Transcript of Podcast
Shawn Vincent:
Thanks for joining the podcast today. I’m Shawn Vincent. We’ve made it now to Lesson 7 of the 36 Lessons for Armed Defenders. This is part two of our little mini-subsection that involves “the window of justification.” Last time we talked about Don’t Shoot Before the Threat is Imminent. Today, we’re going to talk about Don’t Shoot After the Threat is Over. It’s not as easy as you think. We’ll be joined as always by our friend, firearms instructor Steve Moses, and of course, National Trial Council for CCW Safe and criminal defense attorney Don West. I’m glad you’re here. We’ll get right to it.
Shawn Vincent:
Well, what we talked about last time … we talked about some armed defenders who objectively fired too soon when they were facing a clearly aggressive person who may or may not have had the intent to do them harm, but hadn’t presented a firearm yet, where maybe there was a barrier separating them. Whatever it was, one of those elements wasn’t clear, whether it was ability, opportunity, intent, yet—and they fired too soon. It’s something we call the armed defender’s dilemma: when you’re missing one of those elements.
But what’s almost more tricky for armed defenders is this idea that the window could open where there was a moment where they were absolutely legally justified to use deadly force, but then something changed. The aggressor retreated or was incapacitated due to something … or put their arms up and said, “Hey, hey,” they saw the gun and like, “hey, hey, I’m good.” And then the defender fires anyway, and they fired after the window of justification had closed, and they just fired too late. And these are heartbreaking to me in a lot of ways because I find that there are probably people who are otherwise law-abiding citizens and good natured who were put, by an aggressor, into an extraordinary situation where they’re justifiably terrified and perhaps at one point actually legitimately in fear for their lives and then perhaps because of a lack of imagination or incredulity—that a dynamic violent circumstance could change so fast— they find themselves on the tail end of something, maybe following through a second or two later on a decision they made just a moment before, fire that weapon and then, to the video camera or to the bystander or to the whatever forensic analysis that’s done post-shooting, find that they shot after they were justified in doing so.
Steve Moses:
Yeah, which is very easy to do. And what we don’t take into consideration when we’re training is: it’s more than whether or not the person said, “Okay, I’m no longer in the fight or whatever.” In many instances, even if the fight continues to go on, the person is no longer in the same place they were when you fired that last shot. So you need to be able to assess and address that. Okay, do I need to continue shooting him? And do I need to move my gun? Do I need to shoot him in a different part of his body because of his angle? And so one of the things that we need to do is when we shoot, we put such a an empahsis on speed. You see a lot of these guys that they’re posting online, “Look at me, I can put five rounds on a seven-inch bull in one second.” Splits, 0.20 splits, time between shots. But if you shoot that fast in real life, not only are you liable to miss or shoot that person someplace where it has no impact, you’re just wasting time, but they can also surrender, they can drop their gun, they can do it, whatever. And so we’re going to-
Shawn Vincent:
They can twist around so that the last bullet goes into their back, which looks bad.
Steve Moses:
Absolutely. And you know what? And that could actually be a legit shoot.
But if they look at the video, and if that last bullet went into their round, say a half second from the first round was fired, or the last round was fired, they say, “Okay, well yeah, that’s faster than you can process it. ” But if they turn around and it’s obvious, it’s a second, it’s a second and a half, and you fire that round, and you were just, “Okay, I’m putting those rounds on that guy, and he turned around, and I didn’t catch it. ” It can create huge, huge problems. And a lot of police officers have been, for lack of a better term, investigated and prosecuted for shooting what they said was a fleeing felon. Then, when they got the video, well, what really happened was he shot him, just that guy turned immediately to run off, and he was in the act of shooting that guy and couldn’t halt his action.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the body cam footage. I worked on behalf of an officer who … his partner was being charged by a guy with a knife. He was feet away. The officer threw down his taser, pulled out his firearm, and by the time he squeezed off the first round, we can tell from the video, the guy changed 180 degrees, and he ended up shooting that guy in the back. Yes. And in the end, I think it was pretty clear that he just didn’t have the reaction time to even acknowledge that the guy had fled before he fired, and the charges were dropped. But in a civilian context, without a body cam, a bullet hole in the back is a bullet hole in the back, Don. It becomes really tough to explain to a jury if everything else didn’t go absolutely perfectly.
