Posted on June 24, 2025
In Self-Defense Podcast 137: Defensive Display with Greg Ellifritz
Retired police officer and firearms instructor Greg Ellifritz joins the podcast to talk about defensive display and brandishing incidents he responded to as a law enforcement officer. While brandishing a firearm is a crime, a justified defensive display of a firearm can be a viable alternative to using deadly force in a self-defense scenario.
TRANSCRIPT:
Shawn Vincent:
Hey, friends, I’m Shawn Vincent. Thanks for joining the podcast today. Our guest today is a fellow named Greg Ellifritz. Greg is a retired law enforcement officer. He is now a firearms instructor. He is the founder of Active Response Training. He’s also the curator of a pretty amazing weekly news roundup for armed defenders. He publishes that every week at his website, activeresponsetraining.net. We’re glad to have him here. Steve Moses invited him to the podcast to talk about defensive display.
Greg, as a law enforcement officer, responded to a number of firearms incidents that resulted from either brandishing or the defensive display of a weapon. There are times when displaying a firearm is a legitimate response to a self-defense circumstance. It’s certainly a better response if it can break contact with an attacker and end the attack without the use of deadly force. It’s obviously better for the attacker who survives, and it presents less legal risk for the armed defender who displays the firearm.
All that said, it’s important to know that brandishing a firearm without legal justification is a very serious crime. And in fact, it is one of the most common reasons that we see armed defenders face legal jeopardy in self-defense scenarios. So we’re thrilled to have Greg here with us today. We’re going to talk about the difference between defensive display and brandishing. Glad for you guys to meet Greg. Here’s my conversation with him, Steve Moses, and Don West on defensive display.
Shawn Vincent:
Steve, you’ve done it again. You’ve brought us a great guest to chat with about self-defense and being an armed defender. Could you introduce our audience to your friend, Greg?
Steve Moses:
Absolutely. It’s my pleasure. I invited Greg to participate in this podcast at the 2025 Range Master Tactical Conference. Greg and I met at some distant tactical conference decades ago, probably by now. I already knew a little bit about him the first time I met him. I made it a point to sit in on his class. I was suitably impressed. And since then, I’ve been a big fan of Greg’s. I am an instructor, but I’m also a student, and there are a number of people that I refer to as “instructor’s instructors” out there. Tom Givens of course is one and Greg is another. And last year, we even hosted Greg out at our home range to do his close-contact gun-fighting class and everything. It was a class that I’ve always wanted to take, and as usual, it was awesome.
Greg is a retired career police officer, master police officer. He is very well-educated. He teaches a number of disciplines. He’s also extremely well traveled, and he actually brings some insights from what he has learned over his travels into just everyday lessons that are relevant to concealed carriers and armed homeowners. Another thing that Greg does, he is a very, very prolific author, and he provides a weekly blog. It’s typically about 31 articles, I’m thinking, Greg, does that sound about right?
Greg Ellifritz:
That’s about it.
Steve Moses:
Every week, I make sure I go through every one of those. And I have to admit that some of the podcast ideas that I have proposed to you and Don came directly from Greg. So hey, Greg, I know I did a lousy job of introducing you, so would you finish up here for me?
Greg Ellifritz:
You did great, Steve. Thanks. I’m Greg Ellifritz. I’m a retired police officer. I worked in Ohio for 25 years, did patrol for about half of that, and then the other half, I was the full-time training officer for the department. I had a department that was very big on training and had a chief that would send me to any training I wanted to go to anywhere across the country. So I took full advantage of that and ended up with about 4,000 hours of instructor-level training and something working up near 90 instructor certifications on mostly police use of force areas, shooting and fighting and knives and impact weapons—and everything that you could possibly imagine. I retired five years ago, and since I retired, I’ve been teaching. I teach in somewhere between 10 and 20 different states a year, and I’m usually on the road a couple weekends a month teaching classes.
Shawn Vincent:
So retired from law enforcement but not retired in any stretch of the imagination?
Greg Ellifritz:
No, no. I’m still doing a lot of work, so it’s kind of nice though when I really think about it. If I add a travel day to my teaching and I work eight days a month, that isn’t too bad. Most people wouldn’t complain about that for a job.
Shawn Vincent:
Did I hear Steve right? Did he say that you write 31 articles a week?
Greg Ellifritz:
No, no, no. I compile a big list of good relevant articles in the industry and put out a big list every Friday of the best articles on the internet, gun related, self-defense related articles, put those out. And it’s usually a list of about 30 articles that I found good over the course of the week.
Shawn Vincent:
I think there’s a lot of value in curation like that when you’ve got somebody who’s got the amount of instruction that you’ve had and the experience that you have. Having somebody that you can trust who aggregates that information and separates the garbage from the stuff of value. That’s important.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yeah, I agree. I agree. It’s definitely been popular. I’ve been doing it once a week for, I guess I’m at 13 years now. So haven’t missed a week in 13 years.
Shawn Vincent:
That’s amazing. Tell our listeners where to go to find your blog.
Greg Ellifritz:
My company is called Active Response Training, so my website is activeresponsetraining.net.
Shawn Vincent:
Awesome. So tell me what drives that curiosity for you? I think if there was one thing that we could really encourage armed defenders to do is to get more training, to just have more hands-on tactical experience, more hands-on strategic conversations with a variety of folks who are well credentialed. What drives you to have so much instruction and to be an instructor?
