If you’re the legal initial aggressor in a physical altercation, you could lose your right to claim self-defense—even if you reasonably fear imminent death at the hands of the other party. Steve Moses joins Don West and Shawn Vincent to explore some self-defense cases where the answer to the question “Who started it?” had significant legal consequences.
Shawn Vincent:
Hello, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us today. We are on Lesson 10, which is Don’t Be the Initial Aggressor. It’s not just good advice to not be starting fights with people, but it’s also a legal designation—as Don West is going to explain to us—that could invalidate your self-defense claim even if you subsequently find yourself in the imminent fear of great bodily harm or death. Steve Moses is going to join us. He’s going to talk to us about how he sees that play out tactically with the students that he teaches. We’re going to talk about the idea of the initial aggressor or first aggressor, almost interchangeably; often the legal designation is initial aggressor, but it really doesn’t matter what you call it. It matters that you don’t do it. So thanks for joining us. Here’s my conversation with Don West and Steve Moses on Lesson 10: Don’t Be the Initial Aggressor:
We are in this phase here … the first part of the series was describing the legal realities of what self-defense is and when the use of force could be legally considered justifiable. But then we’ve transferred, and we talked about the window of justification as part of that and don’t shoot too early, don’t shoot too late. It has to be Goldilocks. Don, I think you said, maybe quoting our friend Andrew Branca. It has to be just right. But then we moved into our discussion about Don’t Get Emotionally Hijacked and understanding that there is a state of mind as an armed defender or concealed carry that you have with you that’s going to impact how you interact with people when you go out in the world as an armed defender.
And so now we’re deeply into the self-defense mindset portion of our discussion. And that plays into, well … we’ve all had kids, and we’ve all dealt with kids who get in an argument or in a fight. And once you catch them in the fight and they know that Dad’s around or an adult’s around, the first thing they say is what? “He started it.” And I think as a parent, we don’t care because we just want some peace and quiet. But when it’s adults, and especially if there’s a fatality involved, who started it becomes really important. And the next three episodes that we’re going to do are going to have some version of he started it as the topic. But for today’s topic specifically, we’re going to start with the most obvious and severe he started it, which is answering the question: Wwho was the first aggressor? And before we get into some of the more legal ramifications of what that means in the self-defense argument, Don, would you explain to us legally what it means to be the first aggressor?
Don West:
Let’s start by saying what the consequences are of being the first aggressor in a legal case. Sure. Because the consequences are dramatic. And that is if you are legally the first aggressor and the jury concludes that, in your self-defense claim, you may very well lose the right to the self-defense claim altogether. So whether you are legally the first aggressor or not is incredibly significant to the outcome of this.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. Let me underscore that real quick, Don, because we’ve really hammered home that self-defense is justified—the use of force, especially deadly force—justified only when you have the reasonable belief that you face the imminent threat of great bodily injury or death at the hands of another. And we’ve covered that substantially in our podcast. But there are little caveats to that condition, where even if those things are true, you might still not be justified, and this idea of being legally defined as the first aggressor is one of those things that even if all those other things are true, you still might not be legally justified if you were the first aggressor.
Don West:
If you’re the first aggressor and you are threatening force of some kind, you put the other person in the position of having to decide whether they are facing that imminent threat of harm. Maybe not an imminent threat of great bodily harm or death, but an imminent threat of harm, which gives them the legal justification to use force in response. And then it can go from there. I think, typically, first aggressors aren’t necessarily expecting what they wind up getting before it’s all over.
For example, it’s kind of a nuanced thing, but if you’re the first aggressor and you threaten someone and they respond, but they use more force than you threatened, then that whole dynamic changes and they may very well be criminally liable for using disproportionate force, even though, technically, you started it by committing the unlawful act of a threat or a non-consensual touching or some sort.
In the context of who may be considered the first aggressor legally, I think we should probably start with the notion of what it isn’t. Maybe because we’re talking about a wide spectrum of human behaviors, some of which are obviously not legal first aggressor violations, whereas others clearly would be on their face. And then sort of the middle ground of maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. And then you can take how many of these basic things happened until they pile up enough that even though technically you may not be the legal first aggressor, the jury can’t stand you because you’re playing with a lot of different moving pieces here.
But I can say in our first example that when you confront your children and want to know what happened, and he says, “He started it, that’s why I hit him.” And you say, “Well, what did he do to start it? ” And they say, “Well, he called me stupid.” So words aren’t enough typically. You can yell at people, you can use profanity, very colorful language. You can do almost anything verbally except communicate a threat, and usually coupled with some ability to …
Shawn Vincent:
A credible threat. Yeah.
