Don West- Awesome Responsibility

In this video, Don West, National Trial Counsel for CCW Safe, talks about the awesome responsibility of gun owners and those who carry, and the actions if one has to use a firearm in self defense. Imagine if you can a self defense shooting being a story within a book.

In the video above, Don West, National Trial Counsel for CCW Safe, talks about the awesome responsibility of gun owners and those who carry, and the actions if one has to use a firearm in self defense.   Imagine if you can a self defense shooting being a story within a book.  The book starts with you getting a concealed carry permit.  As the story goes on, the self defense incident is marked in the middle of the story, located in the direct middle of the book.  Investigators are going to look at the moments that lead up to a deadly use of force, examining each page directly before the incident.  They will look at these pages to determine if there was any action of the victim, or concealed carrier that might have put them in this scenario.  They will also look at all the evidence and how that evidence supports the claim of self defense, and if it does, they will look into whether the force used was appropriate for the threat.  If there is any discrepancies of the story vs. evidence, or if they believe that the shooting could have been avoided, or that the force was not appropriate to the threat, they will then go back through all the pages of book, looking into each word to build a case upon.

Alternatively, the moments directly after the shooting are just as important.  After looking at the pages, or moments, just before the incident, they will start to read the pages directly after the incident to see if appropriate actions were taken, and to determine if the use of force stopped when the threat was no longer present.  The pages beyond that will all be blank, waiting to be written, and the outcome will most likely be determined from the book up to the shooting and the moments after.

I don’t know many people who are totally satisfied with all of the pages of their chapters in their life.  There is always something, no matter big or small that we have regrets about, or that can come back and haunt us.  That is why the decision to carry is such an awesome responsibility, and why you must act accordingly.  We have always said that the one person that can mitigate your risk is you, and it starts now.

“The outcome of a  self defense case, perhaps more than in any other type of criminal case, depends on being able to put the jury in the shoes of the accused at the moment when the decision to use force was made.  For the jury to understand whether the accused’s actions were lawful self-defense or murder hinges on precisely that moment …..but that moment will have been shaped by events in the life of the accused and in the life of the attacker that occurred days or years before the self defense incident.  Knowing  that,  and then being able to present it  effectively to a jury is what often makes the difference whether self-defense succeeds and the accused walks out of the courtroom, properly acquitted,  or the claim of self defense fails and the accused heads the other way to spend years or decades away from his family and friends.” -Don West