"Stan," et al. your logic or knowledge underlying and supporting your statements, respectively, escapes me. For example, your emotive statements regarding personal liability or legal jeopardy when a person employs what the person believes to be the most effective cartridge / firearm to defend himself or herself in their abode or otherwise is uninformed. You have the right to lawfully defend yourself. Should the local district attorney and the grand jury disagree and indict, you hire a defense attorney to defend you. Bear in mind you have nothing to prove and no onus to prove yourself innocent; on the other hand, the prosecutor 'must' prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Should a defense attorney put his defendant on the witness stand, or yet allow his client to even take the stand, in a criminal case, that demonstrably incompetent attorney would be committing malpractice of the first order. It could form the basis of an appeal if there is a conviction. This is to say you as a defendant will not be taking the witness stand to defend yourself. Remember, you hired a qualified attorney to do that.
Now, you could take the witness stand and testify, which is your right, of course, but your defense is your attorney's job, not yours, and the professional defense attorney hopefully has the knowledge, training and experience to defend you. Otherwise, why hire a defense attorney? Should the scenario of taking the stand eventuate, you as defendant would unnecessarily expose yourself to withering cross-examination and it would be a remarkably stupid decision to do so, and very likely one taken against your own attorney's best advice. The question of guilt will revolve around whether the shooting and taking of life were justified, not on the matter of equipment that caused the death. Questions of intent are not as important (and very difficult for the prosecutor to prove) as questions concerning the totality of the circumstances that led to the shooting, and not what may have been anticipated as needed by the shooter. So, the scenario you paint for yourself is highly unlikely to ever occur.
Second, why do we buy soft nose or hollow point ammunition with which to load our designated self-defense firearms, and how do we come to select the same? The makers advertise their effectiveness to kill and massively at that, or perhaps I just have not seen those that advertise wounding loads or those strictly meant for that purpose. The adverts I have seen, and assuredly everyone else on this forum has too, demonstrate the effectiveness of their company's projectile by showing the viewer how the projectile displaces large amounts of ballistic gelatin and how far it penetrates. Though perhaps I have just missed the ballistic demonstration where the projectile is meant to disable.
If I -- or for that matter anyone else -- find myself in a circumstance where I must point my defensive firearm at an individual and requires that I fire my firearm, I am not going to be thinking of defending myself by use of some trick or chancy wounding shot. I am going to aim for or point at the chest area and pull the trigger, which shot will most likely kill my assailant. If the situation indeed warrants the need to pull trigger, then it is going to be a justifiable act to law enforcement or the courts.
I think you have it right with respect to the preference for a shotgun as a defense weapon. Though I believe that such would be rather impractical as a tool to simply disable or wound an assailant. Should the need arise, I intend to place my shot in the chest area and will hope to survive the attack and / or the armed home invasion. Of course, if the assailant or invader is willing to dispense with his aggression, I would naturally take him into personal custody because of a change in circumstance, which then could also be justified.
Regards,
Edwardian
