(*** This is not legal advice. I am not liable for your actions. Read at your own risk. ***)

Given some of the stories we’ve seen in the news over the last couple of weeks, there are some people who quite obviously do not understand when they should shoot at another person. For example, earlier this week, there was a story about a young man who was allegedly shot for going to the wrong door even as a story broke about a young woman who was supposedly shot to death for pulling into the wrong driveway.

Unfortunately, whether you should pull a trigger or not isn’t an easy question to answer for a variety of reasons. There are different laws in different states and such a wide variety of situations that could occur, it’s impossible to cover them all in detail.

So, how do you untangle all of this? You go back to first principles. Long before you point a gun at someone and shoot, you should think hard about these questions until they’re practically second nature: