There are a LOT of ways interventions in third party events can go south. Unless I was completely familiar with how a situation got to the point of gun play, I would be incredibly hesitant to intervene.SIGFan43 wrote:My quandry is this: If I’m walking near the building in question, and I hear gunfire within, I’m likely to stay outside and observe through a window, because I might not risk my life to protect the manager if she is being attacked. My logic is that I might be charged with trespassing if I intervene while carrying concealed, regardless of what is happening indoors. Is my thinking flawed?
First of all, if all of the star align and everything was perfect and you ran into a building and saved someone from an attacker, in TX, I cannot ever imagine you being charged with trespass. Ever.
HOWEVER, and this is where it gets tricky, (as txglock21 said there are way too many what-ifs to cover everything)
What if the manager of the building you're walking by is an abusive lady, and her ex is expected to give her payments of some sort. In a poorly thought out situation he agrees to bring the money by her work. The video later shows that she brandished a weapon at him and he was protecting himself when he fired. The video also shows you coming in ten seconds later and putting some caps in the guy defending himself.
The classic case given in many LTC type classes is: You see a man with a gun standing over a woman in a parking lot. She is crying and screaming for him not to hurt her. You pull over and shoot him because he is about to kill her. And later find out that he had just taken the pistol from her in self defense and was fumbling for his phone to call 911.
I try not to say never because it is a big word, but I would very rarely interject shots fired into a situation I wasn't incredibly confident about how it started. The nuances of how it started can mean everything. That is not to say I won't interject myself. Admittedly I have only done this once for any event of magnitude, so I am no expert. However, if I were to interject myself it would most likely be with my phone and my ability to articulate the situation to a 911 operator.
I think that we all have the ability to be heroes, but very few of us have the ability to be batman. My tingly senses aren't good enough for me to infer who is for sure the "saint" and who is the "sinner."