Don West:
A really good point because I’m a big fan of, in the courtroom, of having to explain away as little as possible. You can. There are lots of good explanations for things that, on their face, are different than what they appear. But I tell you, the less you have to do that, the better position you’re in. We’re talking about, I think, the gray areas now, where there may very well be a decent explanation from a forensic standpoint, or a psychological standpoint, or an operational standpoint. Let’s pull back a little bit, though, and talk about more of the stuff on the edge so we can give some clear lessons to our listeners about what’s obviously too late, as opposed to what looks like it might be too late, but otherwise explainable. Okay.
Shawn Vincent:
Do you have a case in mind?
Don West:
Well, I have a couple of scenarios in mind. Our colleague, Andrew Branka, once wrote in a book that I had read before I’d met him and before we were essentially colleagues, said that the window of justification is kind of like Goldilocks and the Three Bears in the house, tasting the porridge, there’s one that’s too cold, too hot, and just right. I think that’s the window of justification in some ways we’re talking about, too cold is too soon; too hot is too late; and just right is when it’s evident that you responded with the right amount of force facing an imminent threat at that point. So let’s move to the too hot, I guess, or the too late side of that.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah, we’re on the “too hot” podcast today. Yeah.
Don West:
What jumped into my mind when we were talking about this as a subject was a video I’d seen, and if you haven’t seen one, there are lots out there because this happens probably more than any of us would like to think. Convenience store robbery. Guy goes in, holds up the clerk, gets the money, goes out the door, and the clerk grabs a gun from behind the counter, chases him out the door, and shoots at him as he’s running away.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah.
Don West:
Okay. In my mind, that’s pretty clearly too late. He doesn’t have a legal right to shoot this guy as he’s fleeing because he is not an imminent threat to him. And I don’t think that’s a fair interpretation of using deadly force to prevent the commission of a forcible felony, even if that would be allowed in your state. I think the crime was over …
Shawn Vincent:
If you are spraying bullets down a street, the risk of you hurting somebody who’s innocent is huge.
Don West:
Yeah. And we’ve seen those in YouTube videos. We’ve seen cases. There was a case in Oklahoma where a pharmacist chased some would-be robbers out of the store and started shooting at them as they were going down the street. But more importantly, I think for the too late is that same case, the pharmacy case, Ersland is that…
Shawn Vincent:
Jerome Ersland. And so to give our listeners some perspective, he’s a pharmacist, and he’s in charge of this. It’s not like a CVS; it’s a private pharmacy. Two kids come in to hold up the place, teenagers. One of them has a firearm. It’s clear he’s holding up the place. Ersland has a Taurus Judge, which, Steve, is loaded with that buckshot kind of stuff.
So he fires it, and some of the shot goes into the kid, who is armed … in his head, and he drops him, and he starts bleeding from his head. So Ersland steps over this kid to chase the other guy out of the pharmacy, shoots at him as the guy leaves—doesn’t hit anything because he’s firing this buckshot at long range—comes back in, steps back over the incapacitated teenager he shot, goes to a drawer, pulls out another firearm, and then shoots him four or five times center mass while he’s lying there and incapacitated on the ground. So I think to your point, Don, “too late” on the kid on the ground, but the first shot was justified.
Don West:
Not only is it obviously too late from a sequence standpoint—not only is it obviously too late, because this kid could not have been a threat at that point—he was physically incapable. He did not have the ability at that point. No matter how bad he wanted to, or how close he was, he could not do it. So he was no longer a legal threat. But I think, if I’m not mistaken, the forensic stuff showed that it was the later shots that no doubt killed him. And without the later shots, he had a higher rate, maybe a high rate of survival from that first one.
Shawn Vincent:
I think that’s right.
Don West:
So you take all of that stuff and compound it, then that is the textbook definition of the coup de gras, isn’t it? The finishing shot, the final end of it shot, and it was obviously for anger, revenge. It could not have been because he genuinely feared a threat himself. So that’s out there on the fringes. That apparently wasn’t known early on. That was a fact that was learned later. And as the expression goes, every shot comes with a lawyer because you have to defend every shot.
