PAULA BOLYARD: How I Evolved on Guns During the #BostonPoliceScanner Manhunt.

If confronted with an armed intruder or assailant, shooting to maim or firing a warning shot may not be an option, so a gun owner must wrestle with the moral implications of shooting someone to death. I searched my heart and realized that in the heat of the moment of an attack, I wasn’t sure what I would do with a gun in my hand. I knew that could be more dangerous than being unarmed; it wasn’t worth the risk.

But all that changed early Friday morning. Along with 80,000 others around the world, I found myself glued to the live-action police drama being played out online. I first noticed the tweets with the hashtag #BostonPoliceScanner late Thursday evening and was soon engrossed in the manhunt, listening to the officers on the ground in Watertown and Cambridge and simultaneously following the tweets from the worldwide audience. Throughout the night, a community of sorts formed as I began to recognize Twitter handles and together we “watched” law enforcement officers create a perimeter and lay down a grid so they could search the neighborhoods of Watertown. We listened as they responded to calls from residents who “heard something” in their sheds or thought they saw a “guy with a backpack” walking down the street. This was repeated dozens of times throughout the night. When police broadcast their location, many listeners typed the address into Google Street View and so could see the streets and even houses they were responding to.

It was both surreal and very real at the same time. It was a strange combination of social media and reality show with the knowledge that life and death were on the line. . . .

I realized at that moment that the police cannot protect me from the Dzhokhar Tsarnaevs of the world.

The best they can do is tell me to lock myself in my home while they search for the bad guy. Though the residents of Watertown (and the surrounding greater-Boston area) were held in a state of near-martial law, the best most of them could do was huddle in their homes, hoping the police would take their 3 a.m. call and come running to rescue them before the terrorist killed them. . . . I realized right then that if I were holed up in my house while a cold-blooded terrorist roamed my neighborhood, I wouldn’t want to be a sitting duck with only a deadbolt lock between me and an armed intruder.

Neither would I.