Greg Ellifritz:
I don’t know. I think it is that curiosity. I think I’m a curious person by nature and a little bit of training ADD. I learn something, develop a basic mastery in it, and then I’m, “Well, let me learn about something else.” So I went from pistols to shotguns to sub machine guns to sniper rifles to carbines, and just constantly learning, that curiosity drive in me, and developed a basic proficiency, and like, “Oh, hey, I can teach all these subjects too. So that’s pretty good.” So yeah, that’s been my primary success in this industry has just been driven by that curiosity.
Shawn Vincent:
Steve, so you had some time with Greg, and you came up with a really interesting topic for what we could talk about today.
Steve Moses:
Yes. I tell you what, one of the things I do not think is taught enough or taught well is the use of defensive display in a justifiable manner. And so much of the instruction that students get in these defensive firearms classes is basically focused on skills. You have a threat, draw the gun, shoot very quickly, shoot accurately, negate the threat, and then let’s start over and work on another part of that.
Whereas one of the things that I noted years ago when I was reading, I believe it was called, was it the Armed Citizen portion of the NRA article in which citizens used force in order to defend themselves, and how many of those encounters were successfully thwarted without a shot fired. And in many instances, just the presence of a handgun or another firearm was enough to stop the threat. One of the things that Kyle Sweet mentioned to me at one time was that a large number of CCW Safe’s claims involve defensive display that actually resulted in charges of brandishing or aggravated assault.
Shawn Vincent:
Sure. And Kyle’s one of the CCW Safe founders.
Steve Moses:
Yes, yes. And so, one of the things I’ve tried to put more emphasis on is how to teach students how to use defensive display. I don’t think it gets out there enough. And when people do talk about defensive display, they really, in many instances, they don’t know how to do it correctly, and that’s what gets them in trouble. So knowing when defensive display is warranted and how to do it properly, I felt like is a topic that needed to be covered, and Greg, I knew, was an expert.
What I did was I asked Greg to join us. And Greg, we’re going to kind of lean on you today and see if we can get some of your insights. And where I’d like to take this at the end, and this is just my objective is basically lessons learned for concealed carriers and armed homeowners that they can use today if necessary.
Shawn Vincent:
And Greg, I want our listeners to know that we got Don West with us as always, and Don’s National Trial Counsel for CCW Safe and a venerated criminal defense attorney. And Don, you take a lot of the phone calls from CCW Safe members, and I think you can vouch for what Kyle said that there’s a lot of instances where there’s a issue with a firearm that wasn’t fired, right? So whether it’s a brandishing or a defensive display thing, these are stories that you hear a lot. Is that right?
Don West:
Yes. A regular part of my role with CCW Safe is to interact directly with the members when they’ve been involved in a self-defense incident. The process for that typically is when they have the opportunity, it’s usually right after they call the police, is they call our 24-hour hotline and I get patched directly through to the member oftentimes while it’s still ongoing. In fact, I talked to a fellow the other day while the police were standing in the same room with him. They were gracious enough frankly, not always the case, but they were kind enough to give him an opportunity to talk privately with me before they completed their investigation. And this was another incident as we’ve been describing here, there was a display issue, no shots fired.
I would think that 5 to 1, maybe 10 to 1, when I’m talking to members that have been involved in an incident, the gun is displayed but not fired. And that’s probably the vast majority of the cases that I’m dealing with day to day, where there’s been a confrontation–there’s been a decision to display the firearm, but it didn’t get to the point where shots were fired. And then there’s the question of “Was it brandishing, menacing, terroristic acts, some sort of violation of the state statute in place where that is, or as would be the case against all of those statutes, was it in lawful self-defense?” Because I mean if you think about it, brandishing or aggravated assault or all of those can be independent crimes if they weren’t done in lawful self-defense because you can point a gun at somebody if you have legal reason to do so, just like you can shoot somebody if you have legal reason to do so.
So, I’m so interested in what we’re going to talk about today as those gradations and variations from the beginning of perhaps some harsh words to a decision to touch the gun, partially withdraw the gun, draw the gun to a low-ready position perhaps, and then right out point the gun at somebody in some sort of escalating event. And really excited to have Greg’s input on how that’s assessed, what kind of discretion law enforcement typically has. Do they try to resolve the facts at the scene when they’re trying to decide whether to make an arrest or when it’s two guys arguing which one to arrest and such? So I’m really interested to know all this. But circling back to your question, yeah, we see lots and lots of those cases.
Shawn Vincent:
I saw, Greg, you’re nodding your head a lot to what Don was saying and I think maybe a great place to start, unless you have something else in mind particularly that you wanted to say is, Greg, you mentioned to us offline that in your career in Ohio, they didn’t have a particular law against brandishing. They called it, what was it, criminal menacing?
Greg Ellifritz:
Yeah. If you’re using a weapon to make a threat towards someone, it’s a menacing threat. And so if that threat is likely to cause serious physical harm or death, it would be aggravated menacing. So in Ohio, that’s how it would work. It would be if you drew a gun and pointed it at someone in a threatening manner, it would be making an aggravated menacing threat.
Shawn Vincent:
Well, that’s my favorite term for describing this that I’ve heard, because every jurisdiction has something slightly different, but they all mean something similar.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yes, right.
Shawn Vincent:
So that becomes relevant in the story you told us about the sub shop guy. Do you want to tell us that case? That was one case that you were involved with as a law enforcement officer. Correct?
