It might be violent, immoral, terrifying, and any number of other things, but if the intent wasn't that you end up dead (even if there was a serious risk of that happening), it's not attempted murder.
If you bring a gun to a mugging and it ends up killing someone - even if it went off accidentally - it's considered first degree murder. No matter what your intent, you willfully created the circumstance that led to someone's death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_rule
From a purely technical legal perspective, robbing someone with a gun isn't attempted murder until they get shot, and then it was premeditated willful murder.
No, I’m not.
Obviously, the victim won't often be able to tell with any certainty (except with some idea after the fact) whether it was attempted murder.
That the difference may be hard to perceive from a particular viewer's perspective doesn't mean that the difference doesn't exist.
In US courts, the latter is (generally) what matters for self-defense claims. Courts don't expect victims to have perfect knowledge of a situation.
So in a certain sense, US courts recognize that things like armed carjackings should be treated as attempted murders.
I'm talking about “attempted murder”, which is a crime defined by intent, and is entirely irrelevant to self defense analysis, where legality of the threats action only matters to the extent of it being unlawful, not as to what particular law is violated.
> So in a certain sense, US courts recognize that things like armed carjackings should be treated as attempted murders.
No, they don't, they recognize that the specific identity of the crime or other violation of the law involved on the part of the attacker is generally immaterial to self-defense analysis, which isn't “armed carjackings should be treated as attempted murders” except in the sense that it is also “simple assault should be treated the same as genocide” or “tortious, but non-criminal, battery should be treated the same as torture”.