Don West:
Yeah. Or a threat or a very hostile comment with raised hands or reaching for your waistband or something more than just a typical, although ugly interaction. You’re still allowed to argue with people. You’re still allowed to walk up to people and insult them, for example. That sort of stuff does not reach the threshold typically of being a lawful threshold of being a first aggressor. The problem is, as we all know from doing this work, that it rarely stays in one spot. Somebody truly starts it maybe with that ugly word or the eye roll, and it goes from there back and forth until somebody crosses the line legally to become the first aggressor. Well, if you are that person, then you have now lost your claim of self-defense because you’re perceived as the legal aggressor and the other person has the right to defend themselves against you.
Shawn Vincent:
And let’s talk about that. When we say “lost the claim of legal defense,” what that could mean is if you’re in a so-called stand-your-ground state and you’re entitled to a self-defense immunity hearing, immunity from prosecution, if the prosecutors can make the argument to the judge that you were the first aggressor, the judge could be like, “Yeah, we’re not going to have that hearing.” And that also means if the judge declares that, now the defense attorney can’t go to the court and get approved, basically, the jury instruction that they can consider self-defense, right? That’s how the nuts and bolts it works out.
Don West:
The end result of that sequence of events is that you don’t get to claim self-defense. Now it may not be as direct as that. In the immunity hearing, perhaps the judge will say, “No, I don’t care what happened afterwards. No, you were the first aggressor, so you lost your right to claim the affirmative defense of justification.” Sure.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. And now that we’ve sort of hashed out the legal side of that, just Steve, you have a lot of interaction with armed defenders of all sorts through the training industry, and you’ve been an observer for a long time. And as working in law enforcement, you see different types of criminals have different mindsets, and this can all get very messy on the interpersonal side, right?
Steve Moses:
That’s correct.
Shawn Vincent:
Does this ever come up when you’re doing training, the idea of the first aggressor and how that works into an armed defender’s mindset?
Steve Moses:
It does. Basically, avoid any opportunity to cause something to go south. And in many instances, that willingness at the very beginning to just bite your tongue, watch what comes out of your mouth, apply that filter. And if necessary, if you can break contact, then we encourage people to do that. And a big part of it is to understand just how easy it is to get just mudsucked into something where something relatively minor occurred, and one or both parties overreacted.
Shawn Vincent:
And part of the reason you do that, even if you’re right—we talked about not getting emotionally hijacked and road rage—and someone might have wronged you legitimately, but is it worth starting the argument that could turn into a fight? I guess, tit for tat, Don, it can be really difficult to know who the first aggressor is. And I’m thinking about … we talked recently about the Dean Keller and Jeffrey Weigel case— the neighbors that got in a fight across their fence line. And what happened is, after they said nasty things to each other, Jeffrey Weigel displays a pistol. And we know that because there is video footage of it. But what I noted in the article is that if you go frame by frame, you only see that pistol for maybe four or five frames. If the fence posts had been over and the shooter had been one step to the left, there would’ve been no visual evidence to the outside world that they had that pistol.
And now it’s a he-said, he-said kind of thing. And can we say here, in that case, Jeffrey Weigel’s display of the pistol makes him the first aggressor? That’s the first criminal act of aggression in that interaction, right?
Don West:
Yeah. I think it’s clear he is the one who crossed that line. He displayed a firearm in a reckless manner, which is at least as brandishing, if not some degree of assault with a firearm. And sure, that’s legally sufficient to be characterized as the first aggressor if you didn’t do it in self-defense. And that’s really the other part of the definition, isn’t it? If you’re the first aggressor, you’re not acting in self-defense. You’re creating the situation, causing the other person to believe they need to respond in some way to that use of force.
Now we talk lots of times and different ways about how you might respond to that. And as Steve once again underscored, you break contact, you get away, you don’t engage if you can. But when someone has threatened you, committed that first crime that characterizes them as the first aggressor, you have to do something, right? Especially if you think they’re serious and that they intend you some harm, you’ve got to do something about that.