Now, as Steve alluded to early on, we’ve also seen lots of cases from our own work with CCW Safe and from the work we do that there are lots of good, reasonable explanations for why you fire five, six, eight, 10 shots in a given scenario. That’s not necessarily easy for a jury to grasp. It’s probably easier for a police officer or an expert, maybe the judge to understand. So, probably, the jury needs some education. How and why would that happen? And why would it be reasonable that you could essentially empty your magazine in a couple of seconds and still be justified? So that’s the gray area, that’s the nitty-gritty stuff of the courtroom, that’s needed to help explain why a justifiable shooting is indeed justifiable, notwithstanding the fact that there may be one or more shots in the back, or there may have been more shots than someone sitting in an armchair watching this unfold would have thought he or she might fire. But the bottom line is the rules don’t change. It still has to be this imminent threat of great bodily harm or death.
The window of justification has to still be open, and any deviation from what seems to be evident has to be explained. And as I started this segment, I don’t like to explain stuff. I wish I didn’t have to, but you do. You absolutely have to be able to explain it. And often there are clear, scientifically sound explanations, but when you’ve got the video of the guy coming back 10 seconds later or the guy halfway down the block being shot in the back, you have a lot harder time explaining how that’s part of the juxtaposition. Part of the imminent fear, the imminent belief of injury or death.
Shawn Vincent:
You talk about the sequence of shots in our “don’t shoot too early” podcast. We talked about the Michael Dunn case, the Loud Music Trial, where he shot Jordan Davis through the car door after an altercation over his playing loud music. And you remember Bendy? Bendy was actually in the Zimmerman case, the Jacksonville prosecutor’s forensic doll. You know what I’m talking about?
Don West:
I did not know that the doll had a name.
Shawn Vincent:
Bendy. It’s Bendy because you can bend this human figure in any different position that you like.
Don West:
That totally flew over my head when that was happening.
Shawn Vincent:
Bendy made an appearance in the Michael Dunn case, and there’s a lot of … Well, here’s the deal: they weren’t completely sure what order of bullets struck Jordan Davis. All they have are bullet holes in the door of the car, and then they have entrance wounds on some of the shots and an exit wound on at least one of them. And so you can shoot somebody five times, but it’s not clear which shot caused which injuries, or even if you can match up entry and exit wounds, or how the body moves throughout a dynamic encounter like that. A body can flip around 360 degrees inside, Steve, like you were talking about, the second and a half, two seconds could take you to clear a magazine. And to your point, Don, each one of those bullets requires an explanation, even though the explanation is a use-of-force expert talking about how quickly you can fire before you even get any feedback from whether you’ve hit somebody or stopped a threat or not. But it doesn’t happen that fast in the courtroom. I’ll tell you, you and I have been in cases where they spent an entire morning counting every shell casing and having the custodian of the evidence confirm that it was, in fact, a shell casing and the number on it and comparing it to the number on the total crime scene chart. It doesn’t go as fast in court, is all I’m trying to say.
Don West:
It just struck me, and we’re talking about the too soon, too late, how it can be too soon and then too late or too late and then too soon, and how in the courtroom it plays much differently than in real life when it’s all over in a couple of seconds. That reminded me of Michael Drejka, the handicapped parking spot shooting in Florida. Did Michael Drejka shoot too soon? Did he shoot too late or some combination of both of those? You know that case, Steve, right? Where there’s this video that was dissected frame by frame by frame to the jury, probably watched 50 times to see if Drejka’s reaction and the way he displayed and then ultimately fired the gun was consistent with whether he believed there was a imminent threat or whether the threat had occurred but was over or whether the shooting victim, McGlockton, I think, was getting ready to continue the attack that he had started by violently throwing Drejka to the ground.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. So people who are listeners of the podcast … they’ve heard this case before. This is probably one of the top three most important cases that we explore because it has so many lessons for armed defenders and concealed carriers. And it’s, I think, so accessible because it’s not one of these extreme cases where I think a lot of people will hear about Jerome Ersland and say, “I would never come back in from firing down the street and assassinate the incapacitated intruder on my floor with a different gun.” That seems so beyond the pale. I hope for most of our listeners that’s a complete hypothetical.
