If you do shoot an attacker, he warns, a typical legal defense will cost upwards of six figures. And the ordeal doesn't end with financial ruin. Kill someone, and your friends and neighbors will instinctively turn their backs on you. "The newspapers are not going to write GOOD GUYS ONE, SCUMBAGS NIL," Ayoob says, "but MAN HELD IN SLAYING. Society doesn't say, `You put this beast in the dirt where he belonged.' Society will make you feel like a murderer. You killed a citizen."

Then there's the psychological trauma. The first thing you'll feel after having shot someone is euphoria -- "not because you killed, but because you survived." When this wears off, you'll enter into a downward spiral: sleep disturbance, appetite disturbance, substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, social withdrawal, depression, maybe even suicidal tendencies.

"Some say that you'll feel warm and fuzzy," Ayoob says. "Your beer will be colder, your jokes will be funnier, your dick will be four inches longer." He pauses, then shouts: "No! You may have killed the archetype of the beast, but you have committed an unnatural act!"

You can tell that some students are getting a bit disheartened by all this damned-if-you-do, dead-if-you-don't stuff. Indeed, there's a touch of after-class grumbling. "I'm a little discouraged," says one man, a 69-year-old psychiatrist. "It's troubling to know the ocean of doo-doo you get into if you have to defend yourself, no matter how well judged the response."

Still, all this is better than the alternative: "There is no reversal from the grave," says Ayoob, "no appeal from the wheelchair."