Shawn Vincent:
Let’s talk about a case that our listeners should be pretty familiar with if they’ve been listening for any length of time. The Michael Dreka case—that’s the Clearwater, Florida parking lot shooting. And just to get everyone up to speed, the facts are basically that Michael Drejka saw Britany Jacobs parking in a handicapped parking spot. It’s a pet peeve of his. He picked an argument with her. Her life partner, Markeis McGlockton, was in the store. He came out, he saw this guy arguing with his girl. He marches up to him and shoves him violently to the ground. Drejka tops over. He’s older than Markeis McGlockton, probably not as strong. Now he’s in his prone position. He’s a licensed concealed carrier. McGlockton’s got this really aggressive posture, and he takes a step towards him. Drejka pulls his pistol and points it at McGlockton. McGlockton sort of changes his posture, steps back a couple of steps.
Drejka is in the throes of his action of pulling his gun out. He fires, probably too late, we talked about in one of our other podcasts, and is eventually charged with manslaughter. It was a fatal shot. One shot to the heart, killed McGlockton. First aggressor, Don, in this case legally?
Don West:
Markeis McGlockton, in my view, is the first aggressor legally. And that’s because I didn’t see any evidence or any discussion along the way that Drejka did anything illegal to express his dissatisfaction with the way that Britany Jacobs … or where she parked her car. He was giving her a piece of his mind. He was up there being a bit of a jerk, no doubt. I didn’t get the sense that he had assaulted her or threatened her or did anything other than just yelling at her and expressing his displeasure. I think even the video may have shown either her window was down or maybe even the door was partially open at some point.
Shawn Vincent:
So just show that he was a few feet away. He wasn’t intentionally right up in the window. Yeah.
Don West:
Well, I think what McGlockton saw was Drejka verbally abusing his partner and came to her rescue. And that’s perfectly understandable up to a point. I do think it’s important not to confuse coming to someone’s rescue because you don’t like the way they’re being treated as opposed to coming to someone’s rescue and exercising your right to defend another person in jeopardy. Because there wasn’t enough evidence I saw to think that she was in some sort of physical jeopardy, but he wanted to get in between them to stop.
Whatever he perceived was going on that he didn’t like and that she didn’t like. And what he did in order to accomplish that was to very violently shove Drejka to the ground. Drejka went all the way down, landed on his tailbone, I think, and rolled …
Shawn Vincent:
Around his back. Yeah, it sort of tumbled backwards. Yeah.
Don West:
So I think, clearly, McGlockton is the first aggressor legally. He committed a crime somewhere between battery, in Florida, a misdemeanor, a felony battery, which is a higher degree of a battery but not aggravated battery. They each have different levels of punishment and such.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. And meaning that if Drejka had pulled the gun out and not fired and the police responded, there’s a very good chance that it would’ve been Markeis McGlockton that was arrested that day, not Michael Drejka.
Don West:
Yeah. I think the police look at that video and they aren’t really looking at Drejka for doing anything more than a lawful display given his knowledge at that point of what had happened and what he reasonably though could happen. He didn’t use deadly force by pointing a gun or displaying it yet. And had that been the end of it yeah, I think McGlockton probably goes to jail probably for a misdemeanor, maybe a felony to start with, but that’s clearly a violation of Florida law. Misdemeanor battery would carry up to a year in jail, $1,000 fine, a felony battery probably five years in prison. Aggravated battery, which typically is when there’s more serious injury or the use of a weapon carries up to 15 years. So it’s not nothing for sure.
Steve Moses:
We have a tendency to always kind of look at this, I think, from the perspective of what Drejka did as opposed to what McGlockton did. And a lot of times our lessons learned revolve around what Drejka did, but by the same token, concealed carriers could find themselves in the same position as McGlockton because it was McGlockton’s actions that eventually resulted in him being shot. And so what could he have done differently in that particular instance as opposed to going up there and physically putting hands on Drejka? And then to me, the answer is relatively visible out there: it’s just simply shout at Drejka to get back. Something like that probably would have accomplished the same thing. And I think not only was this a lesson learned from the perspective of Drejka, it was a lesson learned from the perspective of all of us.
Don West:
That’s a terrific point, Steve, because I think you’re right, given what I’ve seen in those videos, McGlockton’s a pretty big guy. Young, fit, strong. No reason to think that he wasn’t intimidating physically or couldn’t have clearly handled himself in a physical confrontation with Drejka, who was much older, clearly not able, I don’t think, unless he had some special skills I’m not aware of, to deal with the likes of McGlockton. And so McGlockton runs out of the store, sees this, and gets right in front of Drejka, gets in his face, but stands there and says, “Get out of here, get back.” And he’s legally allowed to say that. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. And if he gets right up to him but doesn’t hit him or push him, he hasn’t committed a crime at that point. And he may be, from some people’s standpoint, an aggressor, but he’s not a legal first aggressor in my mind.