But in this case, Michael Drejka had been having an argument with Britany Jacobs for parking in a handicapped spot without a placard. It was a pet peeve of his, and Britany Jacobs’ boyfriend, Markeis McClockton, a big guy, comes out of the convenience store, sees this middle-aged guy arguing with his lady, and we have security camera footage of this.
He sort of marches up to this guy and shoves him without warning to the ground. Michael Draka falls on his butt, gains his senses, and Markeis McGlockton is clearly physically lording over him. He pulls up his pants; he has a big broad-chested posture. He takes a step towards Michael Drejka. Michael Drejka is a licensed concealed carrier. You see him, he pulls his pistol, he points at center mass at Markeis McGlockton, who, from our vantage point … and we talk about the objective and subjective view of an armed defender when we view it there. We’re a third-party observer because of where the security camera is positioned. And from where we’re positioned, we can clearly see that McGlockton’s body language changes. He takes a couple of steps backwards. He sort of turns the side so he’s not as aggressive. It looks like Drejka has made his point, and McGlockton doesn’t want to finish this fight, and there’s a pause, and then Drejka fires.
One shot. It pierces McGlockton’s heart. He has enough time to clutch his chest, run into the store, and collapse on the ground and die at the feet of his five-year-old son in front of the clerk in this convenience store. So you brought up the idea that he shot too soon, or did he shoot too late? I think this is the classic close call, shot a moment too late. We talked about this before. Eventually, his pulling the pistol ended up being a defensive display that ended the confrontation, and instead of stopping it there, he fired.
Steve Moses:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I could see McGlockton actually straighten up. He had that kind of, like you said, “lording over” posture and straightened up. And there was a definite pause before he fired that shot. And I mean, just as soon as I saw that, I mean, it’s just like, “Oh, that’s a bad shoot.” And I really kind of got the impression was … we’ve always talked about that, “Can You, May You, Must You?” It’s been attributed to several other people. And I actually think that Drejka thought, okay, this was a “may” circumstance, and this was his, you know what, for lack of a better term, his opportunity to shoot somebody, especially somebody that he obviously had a problem with his female.
Don West:
Attorney Steven Harris from Florida writes and has written extensively on the “may, can, must” aspect of this—the analysis along the way. If you find some of the stuff he’s written, I highly recommend it. It’s excellent. Pretty academic, but because of that, it’s so good and so clear. What I mean by academic, is it’s dense. I mean, there’s so much stuff in so few sentences that you really have to slow down and read it carefully and think about it. But by the time you get to the end of it, you’ll know a lot about that. I guess, is it called a trilogy, Steve? Is it called the May, Can, Must Trilogy or maybe there’s another name for it. I don’t know.
Steve Moses:
Well, I mean, I’ve heard this from different people. I first heard it from Lee Weems, who said he heard it from his English teacher when he’d ask her if he could go to the bathroom.
Shawn Vincent:
I heard it from REO Speedwagon, who heard it from a friend who heard it …
Don West:
Did you just say REO Speedwagon?
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah, I just made an REO Speedwagon reference.
Don West:
Let’s not let that go unnoticed.
Shawn Vincent:
Thanks, pal. Well, so it’s interesting because I think this happens, I think even from a good-natured perspective, you’re an armed defender, a concealed carrier. Drejka had some training at least, and you think about this, and I think he had a checklist, and he thought, “Oh, I’ve just been attacked. This is pretty brutal. I’m on the ground. This guy’s bigger than me. He’s above me. He’s got a technical advantage. If he wants to start kicking me, I might be done for. ” And he’s like, “Okay, this is on. I think I’m justified, and I don’t know if I have a choice.” And he goes. And then, before he actually pulls the trigger, he’s befuddled by the fact that the threat’s already over, but he’d already made the decision to shoot. I don’t think he could stop himself. He could have, obviously, but he was just on that momentum, and it happened. Maybe it was because at that point, there’s a little touch of “this guy deserves this. He’s got it coming. I want to win this fight.”