Greg Ellifritz:
Yes, it was. I was the lead officer on this one, and it was kind of the most successful brandishing that happened right at that moment, right before we got there that I could remember in my career. And it was a guy who was a delivery driver for a Jimmy John’s sub shop, and he got in an argument with his boss who was a woman. The driver was a 22-year-old kid, no criminal record, no problems, got in an argument about the scheduling. The female boss ended up calling her boyfriend in to deal with the problem. So the boyfriend shows up at the store, and the delivery driver knows the boyfriend is an ex-con, spent time in prison. He knows the guy deals drugs, and the dude’s about 40 pounds bigger than him. So he was really worried that this ex-con who was screaming at him for disrespecting the girlfriend boss, he was thinking that this guy was really going to beat him.
And he was backing up through the store as this guy was kind of menacingly moving forward. And he got backed into a corner by the boyfriend of the manager there and the guy had his fist raised and was threatening to beat the guy. And the delivery driver lifted up his shirt, put his hand on his appendix carry gun and started the draw without completely pulling the gun out of the holster and told the guy that if he came any further that he would shoot him. And the aggressor there then ran out the front door giving the other guy time to run out the back door. And he ran out the back door and called the police and very quickly established that, “This guy threatened me. I’m a concealed carry permit holder and I displayed my firearm and I’ll meet the officers off-site.”
And that’s exactly what we did and we were able to verify his entire story. He was able to point us towards videotape evidence of where the camera was in the store to get that evidence. Both the manager and the guy who made the threats were not on the scene. They had both fled by the time we got there. We had the guy tender his resignation, and gave him an escort home, and that was about the end of that one. So we did not charge him with anything, any criminal act.
Shawn Vincent:
Maybe let’s not go back to work there.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yeah.
Shawn Vincent:
Greg, we’re going to drill down into some of those things there first, but Don, this, as Greg tells it, is sort of a textbook interaction here because he had reason to fear this guy’s actions. He didn’t appear to be armed or wasn’t known to be armed, the aggressor, so the imminence of great bodily harm or death wasn’t specifically imminent until he closed that distance. He made an effort to retreat from him, he gave verbal warnings. And then, when he ran out of room, Greg, it sounds like that’s when he decided to do a defensive display rather than just shoot this guy, which some armed defenders may have decided that they had no other choice but to do that.
When he saw that it broke contact with the aggressor, then he made further effort to egress, first one to call the police. And then Don, it’s always difficult to know how to interact with law enforcement after an encounter like that, but just like you often say, he was helpful. He pointed to things that would be evidence to support his account and ended up with a really good result.
Don West:
Of course, if you’re going to assess this whole scenario from the vantage point of did he have the lawful right to use deadly force in that scenario, you would talk about the disproportion of the size. You’re allowed to know what you know about your attacker, the fact that he knew he’d been to prison, that he lived a potentially violent lifestyle. All of that is allowed to be processed in your decision whether or not to use deadly force. Of course, the critical thing is “Was this person capable of inflicting serious bodily harm or death without a weapon, 40 pounds heavier, bigger with a violent background would give you good reason to think that if this guy got his hands on you?” He could very well certainly if he got the physical advantage and got you to the ground, he would have the ability to seriously injure or kill you if that was his intent.
You can even go back to how he came to be involved. He came as sort of the enforcer for the girlfriend. The beef wasn’t with him; the beef was with the girlfriend, whatever that actually was. And she enlists this guy as her muscle, I guess, to deal with this. So all of that sort of sets the stage for a viable defense had he, in fact, shot this guy. I think it may have had to have gone another step or two before he would’ve had the legal right to physically shoot him. He had to really believe that not only did he have the capability of inflicting serious harm or death, he had the present intent to do so, it wasn’t just a standoff. But once he gets them in the corner, had more things happened, he would’ve had every reason to believe that deadly force attack was imminent. So that’s why this is such a great story because it sort of fits in the middle somewhere. We had a guy who was less physically capable but had the ability to use deadly force if it came to that.
What I wanted to point out though, is that virtually everywhere–which is another way of saying almost nowhere in the US–is displaying a firearm considered using deadly force. That’s a big difference because you can’t use deadly force unless you are, in fact, facing that imminent threat of deadly force against you. So the fact that he displayed the gun by partially withdrawing it is not in and of itself the use of deadly force.
Shawn Vincent:
It’s the threat of use of deadly force.
Don West:
Yeah. And I think in many jurisdictions there are statutes that specifically allow you to display a gun in response to the threat of force. So that in and of itself wasn’t per se illegal because he wasn’t using deadly force. The question was whether it was an appropriate display based upon the context and the circumstances as perceived by the guy that was being attacked. Then of course you have the aftermath, which is he made some good decisions in that case by calling the police, by knowing there’s likely to be video that would corroborate his story, et cetera, et cetera.
One of the things I was interested in, Greg, as you were telling the story was, did it matter to you as law enforcement that he only partially displayed the weapon as opposed to displaying it and pointing it at him? Is that factually significant? Or would you have basically done the same thing even if you had video of him standing there directly pointing the gun at the guy?
