This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

In the 11 years I was a cop, I never shot anyone. I never even shot at anyone. But I came within a finger twitch of doing so during horrible moments that still make me wince.

I shot untold numbers of traffic-torn deer and other animals, but never a human being. I've spent every day since I quit law enforcement being grateful that I don't have to carry that particular burden around with me.

My wife says I sometimes flinch in my sleep. Mostly it's because of imagined explosions that Sonny set off too early, but every once in a while it's the memory of an armed man in the parking lot of a bar. He was carrying a rifle toward the door when I stopped him.

Turned out that he had lost a fight and was headed back inside for some serious catching up. Instead, he ran into me. At gunpoint, I ordered him to put the rifle down. He was drunk and clumsy, and the muzzle swung toward me.

A fourth of a second before the shots that would have changed both of our lives, the lives of our families, and the peace of the entire community, he screamed, wet his pants and dropped the rifle.

He told me later at the jail that it was the look on my face that had scared him the most. He was just a regular guy who had had too much to drink and did something stupid with what turned out to be an empty rifle.

He thanked me for not killing him. I thanked him for turning off the stupid before I had to. It was a small town. We bumped into each other several times after that, congenial encounters that always carried with them a sense of shared relief. I watched his kids grow up. With a father.

Would I have killed him? Yeah. Had it come down to a choice between who got to go home to their loved ones, it was going to be me.

I've been on the other side of this situation as well. One night, when I was a teenager/moron, some friends (I'm not saying who) and I were riding around in a car shooting out streetlights with guns. Big ones.

We stopped at a friend's house to reload. We were having a good time and paid no attention to the possibility that someone responsible might call the police about all the shooting in the area.

When it was time to go, the heavily armed four of us loudly exited the house on our way to find more things that needed to be shot. Never in our empty heads did it occur to us that we might be mistaken for just such a thing.

Standing on the darkened porch, I noticed a piece of pipe sticking out of a bush where no pipe had been before. I could almost reach out and grab it. If I had, you'd be reading something else right now.

The pipe was the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun belonging to a Salt Lake County sheriff's deputy, one of six who had responded to a series of "shots fired" and "man with a gun" reports from frightened residents.

Seconds later, we were smacked around, handcuffed and face-down on the driveway, a furious deputy explaining just how close we'd come to getting our dumbass selves killed.

I didn't know then what I would find out nearly 10 years later — that the cop was almost as scared as I was.

Situations like this go on every hour in police work. We never hear about the 99.9 percent of them that end without anyone getting shot, only the ones that end badly. And when that happens, it's rarely ever as simple as we think.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.