Don't kid yourself - there is no such thing as a shot that is guaranteed to just wound. Bullets do very strange things when they enter bodies, and their paths cannot be predicted ahead of time. They bounce off bones, follow bones and enter other body areas, tumble, deflect, and generally do lots of things you wouldn't expect.XtremeDuty.45 wrote:what I like the most is that you had the mindset to aim low to stop the threat and not to shoot kill. Good thing you waited to get your gun or this could have been bad. Even though the LEO wanted you to shoot you did the right thing by not. He may have justified you in the shooting but a prosecutor would not have. Great job.
A low shot may well hit the major blood vessels that go down both hips and into the legs. It is one of the targets some advanced law enforcement instructors advocate as shooting first because a pelvic fracture will almost always take a subject immediately off his feet, and a femoral artery hit will cause a person to exsanguinate (bleed to death) unless competent trauma care is administered within about the first two minutes.
Regardless of where on the body you aim, if you discharge a firearm, you are using deadly force that may very well result in the death of the person you fire on. You have no business firing at all unless death of the target is an acceptable and legally justifiable outcome.
The OP definitely acted wisely here by holding his fire, even when confronted with a "furtive movement" situation, which would have been legal quicksand in the aftermath.