Greg Ellifritz:
I think the pointing of the gun, there would be a little bit more scrutiny on that action than just merely displaying it like he did. I don’t think the end result would be any different. I think he legitimately felt that he was at risk of being seriously hurt by this guy. And at that point, whether he displays the gun by partially pulling it out of the holster or by pointing it at the guy, probably the impact isn’t going to be too different. He would probably be justified in either case in my opinion.
But I think anytime that we see pointing the gun, there’s going to be more scrutiny and I think honestly that’s because of police policies now. Most police use of force policies, drawing the gun and pointing it at the ground as if a low-ready position usually is not considered a use of force that needs to be documented in police use of force. But once you point the gun at someone, then it becomes a use of force rather. Even though just as you were talking, it really is still a threat, it becomes a use in most police departments policies and you got to do a report when you point a gun at people in most departments now. So I think that aspect of things, if the cop gets more scrutiny for pointing a gun at someone, he’s going to naturally put a little bit more scrutiny over the defender who points the gun at someone versus just pulls it out as a display and never points it.
Shawn Vincent:
But even more broadly, what you’re suggesting here is that, whatever the regulations on use of force how an officer would be scrutinized for using the firearm, they’re likely to project their own internal standards on the public that they protect and serve, right?
Greg Ellifritz:
I think that’s the reality. That’s what happens in a lot of situations.
Don West:
Do you think then, for someone who is being attacked or threatened, that’s a citizen, a concealed carrier, that it would be important to factor that in, in their decision whether to actually draw the weapon, whether to put it at a low-ready or actually point the gun? That there’s a gradation there of that behavior that could result in different law enforcement treatment depending on how the individual police officer sees it or the agency protocol for handling that stuff?
Greg Ellifritz:
Right. Yes.
Steve Moses:
Let me introduce something here guys. And one of the things, a legal perspective aside, there’s four basic firearm safety rules and one of them is never point the gun at anything you are not willing to shoot and destroy right then. So if you bring that gun up and you’re not willing to shoot right then just legal side apart, I mean basically guys, you’re violating one of the safety rules. So my thoughts on this are that if you’re pointing that gun, it’s because at that particular moment you’re getting ready to shoot that guy, and just as soon as that becomes no longer a shoot situation, that gun needs to go back into a safe direction.
Don West:
Yes. It happens pretty fast, as this one no doubt happened pretty fast. And I would suggest the way that Greg described the way this was unfolding, that as the delivery guy felt he was cornered by a big guy that had some pretty bad intent as to what he was planning to do, that as soon as he puts his hand on his gun and partially displays it, that if the guy had not taken a step back but rather had taken a step forward that he may very well have been legally justified in shooting him at that point.
Steve Moses:
That’s correct.
Don West:
Because I don’t know what else he can do, frankly. He knows he can’t go one-on-one, hand-to-hand with him. He’s got no real way to escape. And at that point, in some ways it’s two against one. It’s not just the guy, it’s also the girlfriend who’s there.
Steve Moses:
Don, my take on that still is going to be that unless I am going to shoot that guy right then I am not going to point that gun in anticipation that I may need to shoot him. And one of the issues that we see as trainers is that students basically have about two ready positions. One is more or less pointed at the ground, the other is just directly at the target, and I think that is a dangerous way to train. We try to train that out of them. Our thoughts are that if I’m bringing that gun up and I’m pointing it at it, it’s because I’m getting ready to shoot this guy, and I’m waiting for him—if there’s some reason, and I’m hoping there is—there’s a good chance he’s going to give me some feedback, which means I don’t need to shoot that guy and I can go ahead and drop that down into a compressed low-ready, low-ready, or even high-ready.
Don West:
From a defensive display standpoint, as a lawyer, I think there is great value in—it has to be a Goldilocks thing: It can’t be too soon, it can’t be too late, it has to be just right. But I think “just right” means that you display it soon enough to give the guy a chance to change his mind. If you wait to draw it until you absolutely have decided to shoot it, then the guy doesn’t get the opportunity to say, “Oh, shit, now what?” And turn away and de-escalate in that sense.
Steve Moses:
I a hundred percent agree, and I think that’s something that concealed carriers, armed homeowners need to know, and they also need to know how to do it. And in a lot of instances, it’s just kind of like well, have the right mindset, or when you’re telling people to shoot and not move the muzzle, don’t flinch. You literally have to understand how to accomplish these things, and then once you do that, you need to practice that so that it becomes somewhat of a second nature.
Don West:
Part of what both of you guys are saying, I’m taking it and I’d like to hear more about it, is in order to do those things, you have to have some confidence in your ability to operate the gun, to draw from concealed, to be in control of the situation. So that’s part of training itself. Of course, you have to appreciate the legal jeopardy that goes along with displaying a gun or firing a gun, but you have to also be simply physically able to execute the steps that keep you in control. And if you’re able to confidently partially display the gun or put it at a low-ready, knowing that if you need to raise and shoot it within the time that you believe you have, you’ll still be able to do that effectively to save yourself.
Steve Moses:
Yes, sir. And a matter of fact, when I proposed this, that was my objective all along was to get this kind of conversation going out there so people can see, okay, here’s what you need to take into consideration. Here’s what you need to know and here’s what you need to be able to do. So this podcast is going exactly in the direction I wanted it to go.
Shawn Vincent:
Well, Greg, I see you smiling.
Greg Ellifritz:
This is interesting.
Shawn Vincent:
There’s a lot to respond to there. What’s the first thing that captures your mind?
