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This week we’re going to dive into a discussion about when the use of deadly force is justified.
When we look at self defense shootings in the news, a quick review of the comments below the story almost always reveals a discussion about whether or not a shooting was “justified”. People rage at each other and argue points that they really do not understand. In order to be responsible gun owners and be prepared for self defense, we need to understand what the word “justified” really means.
Attacks tend to happen quickly. The victim often has very little time to process what is happening to them. In that short amount of time, the victim needs to recognize the attack, decide what to do and implement action. This is a recipe for mistakes. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not blaming the victim. But we must acknowledge the massive level of legal risk of choosing the wrong actions in that high stress moment.
It’s very normal for victims to cross legal boundaries in the middle of the fight. But just because it’s normal does not mean there will not be consequences. As the news reports on the story, readers love to debate whether the person will “get off” or whether they will “end up in the slammer”. But what we always must remember is that there is only one group of people who will ultimately make the final decision: the Jury.
I’m not a lawyer and I’ve never argued a criminal case in front of a jury. I have a little experience as a witness, a little experience as a possible suspect, a little experience speaking to detectives in an interrogation, and a little experience in a courtroom. I have just enough experience to know that I am not equipped to handle the aftermath alone. The stakes are too high for me to not take this seriously.
An act of self defense is only “justified” when a jury of your peers decides it was justified. The police will investigate, the lawyers will argue, a judge will mediate, the press will report, the community will gossip. But the Jury decides.
It is always possible that a District Attorney will decide not to pursue charges. This still doesn’t mean the act was justified, it only means that the DA doesn’t see a winnable case. More evidence could come along and the DA could change their mind. Then the case ends up in front of a jury.
Why am I arguing semantics? Because it should help us understand how the unpredictable legal aftermath can be. Not a single juror will have witnessed the attack. Not a single juror will be friends with you. Not a single juror will have felt what you felt in that moment. The jury is supposed to an impartial, sober, sane group of peers who determine whether your acts were reasonable. Even though you, your family, your friends, or even all the commentators on Facebook believe that you were “justified”, your future is in the hands of 12 strangers.
This is why I have a legal plan in place for the aftermath. I’m not a lawyer and I’ve never argued a criminal case in front of a jury. I have a little experience as a witness, a little experience as a possible suspect, a little experience speaking to detectives in an interrogation, and a little experience in a courtroom. I have just enough experience to know that I am not equipped to handle the aftermath alone. The stakes are too high for me to not take this seriously.
Next time you see a news story about a self defense shooting, remember that that victim’s fight is not over and that ultimately their future rests in the hands of a jury.
These are just a few lessons, and there are more. I strongly encourage you to take the chance to train for actual defensive scenarios. Join us for an upcoming class and build the skills that may save your life!
Lesson 1 – Defensive shootings tend to be DIFFICULT. In this case, our bad guy was outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded and confined to a small space with no easy means of escape, cover or concealment. The bad guys pick the terms of the fight. This cannot be stressed enough. The shooting you do at the Range is the exact opposite of a situation like this. At the range, all of the environmental factors are chosen and or artificial.: distance to target, speed of the fight, direction of target, etc. In the real world, almost none of these factors will be up to you. Our good guy in this situation started out the fight with a gun in his face. Once he began his draw, he was immediately shot in the face/neck. These fights are far from easy.
Lesson 2 – Speed of draw. Our good guy was open carrying, but the bad guy had the drop on him. When the good guy made the decision to draw, he had about 1 second to successfully draw and fire before the bad guy would be able to respond by pulling the trigger. The mistake our good guy made was to hesitate in his decision. His hand went to his gun and almost a whole second went by as he made the decision as to whether he would shoot or not. In that moment, he lost any chance he had to shoot first. A fast draw is not simply about getting the gun out of the holster and on target. It also includes the decision to act.
A fast draw is not simply about getting the gun out of the holster and on target. It also includes the decision to act.
Now once our good guy did draw the gun, he was actually extremely fast. The problem was the interval between when his hand went to his gun, and his decision to draw. This interval gave the bad guys time to act. I’d like to add a fantastic resource to this discussion on how training for that decision should really look in the real world.
Lesson 3 – The will to win the fight. Our good guy was shot twice in this fight, at near point blank range. He initially went into a flight/freeze response as he dropped to the ground and curled into a fetal position. However he did not stay down as the bullets continued to fly. He got back up, with bullet holes in his head, and continued to fight, and FIGHT EFFECTIVELY. He maintained continuous movement and continuous fire towards his threats. This is incredibly important, the fight is not over just because you are shot.
These are just a few lessons, and there are more. I strongly encourage you to take the chance to train for actual defensive scenarios. Join us for an upcoming class and build the skills that may save your life!
