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If I find reason to fire at someone it’s because I feel they are trying to kill me. Round count will never enter my mind. That’s the dumbest thing I have ever heard of.

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Shoot until the threat is neutralized. I am of the mindset to run dry to accomplish that.
In the gravest extreme, I hope to live and let my attorney take care of the rest.

Right there with you guys.
Fire until there isn't a threat.
The "Shoot until they cease to be a threat, change shape or catch fire" seems to apply here.

What the military trains to do, and what law enforcement officers train to do is irrelevant.

You're firing your weapon because it isn't the military there defending you, or law enforcement. It's you. You are not bound by departmental policy. You are not bound by status of forces rules of engagement. You are bound by your desire to remain alive. You only have one purpose in that moment, if you've arrived at the decision to shoot: stop the threat. That's it. Anything else is irrelevant.

You'll act within the scope of your training. You'll adhere to the firearms safety you should adhere to under all circumstances. You'll probably have tunnel vision and you'll see the threat and little else.

You'll not keep track of your round count. You probably won't be immediately aware of the number of rounds you fired. You'll fire until the threat is stopped. How many rounds that takes is quite irrelevant, bounded only by your magazine capacity and whatever else you have to back that up. If it takes one round, so be it. If the threat doesn't stop, there are multiple threats, or the threat escalates, then you're going to go through as much ammunition as it takes, until you run out.

You won't hear the clang of a steel target. You won't see neat holes appear in the 10X ring. The threat wont' be wearing one. The threat will very likely not give a lot of indication of having been shot and you probably won't have an immediate indication of how effective your shooting has been. Incapacitation probably won't happen right away. So long as incapacitation hasn't occurred, the threat will still be active. Stop the threat.

Here is my limited experience.... I had taken and passed a four day defensive handgun class at Front Sight and was proficient at drawing from concealed and firing two rounds into center center mass in less than 1.5 seconds.

then I attended a private force on force lass at the Sig Academy given by Todd Rassa... first scenario I have to engage an active shooter... with out really thinking about it I draw an put one round in the guy's chest and he falls.. then I stand there trying to figure out what I should do next and I get shot by the guy laying on the ground... a lesson learned at least from that class....

The problem is that on TV and in the movies more often than not the bad guy gets hit with one round and goes down and is usually dead before he hits... the reality is people are hard to kill and even then they usually die slow.

My son is LEO and we have had this discussion. A friend of mine is a former Fed investigator and his comment would be: Do 2, the rest is up to you.

Of course, then there is the prosecutor type who has never so much as seen a threat worse than spilling his coffee on your charging document.
This is the threat you can't do as above...

Anyone worth shooting once is probably worth shooting more than once. That said, I train to shoot varying strings. I try not to shoot set amounts to keep from falling into the muscle memory tray. Keeping a mental picture of a threat being a threat until it’s not works for me.

I am a clueless civilian in a land where CCW has been "discontinued" for us law-abiding citizens thanks to a deal made 20 years ago by our then president to impress Bill Clinton.

slosig ref to OODA cycles reminded me that if you`ve reached the point where your gun is drawn and aimed, whaterver deserves to be shot once, likely deserves to be shot twice...

I say "Give generously!".

Till the action that motivated your response has ceased.

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had a friend make a 'joking' comment a few years ago in regards to this discussion....

He pointed out the perp did not stop 'moving' until his magazine ran dry....

Good discussion. From a strictly civilian viewpoint, double taps help me learn to keep rounds on target during rapid fire. I will often shoot a string of double taps, but will also shoot triples. If ammo was endless and free I would certainly train controlled mag dumps but alas that's not the case.

As a civilian, my goal is to stop the threat to me or those near me. I am not responsible for apprehending.

Any altercation can and will be second guessed, but I feel shooting until the threat is stopped is reasonable and defensible. If you dump multiple rounds into someone who is coming at you and stop when they stop, I think that would be hard to successfully prosecute. Likewise if you put one round in their back while they were running away from you, well you can't really defend that very well because the immediate threat to you was already stopped.

Adding to my previous comment...

Number of assessed targets and urgency may change the equation drastically.

Give generously.

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it's better to give than to receive...