Greg Ellifritz:
Well, the thing that strikes me the most, interestingly enough as a gun trainer, talking to this kid, and I call him kid, he’s 22 years old, he’s in college. This is his job, delivering subs. He had just gotten his conceal carry permit. In Ohio that involves two hours of live fire shooting. It’s an eight-hour total class with two hours of live fire shooting, but there was no drawing from the holster is required to get your permit in Ohio.
And so he was telling me after this was all over with, he said he had only gone to the basic concealed carry course and hadn’t done any training or practice since then. And he said, “When I put my hand on my gun, I really wished that I had done more training.” And he told me that he regretted not doing more training because he had never been formally taught how to draw that gun from the holster. He got his concealed carry permit shooting guns off of range tables, and that’s just how they did it. And he regretted that when it came time to actually use the gun for real.
Shawn Vincent:
So they don’t have range tables out in real life?
Greg Ellifritz:
Not in most of the places I go.
Shawn Vincent:
Hold on, let me move around this table in the sub shop here before, so I can be comfortable. That’s funny. There are a few things I’d like you to respond to, Greg, that caught my attention while Don and Steve were talking about this. And one is, our hope is that a defensive display will be a de-escalation, but there are times when showing the firearm might cause an escalation. Now you’ve introduced the threat of deadly force into the situation, potentially justifying the other person to use deadly force against you. I think the only thing that would determine the difference between whether it’s a de-escalation or an escalation is, for sure, the result that it creates.
Greg Ellifritz:
Did it work? Yeah, did it work?
Shawn Vincent:
Or perhaps importantly, to looking at whether it was justified or not, the intent of the defender, right?
Greg Ellifritz:
Yes.
Shawn Vincent:
But I think there’s a couple of different alternatives that could have happened here is one, it worked, the guy left and he was able to flee. But he wasn’t as confident and competent with his firearm skills as he would like to have been. If he had betrayed that with his eyes, or this aggressor felt that maybe he wasn’t serious about shooting him, he could have gone in for more violence against him.
Greg Ellifritz:
The guy actually told me when he displayed the gun and the dude ran out the front door, he thought that he was going to a car to get a gun to come back. And that’s why he ran out the back door because he thought that the guy, being the ex-con, probably had a gun. And he thought that as soon as he had the opportunity to get it, he was going to run to the car and get it. He actually didn’t, never came back, but that’s what the defender originally thought.
Shawn Vincent:
Yep. As the investigating officer on this, Greg, I’m assuming that the fact that our defender had some egress, he made an attempt to move away from this guy, that was important in your assessment, right?
Greg Ellifritz:
It was. It was because it gets sticky when it’s a disparity of force like that, when it’s one guy armed with a gun and one guy not, establishing “Did that armed person really have a reasonable belief that he was going to be seriously hurt or killed?” It gets stickier in that situation when there is that disparity. So by the guy doing it almost textbook–and at the time that this happened, Ohio was not a stand-your-ground state and you did have to retreat before using deadly force if it was possible.
He did everything perfectly. We knew who he was. We’d already run his concealed carry permit and his background before we got there because he gave that name to the dispatchers. We knew everything. He pretty much did it perfectly. And then when we went to talk to the other guy, the other guy wouldn’t talk to us. Neither the manager nor the other person would come talk to us. So that also reinforces our opinion in that investigation of what’s going on here.
Shawn Vincent:
Who’s on the right side of this.
Greg Ellifritz:
Here we got this guy who’s got his permit and seemed to do something reasonable. He pointed out video where we could verify that, can’t get a story at all from the other guy. We can figure out what’s going on here. The problem that we get is what would’ve happened had he not called and the other guy called and said, “Hey, that guy threatened me with a 9mm Smith & Wesson M&P Compact that was carried in front of his hip on the right-hand side.” And we stop him, and that’s the gun that we find, then again, we get into another sticky situation.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah, we’ve actually seen that Don, haven’t we? Where someone can describe the firearm really well, it makes it real tough not to charge a guy.
Don West:
I was just thinking Greg’s comments about, at that point in time, Ohio wasn’t stand-your-ground. I think Ohio a few years ago, not that many years ago, was the lone holdout on whether the accused had to prove self-defense.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yes, it was.
Don West:
It wasn’t till the last few years that now in Ohio as everywhere else, the prosecutor has the responsibility to disprove self-defense as part of their obligation.
Shawn Vincent:
We actually looked at a case Don that was set to go to trial that morning when the law took effect and the prosecutor dropped it because he said he couldn’t meet the burden anymore.
Don West:
Yeah. So change a couple of the facts that Greg’s been talking about, like the driver doesn’t call the police and the other guy does, and the driver’s found with the gun. So not only do you not have stand-your-ground, but now you have at least, perhaps at that point, the affirmative responsibility to show you acted in self-defense. And just a couple of those little things would completely change the dynamic of this case and perhaps put this guy at significant legal jeopardy, frankly.
Greg Ellifritz:
Sure. Yes.
Shawn Vincent:
I want to ask you this, Greg. So let’s imagine that the defensive display didn’t work, that this aggressor then saw that the threat was made and then advanced again, and now our defender draws, fires, and ends the confrontation with the use of deadly force, whether he kills him or not. If you, as an investigating office,r saw that that defensive display was made before he actually deployed it, that makes a difference in your assessment, wouldn’t it?
