I know his wife is some proud of him.
Certainly under the circumstances we can forgive his wife for not allowing herself to consider the foolishness of his choices, or for being a fool herself. When you get lucky enough to "win" against the odds, it is hard to understand the dire risks you were just exposed to.
Nearly driving your car off a cliff isn't nearly the teacher that
actually crashing and burning would be, and in fact tends to teach entirely the wrong lessons. You aren't a great driver because you escaped. You're a negligent idiot who nearly died. Same idea.
Your opinion is not the only correct course of action as we see here in this article. Just keep that in mind.
But here we study lethal force encounters to try and determine how we should best learn from them and apply the lessons they teach.
You may choose to cheer the "hero" for his "bravery" but that's not really learning anything from his mistakes, and thus, not why we're here studying these things.
He did little right and much wrong. He took risks that we would hope no one here reading and studying the situation would choose to take.
The benefits of his choice to himself were non-existent (he had no need to enter the fight) and the benefits to society of his thoughtless act were negligible at the very best. MAYBE he prevented one goon from shooting another goon, but so what? Maybe he shortened the time the police would have taken to round them all up by a few hours, but so what? There's some outside chance that further gunfire would have harmed a bystander, but there's no reason to think that was particularly likely.
No, he gained very, very little for anyone except that he gets his name in the paper and internet news sites (yaaay) and he risked things that no sane man has a right to risk.
It was, truly, the Good Samaritan version of a "
Hey Honey, hold my beer!" moment.