Jerome Ersland thwarted an armed robbery at his Oklahoma City pharmacy by shooting one of the two assailants, a non-lethal headshot that incapacitated him. Then the defender followed the other robber into the street, firing at him as he ran. When Ersland reentered his pharmacy, he stepped over the robber who lay bleeding on the floor and fired several fatal shots into the incapacitated criminal’s body. Why did Ersland do it? The imminent danger had passed. Ersland almost certainly fired those final shots out of anger. He allowed himself to become emotionally hijacked.
Firearms instructor Steve Moses says that, when someone becomes emotionally hijacked, it means “Something has occurred that has caused them to disengage their rational brain and turn the controls over to the emotional brain.” One of Steve’s mentors, firearms instructor and Army veteran Claude Werner, says that “When the emotions get ahold of us and cloud our thinking … that’s when it becomes much easier for reasonable fear to become unreasonable fear.”
Not all cases are as extreme as Ersland’s. Michael Drejka shot Markis McGlockton after being shoved violently to the ground in a convenience store parking lot. Drejka drew his gun and pointed it at McGlockton’s chest. A jury convicted Drejka of manslaughter, in large part, because McGlockton had begun retreating before Drejka pulled the trigger. We explored Drejka’s case in Lesson 7, and we shared a statement made by one of the jurors: “He had time to think, ‘Do I really have to kill this man?’ And no, he didn’t, but he chose to.” Why did Drejka make that choice? Criminal defense attorney and National Trial Counsel for CCW Safe Don West suggests that “Drejka had a lot of feelings override his rational mind, and perhaps he felt like this guy had it coming, and he pulled the trigger when he knew the moment had passed.”
Like Ersland, Drejka allowed himself to become emotionally hijacked. Ersland’s actions proved more unreasonable than Drejka’s, which is why Ersland is serving life in prison while Drejka received a 20-year sentence. The contrast helps demonstrate that reasonable fear and irrational anger exist together on a dynamic spectrum. In his book The Finishing Machine, criminal defense attorney Mike Arnold wrote, “Anger and fear aren’t binary or mutually exclusive and many anthropologists, psychologists, and evolutionary biologists will tell you that both emotions probably evolved from the same kinds of stimuli.”
Anger isn’t the only emotion that can cloud an armed defender’s thinking. Pride often factors into self-defense cases. Don West describes pride as an “ego trap.” He says, “We’re talking about the guy who just won’t back down, or the guy who thinks he has to teach the other guy a lesson—I believe it’s ego-driven, and he forgets his training and what the purpose of self-defense is to begin with.” You’ll recall from Lesson 1 that we believe the goal of self-defense is to break contact, and the ego trap can short-circuit a defender’s thinking and break that self-defense mindset.
Steve Moses says, “The same people who will engage in altercations with other people because they’ve been enraged—if they were confronted with an angry pit bull or a grizzly bear—they wouldn’t stick around to fight if they had any other choice.” If Jerome Ersland’s pharmacy had been invaded by a couple of pit bulls, he probably wouldn’t have chased one down the street or fired multiple shots into the one he had already incapacitated. If Michael Drejka has successfully broken contact with a bear in a parking lot, he might have had the compunction to let the animal flee.
Steve’s point is that people don’t get hung up on pride or get caught in the ego trap when they face a non-human threat; they simply look for the quickest, safest way out of the situation. However, when individuals are insulted or offended by the actions of other people, they can become emotionally hijacked and make irrational decisions they’d never consider if their ego wasn’t on the line.
For Lesson 8, we’ll explore three cases where defenders became emotionally hijacked and made unreasonable use-of-force decisions. We’ll start in the suburbs of New Orleans, where Ronald Gasser shot Joe McKnight at the end of a road-rage incident that stretched on for more than five miles. Then we’ll travel to Lapeer, Michigan, where Jeffrey Smith shot Arthur Kohn during a melee that erupted over a minor traffic infringement. We’ll end at a ranch on Arizona’s Mexican border, where George Alan Kelly, frustrated with the repeated illegal incursions on his land, fired warning shots at a group of trespassers and later found one of them on his property—dead from a bullet to the back.
***
While navigating traffic in his Audi SUV on December 1, 2016, local New Orleans football hero and former New York Jets running back Joe McKnight cut in front of 56-year-old Ronald Gasser’s blue Infinity sedan. Gasser took offence and retaliated, resulting in what authorities called a “tit-for-tat” road-rage incident. For five miles, the two drivers weaved through traffic, shouting obscenities, and trading gestures through open windows. At some point, Gasser retrieved his .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol from his gun bag and set it within easy reach. When the vehicles stopped at a red light, McKnight exited his Audi, approached Gasser’s open passenger-side window, and leaned his arms on the doorframe. McKnight was unarmed.