Greg Ellifritz:
I would think it would be a good thing. I don’t think it could hurt. You’re giving him a chance to back off and stop his aggressive actions. And when he does not take that opportunity, I think it makes his intent much more clear at that point in time. If you’ve pulled the gun, told the guy if he continues his actions, you’re going to shoot, and that guy continues his actions, I think we don’t question his intent anymore at that point in time. This guy is serving to be a deadly threat at that point in time. So having that chance for that guy to de-escalate, I think that’s probably a good thing. I do a little bit of expert witness work, I would certainly bring that up if I was the expert defending the person. He pointed the gun and gave the guy a chance to walk away and not get shot. he chose to attack instead. I think that’s powerful evidence for a jury that the guy was acting reasonably at that point in time.
Shawn Vincent:
You have a contrasting story about a “defensive display case,” we’ll call it. Tell us about this, Greg.
Greg Ellifritz:
When we were talking about what to do with this podcast, I was thinking back and I was thinking, what’s my best scenario and what’s my worst scenario? And so you heard the best outcome scenario. The worst outcome was a road rage incident. It was two guys were cutting each other off on a two-lane road, brake-checking each other. One of the drivers made a finger gun motion and pointed it at the other driver–like that as if he was going to shoot him. The other driver knew that it was him pointing his finger. There was no mistaken identity of he “Was pointing something dark?” He definitely knew it was his finger. He was making a gun motion and pointing it at it.
So the other driver reached into his glove compartment of his truck and pulled out his Ruger 9mm and pointed it at the other dude. At that point, they both separated, went to parking lots across the street from each other and both independently called the police on each other. So the one guy, the guy who had drawn the firearm, wanted the other guy prosecuted for a menacing threat for the pointing the finger gun at him. He thought that that was a threat and the other guy wanted the dude charged with a menacing threat for pointing a gun at him.
Shawn Vincent:
Let me guess who won that.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yeah. The big difference there with that is that perspective of “Is it reasonable that you are fearing for your life in that moment?” Now pointing a finger gun at someone, that’s certainly a threat, but in that particular moment, that finger isn’t going to start spitting bullets at you, and you’re not in any obvious risk, imminent danger right then at that moment. And that’s the problem. In that scenario, would I have had a problem if the guy reached into his glove compartment, got his gun, kept it on his lap, so it was a little bit closer as he drove away, and called the police? I wouldn’t have any problem at all with that course of action, but this situation, he pulled the gun basically to one-up the guy, not so much to defend himself for what he thought was a reasonable threat in that motion.
Shawn Vincent:
So that one-upmanship, Don, I see you shaking your head there, I mean that’s the real critical difference between brandishing and defensive display is that intent. And you’ve given us an extreme story, pulling your gun out and pointing it at a guy who gave you “pew-pew” finger pistols is absurd on its face …
Greg Ellifritz:
Unreasonable, yes.
Shawn Vincent:
… and unreasonable. But there are graduated spectrum of that. And I think there are times where it might seem more clear that a threat is real and that the stakes are higher than finger pistols when people draw. But you can look at it and based on the things that were said, or that there was brake-checking involved, that there’s more of a desire to win this argument that’s motivating the gun coming out than any real fear. And Don, I see you shaking your head there a little bit.
Don West:
Yeah. I can’t tell you how many of these calls I’ve taken about this. And sometimes that’s all there is what we’ve talked about, and other times it actually escalates to the point of somebody firing the gun thinking that, not only do they have the right to raise the ante, it gets to the point that they are so offended and insulted by the behavior of the other driver, not necessarily at risk frankly, but just really PO’ed because of how they were disrespected. That’s a common term we maybe overuse sometimes, but it often boils down to just wanting to win the argument and that sort of behavior displays itself.
I think there’s a lack of appreciation for the significance, the legal significance and the jeopardy that you face when you do something like that. Even if you had no intention whatsoever in the world of pulling the trigger, you just wanted to show this guy who had fingers that you had the real thing so that if one of you were backing down, it would be the other guy. And of course we know that there’s a different view of that taken by law enforcement and by the criminal justice system.
I’ve always been perplexed by how someone involved in one of these things, that’s a concealed carrier that’s supposedly responsible enough to be licensed to have a firearm, thinks that the other person is going to be just as reasonable or rational as they perceive themselves to be, as they become more irrational and unreasonable. Who’s going to exercise common sense in this scenario?
Greg Ellifritz:
I worked a case last year where it was road rage. It was just like that. It ended up being two professional guys, both upper 10%, mid-level manager guys who got into a road rage incident on a rural highway in Texas. And they both pulled over into a gas station parking lot, and one ran up to the other who was still seatbelted into the car, who thought that they were just going to scream at each other, and one ran up and leaned into the car and started beating that guy. And the person who was attacked drew his gun and shot him and killed him right there in the parking lot with exactly that same kind of thing. Two adults can’t take the off ramp as the intensity builds, and they pull over, and something’s going to happen, and something definitely happened, and two lives are ruined. One guy’s dead, and one guy’s now a convicted felon.
Shawn Vincent:
If they had just driven home, they would’ve probably forgotten about the circumstance as soon as their wife reminded them what they had forgotten to bring home that they had promised to bring, and then they’d be good.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yes. Yes.
