By Scott Longman
Like probably most everyone reading this, I was taught calculated restraint in the use of force from the time I was young. Is this a shot I can take, in conjunction with is this a shot I should take? Besides the several related basic safety issues, I had hammered into my head the sheer ethics of the shot.
And that really gets to the point here: Sometimes, we are defined by the shots we didn’t take.
My stand-down history starts with many small such instances, against squirrels, raccoons, and even big Norwegian rats, those mostly with my father, the Army Ordnance Officer at my shoulder. He wouldn’t even let me take a questionable shot on a rat, as awful and destructive as they were. Too far. Moving too fast. Too much brush. He liked to quote the fictional but nevertheless instructive Inspector Callahan: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” And so I learned.
But fast-forward two decades, and I no longer had him at my shoulder.
I was on a week of going after deer on a huge farm that had been in another key mentor’s family for hundreds of years. The fall hunts were every bit as much of this place as daybreak and sundown. The afternoons of those hunts were organized with brush beaters and radio-collared dogs and established fire zones and permanent tree stands. But mornings were often free-form, meaning I was solo. Be back at the big house for lunch.
And so I found myself settled in at the base of a giant tree, older than I could name my ancestors, on a gorgeous, crisp fall morning. As lots of elsewhere, that state’s firearms season began well past peak fall colors, but any year’s particular weather matters, and this day, a large part of autumn’s colorful splendor was still apparent, along with the morning sunlight to show it off. I had a borrowed Mossberg 500 12, plain but perfect. This sector of woods didn’t have a treestand: I set down a second poncho on the ground and simply settled into the base of a tree while putting the primary poncho over me. It was hard to note the wind.
Nature came and went. Birds, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks. They kept appearing in front of me, which I interpreted to having the unfelt wind in my face.
And then this creature came, a simply magnificent red fox. Beautiful pelt, in the prime of life. We had tags covering them. He trotted along, oblivious to the potential disaster that awaited.
At about five yards, he snapped to attention. I am in the group of people who believe that many animals are far, far more intelligent than the general public might give them credit for. I swear that the look on the fox’s face was: “Oh, fuck!”
I just didn’t have it in me to shoot him. He wasn’t what I was there for, and the farm only raised dairy cattle—no chickens—so he was of no threat to my mentor’s livestock. I took my left hand, pointed to my left, the direction he was already going, and said, “Get out of here” which, after a pause, he enthusiastically did. I have never regretted that decision.
And then we get to humans.
I have had a couple of instances where I could have shot some spirochete who very much deserved it. Those were within the Rules of Engagement, but one extra-so.
I was dating a magnificent young lady who went to a college in a major city. While the campus itself was reasonably civilized, it was smack up against urban hell.
One of the ways I tried to maintain the long-distance relationship was a nightly call, back when long distance truly cost you. Well, one day, I hit upon the idea of driving up there without telling her, finding a pay phone—remember those?—near her apartment, and calling her at the same time of late evening that I usually called, with the intent of ending the call with a “Hey, how about I show up right now?”
I did that, at the edge of campus, which also meant at the edge of the ghetto. And right after I hung up, three aggressors emerged, the one in the middle with a knife. Well, I’m not a complete idiot, so I was packing a 1911A1 Series 70, cocked and locked. I presented, and there was a moment where they knew, and I knew. I would have been one hundred percent legal to shoot at least the knifeman and maybe all three, and for a pregnant second I damn near did. But I gave them just an instant to bolt. They did, like you’d turned on the kitchen lights, gone. I have never regretted that decision.
Sometimes, we are defined by the shots we didn’t take.