Shawn Vincent:
Steve, since you flipped the roles and we’re looking at what if the concealed carrier, the armed defender, was McGlockton. So here’s the situation. McGlockton, hypothetically, the armed offender comes out of the store, sees Drejka yelling at his girlfriend, goes up, decides, “I’m going to push this guy down. He deserves it. ” So then at this point, Michael Draca has been assaulted physically. He pulls out his firearm to defend himself. Now I’m imagining Markeis McGlockton in this hypothetical situation as a concealed carrier, which he wasn’t armed, but let’s pretend he was. Now he’s got a guy pointing a gun at him. He pulls, maybe he’s a quick draw. He pulls his firearm, shoots, and kills Michael Drejka. Now he would have, at that moment, had reasonable belief that Drejka had the ability, opportunity, and intent to shoot him, which is our definition of what justifies the use of deadly force. But he pushed him to the ground first. He committed the act of first aggression that probably invalidates his self-defense claim. It’s over for him, right off the bat.
Don West:
That is a brilliant way to turn this on its head and illustrate how complicated and difficult and nuanced all this stuff is. Because I don’t know, Shawn, the way you lay it out, yeah, it sure sounds like McGlockton would have, notwithstanding the fact that he committed a battery, that was over in his mind. Now Drejka draws a gun. Why? Is he being the second first aggressor, or is he protecting himself from a subsequent attack by McGlockton? So is he lawfully displaying a firearm at that point, knowing that McGlockton can kick his butt and anything else he wants to kick since he’s on the ground, vulnerable, and not physically capable of defending himself without a firearm?
So then he pulls the gun, ostensibly as a defensive display, not to shoot McGlockton for what he’s already done, but to prevent McGlockton from coming at him again and indeed being that imminent threat of great bodily harm or death. So McGlockton doesn’t see it as a defensive display in response to what he just did. And in fact, Drejka, in your scenario, never saw a gun in McGlockton’s hand, right? So he’s responding to the physical battery. Now, McGlockton sees the gun that Drejka has, thinks rightfully or wrongfully that he’s about to get shot. So his response is to draw his firearm and shoot Drejka. That’s how this plays out.
Shawn Vincent:
That’s how this plays out. But now, even though he faced the imminent threat, a reasonable belief that Drejka had the ability, opportunity, and intent to shoot him, he may not be able to claim self-defense because he was the initial aggressor. That’s what we’re trying to illustrate.
Don West:
You can absolutely bet that’s the prosecutor’s first argument and strongest argument to the judge and ultimately to the jury is that why would you reward this guy when he’s the one that started it? And maybe that’s the whole thing we go back to who is starting it? What does it mean? And how does it change from moment to moment back and forth? Yeah. I hope he would have lots of money for lawyers in that scenario.
Shawn Vincent:
But ultimately it’s up to the jury if it’s going to go there. So maybe even if a judge allows the defense of self-defense, a jury’s going to look at that and say they don’t like it because he started it. In fact, we’ll sort of revisit Drejka again when we talk about provocation, which is shy of being the first aggressor. It’s not illegal, but it’s still provocation that can invalidate your defense or just being the first jerk. The juries don’t like that. And they feel like if you contributed to the circumstances that caused the use of force, it’s a strike against you. And that could be a big strike that could sink it, or it could be a little strike that piles up on other strikes that affects your legal defense.
Don West:
Well, just think about the scenario you described, and nobody dies, but people get hurt. And now we have serious crimes, attempted murder perhaps rather than murder. And each of the participants gets to tell the jury their side of the story.
Shawn Vincent:
It’s messy. It gets really messy. I want to talk about a messier case. We’re going to go to North Carolina, New Year’s Eve, years ago. There’s a guy named Gyrell Lee. He’s hanging out with his cousin, Jamieal Walker. They’re celebrating. Quenton Epps, who’s this guy who the newspaper called a known troublemaker. He’s coming by, starting static. They’re having this escalating verbal altercation throughout the evening. Sometime after midnight, Epps drives by, probably shouts something nasty. He’s down the street. Walker says, “We’re going to go talk to him.” Gyrell Lee goes and gets his gun just in case. So they go, there’s a verbal confrontation in the street. And then Gyrell Lee’s cousin Jamiel Walker punches Quenton Epps. Epps responds by pulling out his firearm and shooting Walker in the stomach. Walker runs off, he ends up hiding behind a house and dying of his wounds. Right after that, Quenton Epps turns towards Jerrell Lee, who has his firearm behind his back.