Shawn Vincent:
Greg, as we’re wrapping up our chat here, you talked about how so many of these incidents don’t get reported because neither party has an incentive to do it. But I think fair to say that if either party reports it, it’s something that law enforcement’s going to look at. It’s a serious deal to pull a firearm.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yes. Yeah, I can’t imagine many places where that wouldn’t be investigated if they have cops available free to do it. Everybody’s in a body crunch right now, and there’s never enough cops to answer all the calls, but if there are cops free, I can’t imagine many places that wouldn’t send a couple cops to investigate something like that.
Shawn Vincent:
And it’s serious.
Greg Ellifritz:
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Shawn Vincent:
And let me ask you–this is going to be self-evident–but I’d like you to respond to it, that if that guy in the sub shop had shot and severely injured and/or killed his attacker, your response to that call would’ve been a lot different and the defender would’ve had a much different experience, right?
Greg Ellifritz:
Yeah. If I was making the call as the lead officer there, I would have a lot of input into it, but ultimately, I would have bosses and detectives that might be making the call over the top of my head. But if it was my call on that exact situation, he would not be arrested. But we would certainly detain him differently. In that scenario, I knew he had a gun. I knew he had a permit. He told the dispatcher where he was. I did not disarm him in that situation. I knew he was armed, and I didn’t even take his gun away from him or detain him while I was talking to him in that scenario because I wasn’t threatened.
In a scenario where he actually had shot the person in the same scenario, he’s probably getting handcuffed, we’re taking his gun away from him as evidence, and we’re going through it that way. But he’d be treated a little rougher, and he’d be in cuffs for a little while and get a few more people asking questions, but I think the end result would probably be the same.
Shawn Vincent:
Were you a homicide detective ever?
Greg Ellifritz:
No, no.
Shawn Vincent:
But you would’ve-
Greg Ellifritz:
I investigated all the police uses of force when I was a training officer, so I did that quite a bit, but no.
Shawn Vincent:
But if you had a dead guy there, you’d have to call in a homicide detective, right?
Greg Ellifritz:
Got to call. The bosses are getting there, the coroner’s coming, the homicide detectives are getting there. There’s other people that are going to play a role. But that initial officer who went to the scene has a pretty big role in telling those people who ultimately make the decision what he experienced and what he thinks. If that officer’s any good, they’ll often go with what that original officer thinks, but …
Shawn Vincent:
Sure, but that’s going to be the shortest …
Greg Ellifritz:
Yeah, it’s additional layers of scrutiny get involved once you start shooting the gun. The one thing I was just thinking about, we were talking about that just differing levels of the display. There is definitely a danger in making that display if the bad guy already has you at gunpoint. I mentioned you asked, do you think it’d be a good idea for someone to draw the gun, point it at him, give him a chance to back off, and I would say yes. But if he’s already holding you at gunpoint with finger on the trigger, you’re taking the chance of, “Hey, I’ll show him I’ve got a gun too and he’s going to give up,” that’s not been the best outcome in my experiences. So if he has you cold and you think he’s going to shoot you, don’t partially display this weapon, thinking that you’re going to scare him away and make him stop. That’s a good way of getting yourself shot real quick.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. Well, and Steve, you’ve mentioned before, if you don’t fire in that situation, the other guy just might not believe that you’re willing to do it at all, right?
Greg Ellifritz:
Yeah, it’s an incentive for him to fire. He’s thinking you won’t do it, so yeah.
Shawn Vincent:
Here’s where this conversation gets tricky because, I think from a real textbook perspective, we don’t want to draw our firearm unless we’re justified in using it to protect ourselves in deadly force. But Don was talking about the Goldilocks pre-moment where …
Greg Ellifritz:
That moment doesn’t exist. That’s the misconception of people when they look at these uses of force. They expect that the person is going to be able to recognize that one moment and act in that moment. And in reality, it’s never perfect when that person draws the gun, or it’s never perfect when that person uses the force. It’s a balancing of “If I go too early, I might go to jail, and if I go too late, I might get dead.” And it’s that balancing act, and in all of the use of force cases that I investigated as a cop, both police using force, and as a patrol officer, when I roll up on assault cases, nobody does it perfectly. It’s always a little bit too early, a little bit too late, and that’s when we bring the experts in. But I’ve never seen people that do it perfectly every single time.
Shawn Vincent:
I guess, tell me how you feel about this though–there is a moment or a space of time where actually firing that pistol and shooting someone dead would not be justified, but defensive display makes sense and could in fact prevent the whole tragedy from happening. And that’s such a difficult spot for us. We say all the time, we don’t give advice on this podcast. We don’t give legal advice, we don’t give necessarily self-defense advice. We’re looking at real life situations with experts and people who are involved in this thing to see what outcomes were.
And the truth is, defensive displays often create positive outcomes because it means nobody died and often nobody even gets prosecuted. And the jeopardy, both legally and to the physical well-being of both parties involved is so much lower. So clearly there’s a place for defensive display when the use of deadly force isn’t explicitly justified, but it takes a thoughtful, knowledgeable person to be able to navigate that really narrow moment.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yes.
Don West:
Not only is it so critical there in terms of saving yourself and not exposing yourself to legal jeopardy, it seems to me that we don’t talk very much about how display can, certainly if it’s done way too soon, sort of reverse the roles here, whereas the person you’re perceiving as the attacker may not think that they’re attacking you, they just want to point their fingers and yell at you a little bit, and all of a sudden you pull a gun on them, and now they think they’re just about to get shot. So their response, of course is in kind, they pull their gun and pretty soon now it’s two people with guns and somebody gets shot. So I agree wholeheartedly, it’s a very nuanced dynamic situation that you want to get right every time if you can.
