I think without knowing more about the specific situation and individual, it is impossible to judge whether this is a skillful action or not.

I would start off by saying that I agree with you broadly on gun rights and a right to self defense. I'm a believer in the Second Amendment as a guarantee of individual rights to guns. I don't believe that ahimsa requires letting an aggressor harm you or an innocent- there are examples form the jataka and Gandhi's thought that I think are applicable.

If you are carrying a weapon responsibly, you must train regularly in its use or else it becomes a liability- a source of false bravery and potentially the instrument of your own destruction, or of an innocent if used incorrectly. You can also neglect other techniques of self-defense that might prevent a confrontation from being necessary. Things can be replaced. Lives can not be. Do you spend as much time studying techniques of non-violent conflict resolution as you spend at the shooting range? Shooting guns is fun, but what about learning verbal self defense, awareness, victim profiling, aikido, etc.? Many people prepare themselves only for an 'all or nothing' scenario in which the threat is obvious, undeniable, and lethal- this is the vast minority of confrontations, I suspect.

I also see a difference between self-defense in the home and out on the street. If you have a job that requires you to be in a dangerous area at dangerous times, that is one thing. If you have a paranoid assessment of the danger that you face every day, that is another. If you are carrying a gun, are you preparing yourself to retreat or de-escalate when the opportunity presents itself, or are you preparing yourself to escalate a situation into an armed confrontation?

It is easy to slip into a "war zone" mindset where you are preparing yourself for violence at any moment. I think that the number of actual situations in the world where this is true is very small, but the mindset can become established and hard to shake. We see numerous cases in the United States where people were shot not because they posed a threat, but because the people who shot them believed they lived in a more dangerous world than they really did.

So I think it comes down to: * How realistic is your assessment of the threats that you face? and * How are you preparing yourself, and are you taking sufficient measures to ensure that you don't become the source of violence rather than responding to it?