Lee pulls it out and shoots Epps first and kills him. Now there’s some complicating factors. Gerald Lee runs from the scene. He hides the weapon. He doesn’t call 9-1-1.
It gets more complicated than all this. But when it comes to first aggressor, in this situation, it was legally Jamieal Walker who was the first aggressor in this case. I think legally, when we talk about proportionality of the response, shooting someone in the stomach who has just punched you might be a difficult claim if Quenton Epps wanted to claim self-defense in this case. But notwithstanding, by punching him, Walker…let’s say Walker had a gun and had responded quickly enough to Quenton Epps pulling his gun out and shot him dead. Now we’re back in our hypothetical situation with Markeis McGlockton and Drejka, where, because he threw the first punch, he might lose a self-defense claim.
But now we’re muddying the waters. It’s the cousin, the bystander who then fires the fatal shot that kills Epps. He’s not the first aggressor, but what I think is interesting in this case is that he was a party to the first aggressor. So legally it didn’t invalidate his self-defense claim, but it was something that the jury considered in this case. Right? That he was on the side of the first aggressor. And I think that that has a psychological transference of that concept when a jury considers it.
Don West:
That’s a good point because in the trial of cases, you’re dealing with legal issues and facts, disputed facts, unknowable facts, I guess, but you’re also dealing with human dynamics. And while it’s not supposed to be the case since Lady Justice is blind, whether or not the jury likes you or dislikes you, maybe even insofar as if they like your lawyer or not, or think that you’ve been treated unfairly by the judge even. There’s all that stuff, the noise that can have a significant effect on their decision because they’re looking at it not just as fact finders in my view, but also for the human dynamics of it. And we all know that we have all sorts of personal biases that we carry with us every moment of every day. And some people are so off-putting just by the way they treat other people and the way they present themselves. If they’re so unlikeable, I think they have a harder fight, typically. Even though it shouldn’t be legally, it’s supposed to be the facts and the law and just that. But all that stuff, I think, factors in. And if you do things either on your own or vicariously that create a bad image of you, you may very well suffer for it.
Shawn Vincent:
Steve, I saw your wheels turning there while I was describing this scenario.
Steve Moses:
Well, I tell you what, there’s just so many unknowns about this. I try to put myself in the place of the party that was charged with murder. And then the question was to be is, okay, was that a single punch? Was he continuing to punch him? When his cousin was shot, did he shoot the other person right then? Did he wait for a moment and then shoot that person? I mean, all of these things kind of factor in. So I’m just kind of like, I would’ve loved to have sat in on that trial and listened to what really took place. But one thing I know for sure is that if you have a potential issue with a third person going over there and confronting them and taking a gun just in case, no matter what happens, it’s not going to be a happy ending.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. Well, there are so many overlapping lessons in all these cases. We revisit these things over and over again. But there is pretty soon, in a few, we’re going to be talking about Don’t Leave a Place of Safety to Confront a Threat. And I think one of the things we can always say is if you find yourself thinking, “Let me go get my gun, I might need it.” If there’s one warning sign we talked about, Steve, you talked about having a voice in your head that says you’re getting emotionally hijacked. You hear yourself say, “I think I need to get my gun.” Just keep going. That’s the warning sign that bad stuff’s going to happen. You talk about how this gets..
Steve Moses:
Well, if you think you need to get your gun, you need to get your gun and then leave. That purpose of getting your gun is that because someone kept encroaching on you and you were trying to break contact as opposed to, “Okay, I’m just going to wait for him here, but I could leave.” Or even worse, “I’m going to go confront that person.” And that just seems to be a common thread in so many of the cases we’ve discussed in which the person felt like, “Oh, this may be dangerous.” So they got their gun before they went over to confront another person.
Shawn Vincent:
So we’ve talked about a couple cases where we started with a hypothetical, and then we found sort of a psychological transference of first aggressor. So let’s go to Lapeer, Michigan. And there’s this guy named Jeffrey Smith who’s armed with a Smith and Wesson. And he’s coming out of a gas station a little after 7:00 AM in the morning. And he’s sort of taking up the whole exit to the gas station onto this road. And there’s this other guy coming in. What Jeffrey Smith doesn’t know is that this other guy, a guy named Arthur Kohn, is twice the legal limit to drive and has cocaine in his system. And so Kohn is mad that Smith’s hogging up the whole entrance to this gas station. They exchange nasty words through open windows. Smith drives off. Kohn has to bump his pickup truck over the curb, and Smith goes down the road a little bit, and he thinks, “You know what? I haven’t had the last word with this jerk. I’m going to turn around and finish this conversation.”