Steve Moses:
Well, just the way I look at this, and again, this is not professional advice either, is if I need to shoot somebody right now, I shoot them. If I need to shoot somebody right now and in the one and a half or two seconds it takes for me to get my gun and make the shot, they do something that causes me to not need to shoot them right now, I don’t shoot them and I get my gun offline as soon as I can. And if there is a situation in which like, okay, I’m going to have to shoot this guy, but I’m just enough ahead of him, maybe a second or so ahead of him that I can get that gun out at the ground and give a verbal command and stop him from doing that, that’s what I’m going to try to strive to do.
Very much what Greg said was so important: that sometimes you have to shoot. Defensive display, especially against a person that has a gun, is really risky. And what a lot of people do not realize, Greg knows this, is that a person standing at you from say, I don’t know, Greg, say 6 to 10 feet that has his hand on the gun pointed at the ground, you can point your gun at his chest and he could probably get a shot off as fast or as fast as you can. He could literally go from 0 to 60, just “bang.” And people do that all the time.
And these are all important reasons to train, to listen to these podcasts, get as much knowledge as you can, and then you know what? Get trained and then practice. And one of the things that I do is going all the way back to the introduction is I read Greg’s blogs every week. I take advantage of anything that CCW Safe puts out there that might make me a safer concealed carrier or armed homeowner. I mean, just to me, this stuff just never ends.
Shawn Vincent:
Greg, you told me that sub delivery guy confided in you that he wished he had had better training. And one thing that occurred to me is, when Steve was talking about those decision-making spectrum, is that if you have familiarity with how you draw that pistol, if you know how long it’s going to take you to get out, you know what obstacles that you have to overcome to un-conceal it and draw it, then that window of when you consider a defensive display, I think gets smaller.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yeah.
Shawn Vincent:
Because if you have the tools to use verbal commands and to use movements and other things to assess their threat and intention and mitigate your opportunities for egress, then you can be much more decisive. I think a cause for brandishing is people just not being confident that they can get their gun out in time, and so they bring it out too early. Steve’s told us this before.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yes. I agree. I agree.
Shawn Vincent:
Great. Well, Don, do you have anything else for the good of the order, anything you wanted to ask?
Don West:
No, I think this was great.
Shawn Vincent:
Steve, is there anything that we didn’t cover that you thought about and you’d like to?
Steve Moses:
Oh, and again, I’m trying not to get too far off in the weeds here, but one of the things is I teach this. I teach a class called Retention Distance Defensive Shooting Skills. Greg teaches close contact gun fighting, Cecil Burch and Craig Douglas and the ShivWorks Collective teach these how to use a gun in a tussle when you’re entangled with another person and having the ability to go ahead and use this gun at just close contact distances in the event that someone that is unarmed goes ahead and tries to make contact with you. That is a great confidence builder. And when I say confidence, you also need to be competent, actually. I think that’s very important. But if you want to go look into that thing, concealed carriers, I think having that is a critical skill and I recommend it to everyone.
Greg Ellifritz:
These things tend to be close. They’re more close if you are unaware of what’s going on and don’t pick up on the threat cues early enough. They don’t have to be as close if you were to pick up on the threat cues a little bit earlier, and that’s where that training that Steve mentioned comes in, not only do you know your own abilities better, you’re better able to pick up, oh, that guy is doing this, which is going to lead to this, and you’re a couple steps ahead.
Shawn Vincent:
That’s the single biggest thing that’s helped me in my life since I’ve been doing self-defense cases, and working with CCW Safe, and studying these cases, and doing this podcast is just knowing a bad situation before it develops, and just going the other way. Or I can wait out the crazy guy who’s ranting in the parking lot between me and my car. I can not go down that street. And following those things, that will save people so much. All these decisions that are so tough at the last moment, if you make them earlier and avoid the circumstance altogether, you’re much better off.
Greg Ellifritz:
Yep. Yeah. John Hearne mentions one of the prime components of training is removing novelty for the student, clarifying situations, making that experience something that they had not yet experienced. And by removing that novelty, “Oh, I’ve seen this before, I know how this movie ends,” and it makes everything just move a little bit smoother.
Shawn Vincent:
Well, a great way to wrap up and bring it full circle. One way that our listeners can remove some of that novelty is to look at the articles that you aggregate on your website. Do you want to let folks know one more time, if they want to be involved in any of your training or get to see the work that you do, how to find you?
Greg Ellifritz:
Yeah. My website’s activeresponsetraining.net. I do usually two or three articles a week, and I’ve been writing on there since 2012, so it’s been a while. I’ve got over 2,000 articles written there, and that’s also where my training schedule is. So I’m picking up the out-of-state training starting this coming weekend. And I’ll be working hard for the next four or five months, traveling everywhere doing the teaching.
Shawn Vincent:
All right, everybody, that’s the podcast for today. I hope that one of the big takeaways is that you understand that brandishing is a serious crime. Defensive display can be the best way to resolve an armed encounter if everyone walks away unscathed and with very little jeopardy. We’ll see you soon. Until then, be smart, stay safe, take care.
Don West:
Can’t be too soon, it can’t be too late, it has to be just right. But I think just right means that you display it soon enough to give the guy a chance to change his mind.