Don West:
Let’s tweak that just a little bit by imagining that McGlockton, as he takes that step toward Drejka after violently … I mean, this is a criminal act that McGlockton did by using a double-handed push into his chest and knocking him on his ass basically. So Drejka is on his tail in the parking lot, which is the position from which he draws his firearm, no doubt stunned. And as you said, McGlockton’s a big guy, he’s clearly fit. He’s a lot younger. Drake is late 50s or somewhere, and he’s not necessarily a guy that’s physically imposing. So if you just change it a little bit, and let’s say that McGlockton takes that next step, well, Drejka, I think, is reasonably apprehensive and may believe at that point that McGlockton has the tactical advantage. He has the physical advantage. And all he needs to do is kick him in the head or stomp on his chest, and he’s only a few feet away. And if he’s headed toward him, I think that’s reasonable fear of serious injury. Okay. So let’s say at that point, that’s when Drejka decides to pull the gun, and let’s say that McGlockton doesn’t see the gun for some reason. He’s looking somewhere else. He goes right past him, and he can …
Shawn Vincent:
Or doesn’t care.
Don West:
Or doesn’t care. We’ve had those two. That’s the “Hey, shoot me then kind of guy.” So as he continues toward Draka, having a clear physical advantage by way of positioning, Drejka is particularly vulnerable, being on the ground, Drejka is at risk of serious injury from virtually anything that McGlockton wants to do at that point, kicking him in the head, stomping him, et cetera. And let’s say McGlockton doesn’t see the gun, so he doesn’t react. He just continues to move toward him. Actual intent, unknown, reasonably inferred intent that this guy’s just about to put me down hard. So Draka shoots him. Now, you can still argue whether that’s a good shoot or not, and there’s a smaller area to argue about, but I think at that point in time, he has a much, much better case. And when the prosecutor has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Drejka didn’t reasonably believe he was at risk of serious harm or death, then he’s in a much better position than when it’s evident from our standpoint that McGlockton does see the gun, attempts to back up, does in fact back up a little bit, but Drejka continues with the deadly force.
Shawn Vincent:
To the point where one of the jurors, after the guilty manslaughter verdict, told reporters that Drejka had the opportunity not to shoot and didn’t take it. And that echoes something that you mentioned a little bit earlier, Steve, that pause, McGlockton backs up, there was an opportunity there to reassess since the situation had changed, and he was unable or unwilling to capitalize on that change of circumstance and fired anyway. And I think we have a “too late” conversation, that’s the thin slice right there. It’s about as close as it gets.
Steve Moses:
I think you need to be looking for reasons that “I need to shoot this person, and at the same time, you need to be looking for reasons that “I don’t need to shoot this person.” At the first opportunity that I see that I do not need to shoot this person, I need to stop. And if you don’t think about that in advance, then when you’re under stress, I think things like this happen. But one of the things that we need to do is we need to stay really dialed in as to what this other person is doing. I need to be looking for a response to my action. I need to be looking for his reaction to that so that I can key off that because I think it makes it really important as to what I do next.
Shawn Vincent:
Well, I like how you phrased that, Steve. As long as we’ve been doing this, which is—we’ve been writing about this for more than 10 years now—I haven’t thought about it in exactly that way. What you just said is if you’re always looking for the opportunity to not have to shoot, and then you run out of those opportunities, you can’t find one—I think you know you’re probably as close to justified as you’re ever going to get. But that mindset will keep you out of so much trouble. As opposed to, I think part of what did Drejka in is that he’d been picking fights at that parking lot for a while, and he had threatened to tell somebody’s boss, a sanitary truck worker, with a “How’s My Driving?” sticker … “Your driver’s lucky I didn’t and blow his head off. That’s how he’s driving is.” And it made it appear when we talk about, Don, the totality of the circumstances, that it started way before the shooting and extended way after that … he’s the kind of guy who’s looking to pick a fight in a parking lot. Maybe the prosecutors would argue that he was looking for a reason to shoot somebody, and finally somebody gave him one. That may or may not be true, but it’s a story you don’t want the prosecutors to be able to credibly tell the jury.
Don West:
And I think that may be underscored by the fact that he wasn’t immediately arrested by the sheriff, who had some real concerns about whether it was a clear crime. And the more they learned about Michael Drejka’s past and the way he’d been reckless and disrespectful and had those other run-ins in the past, I think that may very well have tipped the balance, if not for the sheriff, maybe for the prosecutor. Because, as you’re in Florida, which was the birthing place of stand-your-ground, and I then gave the sheriff some trouble, knowing that under the law, the sheriff’s supposed to investigate the whole case, including claims of self-defense. What’d the sheriff say about the pause?