Gasser, seatbelted behind the wheel, felt trapped and threatened. He reached for his Smith & Wesson and fired three times, striking McKnight in his shoulder, hands, and chest. Bystanders tried in vain to render aid to the fatally wounded McKnight as Gasser exited his vehicle and stood by, clutching his pistol. Gasser never called 9-1-1 to report the shooting, but he stayed on scene, cooperated with authorities, and submitted to an eight-hour interview—without the advice of a lawyer. At first, Sheriff Newell Normand declined to charge Gasser, relying on his self-defense claim. But four days later, after witness testimony and forensic analysis undermined elements of Gasser’s account, the defender was arrested and then indicted on a second-degree murder charge.
At trial, defense attorneys claimed that McKnight had been “basically trying to kill him and run him off the road,” and that Gasser fired only when McKnight lunged through his window. Prosecutors countered with a forensic expert who suggested McKnight’s hand was only “dangling” on the door, and they cited a lack of stippling on McKnight’s body as evidence that he was more than two and a half feet away from the muzzle when Gasser fired the fatal shot, allowing the prosecution to argue that McKnight was stepping away, not lunging forward.
Moreover, while the defense tried to show McKnight as the aggressor, the prosecutors presented testimony from a witness, Veronica Hoye, who said she heard McKnight shout, “No, YOU get out of the car.” It suggested that Gasser goaded McKnight out of the car with the intent of luring him into a confrontation, and when McKnight took the bait, prosecutors suggested, “the trap was sprung.” Jurors also learned that, ten years earlier, Ronald Gasser had gotten into a fist fight with another motorist over a road rage incident—at the very same intersection where he shot and killed Joe McKnight.
A jury convicted Gasser of the lesser charge of manslaughter, but Judge Ellen Kovach, who had broad discretion in sentencing, chose 30 years. “Let this be a cautionary tale,” she said, “to all drivers who rage behind the wheel of their car at other drivers.” As a criminal defense lawyer, Don West says, “Road rage is the bane of my existence when it comes to dealing with individuals who are good, upstanding people who get involved in incidents where they are both aggressors, both of them think they are right, and both of them are offended by the actions of the other, and it all results in tragedy.”
Gasser served just 8 years of his prison sentence. In 2016, Louisiana was one of only two states that allowed non-unanimous jury verdicts, requiring just ten of 12 jurors to convict—the exact split in Gasser’s case. The US Supreme Court later ruled non-unanimous verdicts in criminal cases to be unconstitutional, invalidating Gasser’s conviction. Gasser remained behind bars while prosecutors prepared for a new trial, but an appellate court later ruled that a second trial on the murder charge would constitute double jeopardy, violating Gasser’s civil rights. In the end, Gasser pled guilty to manslaughter, received a ten-year sentence, and was released months later with credit for good behavior and time served.
“This shooting was preventable if someone just used common sense,” Don West says. “You see a guy who is clearly emotionally hijacked if he’s the one following someone so he can give him a piece of his mind, putting himself at risk to prove his point or win the day.” Even though the judge’s sentence didn’t stand, Gasser’s ordeal remains a cautionary tale for armed defenders.
***
34-year-old Jeffrey Smith made a fateful decision on the morning of December 30, 2019, when he pulled off the road to contemplate a frustrating encounter he had with another motorist moments before. Just after 7 AM, Smith stopped for gas and coffee at the Clark gas station on M-24 in Lapeer, Michigan. When Smith exited the gas station, he inadvertently blocked the entrance as 33-year-old Arthur Kohn tried to turn in. The two men exchanged words through open windows, and Smith drove off, leaving Kohn to bump his truck over the curb to enter the gas station parking lot.
As he sat alone in his car, just down the street from the Clark station, Smith decided he hadn’t had the last word in the matter, so he turned around and went back to confront Kohn. When Kohn saw Smith return, he pulled his truck alongside Smith’s 2001 Buick Regal. They exchanged words. Surveillance video showed Smith raise his arm. Kohn responded by exiting his truck, wielding a crowbar. When Kohn tried to open Smith’s passenger door, Smith shot twice, striking Kohn once in the left forearm and once in the chest. While bleeding to death, Kohn staggered around Smith’s Buick, striking it with the crowbar until he fell to the ground and died. Police arrested Smith, and he faced a charge of open murder and several other related felonies.
