For hunting and pest control purposes, essentially (details on request, but being humane is obviously part of it).
For dealing with two legged snakes, not per se. Ignoring high energy (not .22 rimfire) rifles (can address that later if you wish), for normal handguns in self-defense, what police and civilians can legally do is stopping a lethal threat. Killing is not and cannot be the objective.
And there's basically three mechanisms for that, only one of which is reasonably guaranteed to work with normal human marksmanship.
First, when shot once, a large fraction of people will stop their aggression, e.g. Trayvon Martin is the most recent famous example. For that matter being shot at is often sufficient (browse YouTube some). But you obviously can't count on it.
Hitting the central nervous system, brain, or spine high enough, will do it. But those are small, hard to hit targets, we have strong instincts about threats to our heads, the brain is well protected with bone, etc. etc. ... and of course a hit to the brain is often fatal and almost certainly catastrophic.
Failing that, causing someone to lose enough blood they can't keep fighting is what you're left with---but that's dicey, there are many many incidents where e.g. heart function is outright stopped and the aggressor continues to be lethal for 10s of seconds to in some rare cases minutes. And this mechanism is obviously also hard to keep from going all the way to fatal.
One very special case for police snipers is the hostage situation where they have to hit the perpetrator's brain stem to prevent him from reflexively killing his hostage. That's invariably lethal (killed JFK), but still based on the, in this case, narrow legal distinction that the intent was to stop the perpetrator from killing a innocent 3rd party, not kill him per se.
Ah, I should add the deterrent affect. Being maimed or killed by a civilian is about the greatest fear of criminals according to surveys; the fact that the civilians will be using lethal guns is of course behind that. From that it logically follows that the vast majority of the 2.5 million gun self-defense incidents in the US every year do not involve anyone getting shot, and almost always even a shot being fired (warning shots are pretty much never legitimate).
Maybe not, but I decided to do a "Just the facts, Ma'am" posting ... and since so many are using the Martin case to attack the very idea of self-defense---and don't say that's silly, for the U.K. effectively outlawed it in the courts in the '50s, by statute in the following decade or two---I don't think it hurts to repeat the well established fact that he was the aggressor using lethal force on Zimmerman when the latter was forced to shoot him.
If you want to dive into that case, it's also telling he only shot Martin once (because Martin immediately ceased trying to kill him). That doesn't really jibe with the bogus narrative.
For dealing with two legged snakes, not per se. Ignoring high energy (not .22 rimfire) rifles (can address that later if you wish), for normal handguns in self-defense, what police and civilians can legally do is stopping a lethal threat. Killing is not and cannot be the objective.
And there's basically three mechanisms for that, only one of which is reasonably guaranteed to work with normal human marksmanship.
First, when shot once, a large fraction of people will stop their aggression, e.g. Trayvon Martin is the most recent famous example. For that matter being shot at is often sufficient (browse YouTube some). But you obviously can't count on it.
Hitting the central nervous system, brain, or spine high enough, will do it. But those are small, hard to hit targets, we have strong instincts about threats to our heads, the brain is well protected with bone, etc. etc. ... and of course a hit to the brain is often fatal and almost certainly catastrophic.
Failing that, causing someone to lose enough blood they can't keep fighting is what you're left with---but that's dicey, there are many many incidents where e.g. heart function is outright stopped and the aggressor continues to be lethal for 10s of seconds to in some rare cases minutes. And this mechanism is obviously also hard to keep from going all the way to fatal.
One very special case for police snipers is the hostage situation where they have to hit the perpetrator's brain stem to prevent him from reflexively killing his hostage. That's invariably lethal (killed JFK), but still based on the, in this case, narrow legal distinction that the intent was to stop the perpetrator from killing a innocent 3rd party, not kill him per se.
Ah, I should add the deterrent affect. Being maimed or killed by a civilian is about the greatest fear of criminals according to surveys; the fact that the civilians will be using lethal guns is of course behind that. From that it logically follows that the vast majority of the 2.5 million gun self-defense incidents in the US every year do not involve anyone getting shot, and almost always even a shot being fired (warning shots are pretty much never legitimate).