Guns are dangerous. This is how I start my discussion of firearm safety in our Free Concealed Carry Classes. It seems like an obvious statement, and it should be. It’s the reason I carry the gun in the first place, this dangerous item has the capacity to cause death or serious injury with minimal effort. It’s part of the reason why guns are the ‘great equalizer’, it allows an under sized, under skilled or otherwise under capable person to defend themselves from someone who wants to inflict their will upon them physically.
While it would seem obvious to say that guns are dangerous, a lot of gun owners do not treat them that way. We see gun owners buy guns for important benefits like preserving their lives but without any understanding what it takes to control a gun to manage the inherit risk of owning the gun. Today I want to talk about why learning to control your gun is so important.
Most of us learned how to drive in our teenage years, and have continued driving in the years and decades after. Like guns, cars are inherently dangerous. The focus when we teach teenagers how to drive is to learn the basic functions of the car and how to CONTROL the car in all situations. We don’t teach our kids a set of 4 rules about the car, then leave them alone with the keys. We spend weeks working with them to develop the skills of controlling the speed and direction of the car, as well as cautioning them about the dangers inherent in any situation they encounter. We stress that if they make bad decisions or do not pay attention they will hurt someone and will lose their ability to drive. I’m sure some of you readers learned the hard way what happens when you don’t take the responsibility of the car seriously. I did.
When it comes to guns, a great many gun owners will focus on their rights to have and carry guns. They are not wrong. As human beings, we possess the natural right to arm ourselves however we can manage, provided you don’t hurt the wrong person. But in that strict focus on our rights, many of us forget to also respect the responsibilities that come with those rights. Since no one is sitting over our shoulder to ensure that we are learning to properly control the gun, laziness or ignorance drives us to not take those responsibilities seriously. As a result I see an astonishing number of gun owners who do not possess the simple set of skills to control their guns. Control may mean controlling the muzzle of the gun in EVERY situation, or maintaining a safe position of the trigger finger when handling the gun. Control also means keeping the gun in a safe place when not in use.
Guns left unsupervised pose a very serious risk. You may not believe that your unsupervised gun is dangerous but nobody volunteers to be victimized in a burglary. Guns represent risks for children, people dealing with mental health problems or for a criminal who would gladly liberate your gun from your possession given the right opportunity. Just like a car in the hands of someone with ill will or lack of good judgement is dangerous, guns in the wrong hands are extremely dangerous. Part of the right of owning the gun is the responsibility to keep it safe. If we don’t, eventually we shift that responsibility to someone else. In our modern society, that ‘someone else’ will end up being the government.
Colorado passed a safe storage law last year and now under Colorado law, gun owners are required to lock up their guns under certain circumstances. The government has no business telling me how to keep my guns in my house. But thanks to too many concrete examples of kids getting a hold of an unsecured gun, the law made enough sense to the legislators to get it passed and signed. That was in part because enough gun owners decided to ignore their responsibilities.
If we don’t take our responsibilities seriously, someone else will. Gun ownership is not just about your rights. For the sake of everyone, make controlling your guns a way of life. It matters.
Last week, a 22 year old man stopped a well armed mass shooter in a shopping mall in Greenville, Indiana. The evil bastard who decided to perpetrate this act of violence went into a bathroom near the food court, armed himself with an AR-15, walked out of the bathroom and started shooting.
Eli Dicken, a 22 year old Indiana resident, was carrying a 9mm handgun concealed. Within 15 seconds of the first shot fired, Dicken told his girlfriend to get down, gained a position of cover, took aim and fired 10 rounds at the attacker, hitting him 8 times. This hero was physically and mentally prepared to act in the face of extreme violence. He was also lucky that he had enough time and distance to put his plan into action. He saved countless lives because he was ready.
Carrying a gun is no guarantee that you will be ready when you are called upon for the fight of your life.
We have also learned that this young man was not the only citizen carrying a concealed handgun. The first victim, who was shot and killed immediately after the attacker exited the bathroom, was armed. What he did not have was the time to react. Even though he was prepared by having his gun, luck put him right outside that bathroom door as the shooter began his attack.
Carrying a gun is no guarantee that you will be ready when you are called upon for the fight of your life. It improves your chances of being able to fight back, but it’s not the only element of your preparation. Developing a mindset that will help you employ extreme violence at a moments notice, learning the skills of observing your environment, identifying potential and active threats, deciding to act, and putting your plan into action and having the mentality of a protector are all part of the preparation. There will always be the element of luck as well, and luck can count in a fight. But you can’t count on luck.
I want to acknowledge the 3 victims who died in this horrific event. While we celebrate that there was someone ready, willing and able to act to protect himself and everyone else, we still mourn the loss of life due to the evil that was unleashed that day. We wrote before about understanding that evil and preparing for it in a previous blog article.
