Last week, we sent an email about the Warrior Expert Theory and why it’s essential to self defense training.
This week we will be talking about some of the people we have welcomed into our classroom.
Over the last decade, Guns For Everyone has instructed over 100,000 students in Colorado in our Free Concealed Carry Classes. We’ve had every walk of life in our classrooms and on the range. It’s not unusual for us to have current or former law enforcement officers in our classes which always adds an element of interest for our students as we provide our perspective and compare that to what an officer would say. We take it as a point of pride when the concepts and principles that we teach are affirmed by these professionals, especially when it runs counter to the conventional narratives that students usually come to class with. But ultimately, most of our students will never be cops and the overlap of these two worlds is not usually very important.
What can be very eye opening is when we have lawyers in the class, and even more so when those lawyers are prosecutors and district attorneys. In 2022 we have had at least 4 local prosecutors and district attorneys in our classes. When we start discussing the legal processes and risks of defending yourself with a firearm, students are usually quite surprised to learn how the system actually works, and even more surprised when what we say is affirmed by these professionals who work in this system every single day.
Often times, the people who really grasp how brutal the criminal justice system is are the people who have been through it.
When we have criminal defense attorneys speak in our classes, either as students or as invited guests, there is a certain amount of natural skepticism from the other students in the classroom. The question often running through students’ minds as the defense attorney lays out the legal risks is, “How much of this guys’ perspective based on him trying to sell his services to me?”. It’s a natural reaction to be skeptical when someone is telling you how much you’re going to need their services in the future.
But when a prosecutor or DA starts speaking about how they actually prosecute these cases, people tend to listen. The DA isn’t selling anything, he has no incentive to exaggerate or spin things. In our classes these professionals have offered up their input and expertise about the post shooting legal processes. What the students get to hear from them is that the legal system is far more complex and loaded with risk than they assumed.
What we try to communicate to our students in our classes is that the legal aftermath is far more challenging than almost anyone knows. Often times, the people who really grasp how brutal the criminal justice system is are the people who have been through it. And most people in our concealed carry classes have never been anywhere near this system, let alone through it. It’s hard to grasp the reality of these risks without first hand experience.
In addition to the risks, most people do not understand how self defense cases are investigated and prosecuted. This is where hearing from a criminal defense attorney is helpful. But I’ve heard at least a dozen criminal defense attorney’s lecture on what an affirmative defense is and how it’s used to claim self defense, and I still wouldn’t feel confident that I’d be able to walk this knife edge in the aftermath alone. The more I learn, the less I feel like I know.
This story is an excellent example of how a normal day can spiral into a life changing legal mess in just a few moments. This Ohio father protected his daughter in a home defense setting, and yet the last paragraph of the news story reveals the awful legal aftermath: this case made it all the way to a grand jury before the father was ultimately not charged. The prosecutor had a lot to work with in this case, despite the apparent moral certainty of a father protecting his child. While many people watched the video of this shooting, few watched the video of the father’s initial interrogation with detectives. Without legal representation, the father gave the DA enough evidence to pursue a grand jury indictment. If you don’t understand why, it should become obvious to you how unprepared you are for the legal aftermath.
Guns For Everyone is partnered with Firearms Legal Protection to offer our students an affordable legal plan for the aftermath. The cost is low, the stakes are incredibly high. There is no simpler way I can try to put it. Most people are skeptical when offered a service like this, which is natural. But I can tell you with 100% certainty that that skepticism isn’t going to help you after the shooting stops and you’re about to be chewed up and spit out by the criminal justice system. My best recommendation is to have an attorney on speed dial, and to have that attorney fully paid for with the plan offered by Firearms Legal Protection. I carry a gun to protect myself from physical harm. I am a member of Firearms Legal Protection to protect myself from legal and financial harm.
This week we’re going to talk about tragic accidents involving firearms.
Last week a Florida sheriff’s deputy accidentally killed his best friend while playing with his gun. According to an affidavit, Deputy Aaron Larson pointed his firearm at his roommate and pulled the trigger. The gun did not fire but Larson apparently then pulled the slide back and pointed the gun back at his roommate and again pulled the trigger. This time the gun did fire, and 23 year old Austin Walsh was killed.
If gun owners rely only on a set of rules for safety but do not first and foremost respect the risk of handling the firearm, at some point the rules may very well fail to keep the user from doing something they shouldn’t.
Walsh and Larson were best friends and now two lives are essentially over. Larson is facing manslaughter charges as well as the end of his career and most importantly, the psychological weight of being responsible for the death of his best friend. Walsh’s life was over in an instant.
The obvious reaction to a story like this is disbelief and an incredulous response of “this is why you follow the rules!”. But I’ve seen enough examples of negligence around guns to know that we can’t count on rules to keep people from having the wrong mindset about firearm safety. It’s no secret that this young deputy made a very stupid and life changing decision to treat this gun as a toy. But there are other examples of deaths caused by firearm accidents that are much less boneheaded than this one, and the end result is the same. People lose their lives when people take safety for granted.