Shawn Vincent:
“That pause gave me pause.” Yeah. Yeah, it’s a good line. And it gave the jury pause, more importantly, and that’s what did him in. Yeah, I kind of want to split the difference on this. There’s a case, this is a guy named Dean Keller, a firefighter in Indiana, who had an ongoing feud with Jeffrey Weigel, a neighbor, a guy who boarded with this woman. They had a property line in common. And we find out that they had had a couple Peckinpah fist fights in the past, and they were always at each other. Now Dean …
Don West:
Are you talking about Sam Peckinpah now?
Shawn Vincent:
I think so, yeah.
Don West:
You think so? Okay.
Shawn Vincent:
It’s a reference I picked up from Alec Baldwin, who’s a fan of classic films. All right. He was talking about … Anyways, but yes. Yeah. Thanks for getting that. Anyways, they were at each other’s throats. They’re both kind of jerks to each other, but they’re out in the … He’s doing some yard work, and Dean Keller had his pistol with him while he was doing the yard work. And inexplicably, a security camera aimed at the fence with full color and the sound on, but we won’t criticize him for that. This is good security. But he’d had altercations with this guy at the gate on the fence before. So he’s out there and just for … I want people to picture … I’m trying to think of this actor. He’s a crazy guy whose daughter was in Jurassic Park. Who am I thinking of, Don?
Help me out. I’m old man now.
Don West:
Bruce Dern.
Shawn Vincent:
Bruce Dern. This guy looks like Bruce Dern on a bad day. Her hair’s all crazy, all wiry and angry. So this Bruce Dern-looking guy starts insulting Dean Keller, starts saying nasty things about his wife. Dean Keller says some nasty things back. Weigel, the Bruce Dern-looking fella, he’s on this riding lawn mower tractor. So you can see in this video, people can look it up. Just look up Dean Keller, Jeffrey Weigel. You’ll see this video. It’s all over the internet. So he backs up, says some words, and then he comes back into frame moving forward. And for just a glimpse, you can see him. He’s got this revolver that he picks up, and he kind of shakes like this. And then Dean Keller pulls out his pistol, which is … By my count, I’m guessing it was a 16-round magazine and one in the chamber, unloads the whole thing at him, strikes Weigel a couple of times he hits him in the chest.
Weigel falls off the lawnmower, and Keller just unloads the rest of it. I believe pretty much all those shots went into the lawnmower. Weigel gets up, flicks off Dean Keller, tells him to go “F” himself, and walks back into the house and calls for medical treatment. There were no charges filed. The video showed that Weigel displayed the gun. They knew that he had an antagonistic relationship, and they just decided not to charge Dean Keller. But if we’re in the conversation that we’re having about “shoots too late,” we have a situation here where maybe the first three or four shots that Keller fired would’ve been justified because, arguably, Weigel at that point had the ability, the opportunity, and maybe the intent to shoot him. But then at the point that he falls off the lawnmower, I think there’s a justification for a … I see you shaking your head, Steve, a moment of reflection to see, did I stop this?
But Keller, I think … And we’ve shown this video to folks, Don at shooting ranges when we’re doing conferences, their little moment where they can get off the range and sit in the air conditioning and listen to us talk about self-defense law, right? So people have been out and shooting all day look at this, and they’re like, “I kind of think he wanted to shoot that guy.” It’s that the window opened where he said, “Aha, I’m justified. I’m going to unload this entire magazine on this guy.” And I say that if instead of surviving and walking away and going through weeks of hospitalization because of his injuries, if Weigel had died, and especially if it could have been shown that it was one of the follow-up shots that killed him and not one of the first shots that incapacitated him, what didn’t get charged could have been a murder conviction.
Don West:
So I guess Weigel could have fallen on the other side of the John Deere garden tractor and been much more vulnerable, and likely those other shots would have hit him, and more likely …
Shawn Vincent:
The tractor could have kept going or something, right? Yeah.
Don West:
So was Keller charged with hunting John Deere without a license or out of season?