This attack demonstrates many of the principles we talk about in our Free Concealed Carry Classes, and the principles that we train around in our Defensive Shooting courses. We have a responsibility to be as prepared as possible if we carry life and death tools on us.
This video has been around for a little while and you may have already seen it. It involves a man firing his gun in self defense from the front seat of his car while driving in Florida, and it provides us with many important lessons about self defense and road rage.
If we watch this video slowly we see several events transpire very quickly. Understanding these events is important for understanding how road rage unfolds, and why it’s easy to get caught up in a confrontation that doesn’t need to happen in the first place.
Our driver stated that initially he cut off the other driver. While we pretend that driving is a normal activity for us, the reality is that the human body did was not designed for highway speeds. When we in a car, we are moving through space much faster than our brains are designed to process. We have engineered cars, roads and rules in such a way to control this chaos, but when things start to go wrong, it is very normal for our brains to process immediately that we are in extreme danger. This recognition, even at a subconscious level, can trigger a response that can lead to drivers to overreact to the danger. Cutting someone else off is almost always a harmless mistake, but our brains don’t necessarily process it that way.
After cutting off the other driver, our shooter described the actions of the other driver. He said the other driver started to tailgate him. It’s common for drivers to have an aggressive response to the danger they were just in, and one way of demonstrating that aggression is to get physically closer to the other vehicle. Tailgating is not smart at all, but if we understand why people respond in this manner, we can take steps to deescalate. Unfortunately, tailgating tends to elicit the same aggressive response as cutting someone off. And our driver here admits to brake checking the other driver. Each driver continues to escalate instead of backing off.
At this point, our driver is feeling threatened enough that he pulls out his handgun. From the video, we can see that he isn’t waving it around to intimidate the other driver, he has it low and out of sight. This starts to change as the other driver pulls up beside him. The sequence of the next set of events makes it hard to tell what the driver intended, whether he was simply preparing to defend himself or if he was planning to wave or point the gun at the other driver has he passed. We can’t know because the other driver throws a water bottle at the vehicle as he passes.
The noise of the impact causes the driver to bring the gun up and wildly start pulling the trigger. His body language while firing seems to show a defensive posture, he’s slouching and pushing himself backwards. This would seem to lend some credibility to his statement that he believed he was being shot at. His reckless shots are not aimed and he endangers every other driver on the road while he believes he is defending his life.
This is a very good example of someone who hasn’t developed a responsible defensive mindset, has not trained, has not considered the risks of carrying a gun and has not developed a plan for self defense beyond simply carrying the gun in his vehicle. It’s also a good example of how small events on the road can quickly escalate to life and death fights.
If you carry a gun for self defense, you carry an immense responsibility to be a better person. You carry the ability to end someone’s life. That responsibility doesn’t go away if you ignore it. It’s always present. The question is, will you take it seriously?
In Self Defense, luck is always an element. But it could be good luck, or bad luck. Luck counts, but luck is not a plan.
In this self defense example, our good guy is minding his own business when the attacker picks him as a victim. Our good guy complies with his attacker until an opportunity to act presents itself as the bad guy allows himself to become distracted and take his eyes off his victim for several seconds.
Our good guy demonstrates an important principle in self defense. If you’re going to act, no half measures. He aggressively and quickly attempts a disarm of his attacker. It works surprisingly well and the good guy gains quick control of the gun. He immediately gets the gun into a shooting grip and fires multiple rounds.
If I was an aggressive prosecutor I may try to show that the good guy acted excessively by shooting our now unarmed bad guy multiple times as he tried to flee. As a defense attorney, I would make the argument that the bad guy had an accomplice and the good guy had no idea how far either of these two men were willing to take this fight. Our good guy acted decisively and almost all of his aggressive actions took place in less than 2 seconds. His final act was to physically strike the bad guy with the gun. Here is where the luck starts.
As he strikes the attacker with the gun, it goes off and the round fired travels through the glass door into the shoulder of the second attacker who was waiting outside. The odds of this wild sequence of events have got to be astronomical.
After it became clear that the bad guy had no more fight left in him, the good guy stopped attacking. After the attacker managed to burst through the shattered door and leave, the good guy made no attempt to pursue him. Legally this is a very advisable decision given these circumstances. We also see in the video that the first thing the good guy does after the threat runs out the door is to try to get a full assessment of what is happening outside the store. We can see him looking through the tinted window.
Violence is ugly and it is something that many people shy away from. But when it is required to resist evil, it is best when it is fast, aggressive and as coordinated as possible. This good guy did a fantastic job of defending himself.
This attack demonstrates many of the principles we talk about in our Free Concealed Carry Classes, and the principles that we train around in our Defensive Shooting courses. We have a responsibility to be as prepared as possible if we carry life and death tools on us.