On November 20th, an 11 year old boy in Wisconsin was accidentally killed by his uncle in a hunting accident. As the boy’s uncle was attempting to unload his rifle while it was laying in the truck, the gun fired and the bullet struck the 11 year old in the chest, killing him.
Both of these accidents have something very important in common. In both stories, the person with their hand on the gun failed to maintain the proper mindset when in control of a gun. I’m fairly certain that both of these men knew “the rules”. But knowing the rules is not going to guarantee that you have the mindset necessary to respect the risk of handling a firearm.
Guns are dangerous by their very design. They have the capacity to cause enormous damage with very little effort. If gun owners rely only on a set of rules for safety but do not first and foremost respect the risk of handling the firearm, at some point the rules may very well fail to keep the user from doing something they shouldn’t. Cultivating the mindset of acknowledging the serious risks of guns is intended to not allow a user to become complacent about safety.
Every action you take with the firearm should be guided by an understanding of the risk of what you are doing, and what the benefits are. The benefits should always clearly outweigh the risks. Is there a benefit to hunting? Of course there are lots of benefits. But is there a benefit to attempting to unload your hunting rifle while having it pointed at your 11 year old nephew? The life changing risk was ignored.
I don’t even need to analyze the risks and benefits of playing with a gun and pointing it at your best friend’s head. It’s easy to understand the stupidity of that action. But there are plenty of accidents with firearms that happen in much less stark circumstances. An Ohio firearms instructor who was accidentally shot by a student in the classroom in 2016. A Houston gunsmith who killed a customer when he accidentally fired a rifle he was working on in 2017. The LA police officer who accidentally killed a 14 year old girl in a department store changing room while the officer was shooting at a violent criminal who had been assaulting multiple people with a hammer.
Guns are inherently risky. We must never assume that they are not. We as a community have a responsibility to cultivate a mindset for gun ownership and gun handling that keeps that reality front of mind for everyone. This is how we address safety in all of our classes and more importantly, it’s how we think about safety in every action we take with our firearms.
Last week we covered a firearms accident that resulted in the death of a young man. This week we are going to look at what training should look like for defensive use of a firearm.
I took a couple of students to the range a few weeks ago. The gentleman had a little experience around firearms, but not much. The lady had essentially zero experience. These two were middle aged, interested in being prepared for self defense and taking their education and training seriously after coming to one of our Free Concealed Carry Classes.
Perfection of skills or preparation in a self defense context is impossible. There are too many variables to account for.
Both of these people struggled with a number of skills throughout our 1 hour together. It seemed obvious to me that they were getting a little discouraged on the range and were feeling like they had failed. Part of this is my fault for not doing a good job setting the expectation before we started of what the actual goal is for the training. Part of this is also the mindset that they brought with them to the range that they were going to have to perform to some kind of standard and that without that performance they were failing.
Aside from their perception of the goal and their performance, both made significant progress in the time we spent together. But progress in what? If I was to set a standard, let’s say consistently shooting 3 rounds in the high center chest at 5 yards in 3 seconds, then they didn’t get anywhere near that. But if I set the goal as progress in essential skills and understanding for how the gun and the body should work together intuitively in a dynamic critical incident, then there was progress. If the goal was for each of them to become better prepared to use a handgun to defend themselves should the need arise, then we accomplished the goal.
Perfection of skills or preparation in a self defense context is impossible. There are too many variables to account for. The more controlled we set up the training, the more likely we can attain a standard. If the training is set up in a way to control for distance, movement, gear, preparation, clothing, etc, then we can set a standard to say, draw from concealment and put one round on a set target in a set amount of time. But there is very little that we can control in the dynamic world of human beings. We are also morally and legally responsible for the consequences of our actions in the real world and training methods that do not make room for decision making do not accurately represent the necessary totality of self defense.
So how do we approach improvement if we don’t have a standard? First is understanding the context of the fight. We can look at objective truths about self defense fights, such as most likely distances, physiological and neurological processes and limitations, ballistics and more. We can use these facts to determine how we train and what we focus on for skill development. Then as we teach these skills in a training environment we put the student in more and more dynamic situations as we make sure the student continues to learn and apply the essential skills.
Back to our couple and their improvement at the range. Both of these people got much better at their gun handling skills. These are essential for using a gun safely in any context. Both improved their full extension of the gun into and parallel with their line of sight, trigger press and use of sight alignment and sight picture for intuitive sighted fire. Neither of them “perfected” anything on the range but again, that’s not the point. The last 10 minutes we spent together I made sure that they understood what the goal of our time together was, what they did well on, where they needed improvement, and how to work on that improvement. Ultimately it will be their responsibility on whether they will continue their practice and training.