He goes back, and Kohn sees him. They pull up to each other like when you see a couple of highway cops chatting in a median and slowing down traffic for the entire interstate. They’re window to window. And surveillance video shows Smith raised his hand. And later, as it was contested and went to the appellate court, it was stipulated pretty much as fact or determined as fact that at that moment he raised his Smith & Wesson pistol at Kohn. Kohn responds not by saying, “Hey man, we’re cool driving off.” Instead, he gets out of his car, grabs a crowbar, and starts attacking Smith. And Smith fires the pistol twice, shoots him once in the arm, once in the chest. Kohn, shot in the chest, walks around Smith’s car hacking it with a crowbar and goes and falls down and dies behind the pickup truck that’s parked in the parking lot. The pickup truck, by the way, the driver, terrified that there was just a shooting there, backs up over Arthur Kohn, poor guy. It’s a terrible tragedy that I’m laughing about, but it’s just such an insane situation.
But there’s a guy who was attacked by a crowbar-wielding lunatic who was drunk and high on cocaine, and it took a jury 90 minutes to convict him of murder, and the judge sentenced him to life in prison. So Steve, we’ve had this conversation before, but to reiterate, I think if you’re in normal circumstances and somebody’s being very aggressive and they are a feet away from you wielding a crowbar clearly with the intent to smash you with it, are we talking about ability, opportunity, and intent here?
Steve Moses:
Yeah. Everything’s there. Everything is present.
Shawn Vincent:
So it takes a lot, Don, to defeat yourself in that circumstance. And I mean, we’re going to go back to it pointing a gun at somebody without legal justification. That makes you a first aggressor. That’s an illegal assault, right? Legally.
Don West:
Sure. Absolutely. If it’s not done in self-defense, it’s per se assault. Sure. Without the intent to use it. Aggravated assault typically is making a threat by word or act that is designed to make somebody fearful, but not requiring that you have the actual intent to harm them or much less kill them. It’s the threat. But pointing a gun at somebody accomplishes all of that immediately.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. And I think that’s a great underscore to the entire lesson because, by the book, if someone attacks you with a crowbar and they have the physical means to really mess you up or kill you with it, that’s an example of when normally the use of deadly force would absolutely be justified. And then it becomes turning it on its nose, a textbook example of how being the first aggressor can completely then demolish your self-defense case.
Don West:
When it’s time to move on a little bit from this, I think maybe it would be a good time or a good segment for us to talk a little bit about road rage cases since this is kind of a road rage case and we have lots and lots of those that don’t get to this point, but they occur by people driving while angry, I guess, and resulting in some interchange, some display of force. It often starts by what the other person thinks is aggressive driving. So maybe in the context of who is the first aggressor from a self-defense standpoint versus who’s the first aggressor from a driving courtesy standpoint.
Shawn Vincent:
If you don’t mind, I’d like to leave that as a teaser for our audience because the case that you’re talking about is the first case we’re going to explore in our next episode.
Don West:
Great. Perfect then.
Shawn Vincent:
Excellent. Steve, before we wrap up our conversation about first aggressor, do you have anything you wanted to add? Anything we didn’t get to?
Steve Moses:
Well, just some things that I wrote down, and I just wanted to make sure that at some point I mentioned that anytime we are potentially going to deal with another person, we always need to believe that that person is dangerous. We never want to show what’s commonly called disrespect in any manner, including any subtle ways, thinking that, okay, we’re going to kind of get past this. He won’t pick up on it. We always need to view every single encounter with another person as if it was going to be videoed. And also it’s important, it’s almost impossible to put a true jerk into his place. You’ve heard that old saying, why you don’t want to teach a pig to sing? It doesn’t work. It just annoys the pig. Well, that’s kind of the case here.
Shawn Vincent:
I love that.
Steve Moses:
And then finally, there was an outstanding trainer in the Rangemaster community named William April. He was a criminal psychologist and he put forth some really good work. And one of his quotes is, “Remember, they are not like you and they don’t think or act like you do.
Shawn Vincent:
” All right, everybody, that’s our podcast spot today. Appreciate you listening through to the end. As we teased there a little bit, we’re going to talk about a road rage incident next time when we explore lesson number 11, which is do not provoke a potential aggressor. Until then, be smart. Stay safe. Take care.
