[MiniDevil]

Originally Posted by GunLawyer001

Note the "castle doctrine" in 2(2)(A). Also pay attention to the duty to retreat in most places.
For a helpless person on the ground, being savagely beaten by multiple hostiles, I'd think that shooting active members of the crowd until the beating stopped would be defensible. My guess would be that the first shot would end the fun, although if they were armed it would escalate into general shooting; if you're in danger of being kicked to death, I'd roll the dice and risk being shot to death if it might scatter the gremlins.
Note also the prohibition on "provoking" an attack so that you can "defend" yourself. Most shootouts that you see in Westerns would end in prosecutions, even where the survivor provoked the other guy to draw first.
Society considers your shooting of the bad guys to be presumptively bad, so you never get a free pass, but sometimes you are excused.

Was the castle doctrine passed in PA?