The legal technicality of a new self-defense claim in the news is duly noted.

A robber had run from an armed clerk, and was chased outside the store. While being shot at by the clerk, the robber returned fire and the clerk died.

…when the guy ran away, the concept of the clerk being reasonably afraid, that changed considerably. Now you have a serious felony, what the robber did, but you don’t get to execute the guy under those circumstances. So the robber then obtained the right to self-defense.

I wrote and gave talks about this scenario back in 2012, while working on active defense.

We referred to it as knowing when defensive acts become indefensible, citing an old case from a British military trial known as “the fourth bullet”.