Knock, knock, knockin' on heavens door

Last week I tweeted a simple sentence; "Some doors should be left un-knocked on." I'd say it's safe to say most of my 'followers' had no idea what I was talking about.
I haven't been doing this job all that long but already I've lost track of how many doors I've knocked on. Most of the time you're pounding the pavement in a neighborhood looking for reaction to some sort of "This never happens in [Name of town]" event. That however, is not always the case.
This one particular night we knocked on a door at the end of a long, dark, rural, driveway. The response we got was a shaky, scared voice of a woman. She simply said "Go away, I have a gun, this is private property." I knew the shaky hands belonging to the voice were gripping a handgun she had already used to shoot (at) someone. It's still unclear if she managed to hit the burglar but that didn't matter to me. What mattered was I knew the business end of that particular firearm was pointed at that door we had just knocked on, and if her hands were shaking as much as her voice, I didn't want to be anywhere near that door.
So why did we venture down the dark driveway prevent a woman from sleeping that night? Because we were asked too. More often than not the people making the decision on what you do for a story are sitting behind a desk a hundred miles away. At most they are looking at google maps(if you're lucky streetview) to get an idea of where you are. More often than not their looking the rundown telling them they're still four minutes under. So when your brain tells you it's a bad idea to knock on someones door, sometimes it's worth listening to. Hell, you're the one that's standing there in the night outside of the home where a woman tried to kill someone who came a knockin' in the dark.
So that's why I said it's sometimes better to leave a door un-knocked on.