As in the Gasser case, Smith’s prior actions worked against him at trial. Months before the shooting, Smith engaged in a Facebook Messenger exchange about a Smith & Wesson pistol. He wrote: “Nice pocket gun for gas stations and that thinking about buying myself one.” When he did buy a similar gun, which he used in a gas station confrontation, it made the shooting appear premeditated rather than an act of self-defense. Smith imagined a situation where he might need his revolver, and when he saw a potential conflict brewing, he leaned into it. Don West says these facts “suggest that Smith may have voluntarily chosen to enter this confrontation.”
At trial, prosecutors suggested that when Smith raised his arm during the second confrontation, he actually pointed the Smith & Wesson at Kohn. Smith couldn’t have known that Kohn was drunk, twice the legal limit to drive, or that he had cocaine in his system. It’s no wonder Kohn behaved erratically and unpredictably when provoked. And for Smith, his real legal jeopardy manifested when a jury considered whether Smith was the first aggressor, which would invalidate his self-defense claim. It took the jury only 90 minutes to convict Smith of first-degree premeditated murder, a crime that carried a mandatory life sentence.
In most circumstances, a person being attacked by a crowbar-wielding assailant would have reason to believe they faced the threat of great bodily harm or death. It required a lot of bad choices for Smith to get such a quick conviction. Steve Moses says, “There were definitely two opportunities for him to break contact. One was at the very beginning when he left. Then, when the guy was trying to get out of his car, he should have backed out right then. He had multiple opportunities.”
Don West notes, “There are several facts that suggest Smith may have voluntarily chosen to enter this confrontation, including the fact that he left the scene and chose to return.” Why did he do it? To recall Steve Moses’s comment about angry pit bulls and grizzly bears, if Smith had successfully navigated away from a wild animal in the gas station parking lot, it’s unlikely he would have returned for a second confrontation. Smith went back to give Kohn a piece of his mind. He allowed himself to become emotionally hijacked. It cost Kohn his life, and it cost Smith his freedom. Don says, “If your emotions take over, that’s when your claim can be defeated, and the prosecutor might prove you were acting out of anger.”
***
Road rage might be the most common cause for armed defenders to become emotionally hijacked, but it is not the only way. Arizona rancher George Alan Kelly became emotionally hijacked while trying to enjoy lunch with his wife on the front porch of his home on January 30, 2023. Kelly claims he heard a gunshot and saw a group of men, about 100 yards from his house, traversing a portion of his 170-acre ranch on Arizona’s Mexican border. The men wore camouflage, Kelly claimed, and they carried large backpacks and wielded AK-47 rifles. He told authorities that the leader of the group pointed a rifle in his direction.
Kelly ushered his wife inside to safety. There, he retrieved his own AK-47 and went back outside, where he fired a series of warning shots, which he claimed he fired well over the trespassers’ heads in an effort to drive them off his property. It worked. The men dispersed, and Kelly believed the episode was over. Throughout the afternoon, Kelly made multiple calls to authorities, although he never gave a completely candid account of his encounter with the men. Law enforcement became suspicious as Kelly’s account of the episode shifted with each telling. Later, just before sunset, Kelly’s dog found something about 100 yards from the house: a corpse lying face down in the dirt with a bullet hole in the back.
Kelly called it in. Before long, he was arrested and ultimately charged with second-degree murder.
At the time of the shooting, Kelly and his wife had lived on the ranch for about 20 years. Recently, Kelly had been frustrated with illegal migrants trespassing on his property—presumably trafficking drugs. Rightfully concerned, Kelly repeatedly contacted authorities, including multiple calls to Border Patrol, but the problem continued to escalate.
Three weeks before the shooting, Kelly vented to his son Matt, texting: “OVERRUN WITH DRUG CARTEL. AK GTN A LOT OF WORK.” On another day, Kelly texted, “33 DRUG RUNNERS THIS WK…AK 47 HOT. WANNA B BACK UP?” Matt replied, “Nope, Be careful.” Kelly responded, “CAREFUL IS NOT AN OPTION. IT IS EITHER FIGHT OR RUN AND IM TO OLD TO RUN. MOM IS L NL [locked and loaded] ALSO.” Like Jeffrey Smith, Kelly projected his intentions weeks before the shooting unfolded, but evidence surfaced that showed Smith had been contemplating an encounter for much longer than that.