Shawn Vincent:
No, in fact, they charged Weigel for the brandishing or some sort of assault charge once he recovered. He actually got charged in that and pled out, I think. But all that’s to say is in one sort of continuum, and I think Steve, you have encountered this or knono experts who talk about this, that you started, if not this podcast, the last podcast talking about … And maybe it’s a good time to reiterate it, that you can, in fact, empty a magazine very quickly, but it’s important to know where your bullets are hitting and if they’re having the desired effect, there is an opportunity, especially if you train for it, to assess what’s going on and to treat at least every third bullet.
Steve Moses:
Well, assess every shot. Assess every shot. We teach our students not to shoot faster than one-half to one second between rounds. Every time you fire around, assess it. Fire around, assess it. Okay, I don’t need to do it anymore, or I need to aim someplace else. And I know it sounds like, wow, that’s really fast. It’s not … You can be teaching someone that’s, say, maybe an intermediate student, and you can have them reading those splits and reacting to those splits just like that. We actually do a drill in one of our tests that we have this little humanoid target and everything. It’s about five yards, and we have a person with a laser, and they take that laser, and they hold it off the target, and then when they splash that target with the laser, that is your go signal, and you shoot as long as that laser’s going off.
And if the laser goes off and you continue to shoot, we go, “Okay, that was past a half a second. That was probably a bad shoot.” As a matter of fact, one of the things we’ll do is I’ll say, “Actually, all right, you have one second from the time that laser is on to make that shot, but this guy doesn’t know it, and we’ll have that guy shine that laser, put it on there for one second and then pull it off.” Well, ideally what the students should have done is start to draw and shoot, didn’t need to shoot, and pulls the gun down—but you’ll always have one or two students that just have to take that shot. And so when you run that, run them through that drill multiple times after a while they start saying, “Okay, I’ve got to pay attention to what I’m doing, and I need to not shoot this person any more than I’m required to.” In real life, it’s because that person moved, they quit, they stopped, they turned around, and it’s really a good way of getting people to kind of track in on that.
And something else I was going to mention in reference to these people that shoot 16, 17 rounds of ammunition, you can actually shoot somebody 16 or 17 times and hit them every time and not stop them. They may not even die. Most people, when they’re shot or even shot at, they quit for psychological reasons. “I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to fight anymore. I’m done with this. “You’ve got a small percentage of people that the only way you can stop them is physiological stops. And in order to obtain a physiological stop, you need to cause either a direct hit to the upper spine or the brainstem, or damage the aorta or even a large vessel, like the vena cava, so that their blood pressure drops exsanguination- So fast.
Shawn Vincent:
That’s
Steve Moses:
Right.
Shawn Vincent:
And
Steve Moses:
So that’s why sometimes you’ll see these guys that are just shooting each other and all of a sudden one guy just drops. Their blood pressure just dropped. And then of course, then when they fell, of course they bled out. And so that’s why it’s important to be able to shoot to a reasonable degree of accuracy, and it’s also important to know where those key anatomical parts are. Now, one of the things that I think is so important about that knowledge and that skill is that you know then that I know what I need to do to stop this if it starts so I don’t need to prematurely get my gun into play or start shooting this person. And so when you have these skills, you understand how that works and everything, I think your chances of going through your entire lifetime as a concealed carrier or armed offender without being involved in a gunfight, or if you are surviving and surviving the trial, I think they’d go up a great deal.
Shawn Vincent:
I know neither of you is a big golfer, right?
Don West:
On purpose.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah, on purpose. But do you have any friends who are golfers who can, from memory, recall every shot they made in a round of 18 where the ball landed and … I know some of these guys and it made me think, well, there’s a book out there about golf called Every Shot Counts, and I’ve stolen that title for our work because in our work, when it comes to every shot counts—and what you just described to me, Steve, makes me think of, Don, what you were describing about how you need to be able to articulate all the self-defense decisions that you made.
And you said early on that the last thing you want to have to do is explain a bunch of stuff away at trial, but if your client comes to you and can explain to you articulably the reason for every round that they fired: “he was coming at me in this way, I fired, he didn’t stop, I yelled at him, and then I fired again, and then I had to fire a third time because he was getting close and I knew I needed to stop him.” That’s a much better bit of testimony than “I can’t remember how many times I fired, and I don’t know why I shot them on the ground.” It’s being able to articulate. And so Steve, what you said is if you have that mindset already that you’ve been trained to see where the bullet impacted, assess and adjust if necessary, then they’re going to have that memory to be able to explain their actions. And it allows you to make a decision every step along the way.
