need to make up your mind that you want to survive. You may feel like **** afterwards, but you'll be alive to feel like ****.
The 21 foot rule is the distance at which a person not expecting an attack (as in, not expecting the person to attack them, not completely unaware of the attacker's presence) can reasonably expect to draw and fire before an attacker with a knife can stab them.
If the person with the gun has any sort of advance warning, already has their gun out, or both, the distance decreases. Other factors can increase the distance. That's also the distance for just one shot; to get more shots off requires more distance.
The purpose of the rule is to illustrate to people that just because the other guy has a knife and you have a gun doesn't mean you've gunned down a helpless person if you shoot them 20 feet away, a favorite line of criminal-sympathizing fools and people who can't accept that their family member was a thug or drug dealer or something. A knife is a deadly weapon and should be treated as such.
In any case, the rule is not very applicable to the situation of self-defense against an aggressive ex, since the defender already knows the attacker is hostile when he or she sees them, which is a warning. The attacker may get around this by sneaking up, but it's highly unlikely that the defender will see the attacker standing there and regard them as just another person on the street.