The reason all of this is so important is because we are talking about skills and tools for preserving life in a dangerous circumstance. These high stakes necessitate the dedication to the correct approach to learning. This is how we conduct our Free Concealed Carry Classes as well as all of our other training and education.
In our last blog post, we discussed how we get better at the skills necessary for self defense with a handgun. This week we wrap up 2022 with an interesting analysis of instances where civilians used a firearm to intervene in a mass killing attack.
The article linked does a great job of breaking down the data and I will not waste time re summarizing it. But I do want to point out 2 important conclusions.
First is that the rate of success at stopping the attack is EXTREMELY high. In the world of violent encounters, it’s difficult to get consistent results from any data set due to the generally unpredictable nature of violent encounters. These numbers from this data set show that despite what the media tries to tell us, armed intervention is consistently reliable in stopping mass killing events.
Johnny Hurley stopped a mass shooting in Arvada, Colorado in 2021. But he lost his life when a police officer mistook him for the shooter and shot him in the back.
The second point I want to draw your attention to is that in 9% of these documented cases, the armed defender was killed in the fight. In my opinion, pretty much anyone who is willing to put their life on the line to stop a mass killing is a hero. But nearly 1 in 10 events, the defender indeed lost their lives. When you make the decision to be a defender, a protector, you must recognize the real risk. Just because you are armed does not mean you will survive. The high stakes of the fight should be your motivation to train and be as prepared as possible.
This is why we always emphasize these high stakes and realities in our Free Concealed Carry Classes, as well as all of our other training and education.
In our last blog post, we discussed some incredible data about armed citizens stopping mass killers. This week, we have a video for you that defies belief….or does it?
The following video hit the internet a couple weeks ago. A piece of brass that was ejected from a handgun bounces off the barrier and lands on an open box of ammo. The brass hits an exposed primer hard enough to detonate it, causing a small explosion as well as quite a bit of confusion.
This seems a little impossible to believe, yet here we have the video. But what is interesting is that this is actually the 3rd documented case of this kind of freak accident that I have personally come across.
Several years ago when gun blogs were all the rage, I stumbled across a post where someone said this happened to him. He had several pictures documenting the .45 ACP brass case that had exploded, including pictures of the tray that the ammo was in when it happened. Even with the pictures, readers were skeptical.
In 2021 I encountered another documented case of this happening, again with pictures documenting it. Again, people doubted the circumstances. Now we have evidence on video.
What do we learn from this? For me, I am reminded of the way that we approach safety when it comes to firearms. There is always a balance of risk and benefit. Even in “controlled” settings, we cannot eliminate the risk of something going wrong. Accidents are sometimes hard to prevent because some of them are so incredibly unlikely. This is a reminder that we should always be cognizant of the risks as much as possible, known and unknown.
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On December 13, a 70 year old man had a very pissed off neighbor trying to break through his front door. After firing a warning shot that was ineffective at deterring the threat, the defender fired at least 3 rounds at his attacker, striking him at least once.
Mugshot of the defender, Charles Rickey Wolford
On it’s face, this looks like a pretty clear cut case of home defense. Proving you acted in self defense after someone kicks in your door should seem like a slam dunk.
What we have to understand is that there are no slam dunk cases when it comes to using force against another person. Using a gun to defend yourself is always risky from a legal perspective. Wolford is finding that out the hard way.
From the linked news story, we find out that this situation led to Wolford’s arrest, followed by a bond of $75,000. That bond was adjusted to allow Wolford to leave jail while the defense and prosecutor build their investigations. But Wolford doesn’t get to go home, he is required to live elsewhere due to his residence’s proximity to the ‘victim’. There is also a chance that the charges could be upgraded if the victim does not survive. On top of all that, the man he shot was his own nephew.
Wolford has no criminal history and while that may help with his bond situation, that doesn’t mean the prosecutor is just going to assume that he acted lawfully in self defense.
The usual response from people when they hear a story like Wolford’s is to point out that it’s not fair that you can act in self defense and then be the one to pay the legal price afterwards. The criminal justice system often doesn’t seem fair to us because we are not familiar with it. Unless you have spent time in or near this system, much of the way it works definitely looks unfair to us. We must remember that our perception of this system does not matter at all. Once we interact with this system, we have almost no control over it.
The legal risk of using a gun to defend ourselves should not scare us. But we should have a healthy respect for what is coming should the terrible moment come. The more I learn about this risk, the more it makes sense to me to have a plan for what comes after the shooting. I carry a gun not because I want to get into a shooting, but because if I cannot avoid the moment then I want to be ready. It is for the exact same reason that I am prepared legally by being a member of Firearms Legal Protection, and it is for the exact same reasons that I recommend that you do the same.