Kelly had self-published a digital novella on Amazon, a fictional story about an Arizona rancher named George who had become frustrated with illegal migrant trespassers crossing the border on his property. In one passage, Kelly writes: “The riders were less than 100 yards north of the border and riding full out. He emptied a clip as close to the horses as he could without hitting them, the horses that is.” In another passage, Kelly continues: “The sheriff asked if George thought he had hit either of the riders. George told him that if he had hit one, he hadn’t hit him hard enough.”
Fifteen months after the shooting, George Alan Kelly stood trial before a jury of eight of his peers. The press covered the shooting and the subsequent legal drama heavily, and citizens in the Nogales, Arizona area near Kelly’s ranch no doubt knew about the escalating problems with illegal border crossings. Seven of the eight jurors refused to convict, but a single holdout refused to vote for acquittal. On April 22, 2024, Judge Thomas Fink of the Santa Cruz County Superior Court declared a mistrial. In June of 2024, prosecutors moved to dismiss the case without prejudice, which would have allowed them to regroup and potentially try Kelly again. In an interview with Fox News, Kelly addressed the spectre of facing a second trial: “That cloud’s still over my head. It’s a long road,” he said, “and we’re not out of danger yet, but we’re not giving up. I’m not going to let them beat me down.” In January of 2026, nearly three years after the shooting, the appellate court lifted the cloud, ruling that Kelly, then 75 years old, with a failing memory, could not be tried again.
Just because Kelly escaped conviction does not mean he acted properly in self-defense. While he had reason to fear a group of men trespassing on his property, it’s difficult to believe that Kelly, who had time to go inside his home and reemerge with a rifle, felt a valid, imminent fear of great bodily harm or death. It’s more likely that Kelly acted out of anger and frustration. Don West suggests that Kelly “got emotionally involved, and it clouded his judgment of how he should react to this particular threat.” Kelly is lucky he got a sympathetic jury. Gambling on jury sympathy is not a great legal strategy.
***
Ronald Gasser, Jeffrey Smith, and George Alan Kelly each had hot buttons. As evidenced by his previous road rage fist fight, Gasser had an impulse to overreact to dangerous, aggressive drivers. Smith had telegraphed anxiety about encounters at gas stations and imagined he might need a gun for such an occasion. Kelly documented his impulse to fire at trespassers in texts to his son and in a self-published novella.
Steve Moses suggests that it’s only human to have hot-button impulses that can prompt an emotional response. “There is at least a reasonable possibility that the impulse will be to deal with this person right now—you’re angry at the person for doing what they’ve done, doing it repeatedly, or you’re just tired of putting up with it.” While it’s perfectly natural to feel that way, armed defenders and concealed carriers have a responsibility to recognize their hot buttons, and as Steve says, “Make a decision in advance that if the impulse takes place, you will not act upon it. You’ve just got to choke that down.”
Rather than fantasizing about firing his AK-47 at drug traffickers, George Alan Kelly might have instead devised a plan for providing for his wife’s safety, documenting the incursion on video, designating a strategic defensive position behind cover or concealment, and calling authorities. When Jeffrey Smith pulled over after his initial encounter with Kohn, if he recognized his impulse to use his gun to resolve a gas station dispute, he might have thought better about re-engaging Kohn. Ronald Gasser knew from personal experience that his road rage could lead to physical violence, and with more foresight, he might have let McKnight drive off without making a fuss.
Don West says that self-awareness is the best way to avoid becoming emotionally hijacked. Once, during jury selection in a self-defense trial, Don polled the potential jurors about their feelings on guns and self-defense. One juror revealed his support for the Second Amendment. Don asked him if he kept a gun in his car. “No,” the man said. “I’d never have a gun in my car because I don’t want one so close to me when I’m driving.” Don says, “He knew himself well enough that he knew he would be emotionally hijacked in the wrong circumstances, and he took precautions not to allow a momentary emotional flash to turn into a tragedy.”
The lesson isn’t that armed defenders shouldn’t have firearms in their cars—that is just one man’s solution to an emotional impulse he recognized in himself. The lesson is that armed defenders should be self-aware regarding the unique types of events that spark an emotional response in themselves. If you are aware of your hot buttons, you can learn to issue a personal warning when you notice a difficult situation arising, giving yourself time to make rational decisions to avoid acting impulsively. In such a circumstance, Steve says, “You’re fighting with two people—not only the other guy, but yourself, your emotional brain versus your rational brain. You have to have a plan in place to recognize your impulse, and de-escalate while you have the chance.” As Claude Werner says, “Good decisions are almost always made in advance.”