Steve Moses:
Yeah. And to be clear, it’s not so much that I can see where that bullet impacted. It is, I can see where my front sight or my red dot was when the shot was fired, and I can go, “I know where I was aiming at that particular time.”
Shawn Vincent:
And you know what those circumstances are now.
Steve Moses:
And okay, and do I need to do it again? Yes. Do I need to do it again? Yes. Do I need to do it again? No. And then get that gun off target so I can see everything and be ready to go again. And if I can break contact at that point, if I can leave, then that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to call 9-1-1 as soon as possible, followed up by a call to CCW Safe. But again, I just need to have a plan. And I understand, as Claude Warner said, most plans probably fail, but if you have a plan in place, it’s much easier to revise it as things go than come up with a plan right on the spot.
Don West:
I thought that was a brilliant point that he made. Brilliant point about having a plan, even if you need to tweak it or come up with plan B, at least you’ve got a working plan to start with.
Shawn Vincent:
Well, trials like that, Don, you have a whole … Every direct examination or cross-examination, you kind of have a script on how you hope it will go, but often it’s blown with the first answer that you get and you have to adapt, but you have to know what your goals are, what your objectives are and what you’re working with and adapt as you to go.
Don West:
The trial analogy is that you have to be sufficiently prepared to be able to draw on that informational bank to know how to readjust to the moment. As Steve is saying, if you got the basic solid training and you work through it in your mind, if you’ve got the right mindset, if that stuff has been something that’s been on your mind as an important part of readiness as a responsible, concealed carrier, then it’s a shorter trip to find it and to employ it. Just like if I’m trying a case and I’ve got a witness that’s going sideways because they’re answering differently than what I’m expecting them to answer, then I know where I can go because I know what the file is. I know every statement they’ve made before, I know how to find it, and I know how to confront them with an inconsistent statement to show everybody else that they’ve just misrepresented something or testified inconsistently.
Shawn Vincent:
And Steve, something you said earlier that really struck with me is that if you’ve thought about this stuff enough, you’re actually very likely to go your entire life without having to fire that weapon in a self-defense scenario. And it ends up being as simple as pulling up to a gas station and being like, “Nope, not this one. I can go another five miles and fill up someplace where there’s not some guy with a knife hanging off his backpack, yelling at people. “
Steve Moses:
Where am I going to position myself when I’m in that gas station? Am I going to stand there between my back to the pump, facing my car door on my cell phone, or am I going to maybe go to the front or the back wherever it’s closest to the window and the convenience store and stand there and …
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah, it’s parking in a parking lot when you know it’s going to be dark when you come out and make an assessment of, “Am I by lights? How’s my egress? Where’s my problems here?” You start thinking about not being in a gunfight and you start seeing how to avoid it everywhere you go. And guess what? That might keep you from being in a gunfight.
Don West:
Well, we’re all so lucky and fortunate in our lives to be able to live in places where we don’t have to consciously face threats or potential threats just by going outside and walking down the street. Not everyone is so fortunate. And sometimes every day is a fight, a mental fight, maybe a physical fight just to get to school or to get to work.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. And we find that some people have friends or family members who are unstable, who bring chaos, or bring other people around who they’d prefer to avoid. And so that, you’re right, that requires an extra level of vigilance. That’s it. So I guess there’s a little bit of knowing the likelihood at any particular time or place that you go, that you might face an encounter. And that goes to what we’ll be talking about next, which is situational awareness. Well, any final thoughts for the good of the order on shooting too late?
Steve Moses:
The only thing I might come around to is that when we were talking about police officers who had shot people in the back, who turned around very quickly, I think the important thing there is to realize that can happen to you, too. And so again, that just kind of comes back to around us. Always be looking for a reason to quit shooting, but be prepared for the fight to resume.
Shawn Vincent:
All right, everybody. That’s the podcast for today. I appreciate you listening through to the end. Next time, we’re going to get to one of my favorite topics, Don’t get emotionally hijacked. Until then, be smart, stay safe, and take care.
