Armed Citizens and the Law

Over the past few decades, constitutional rights have eroded in the United States due to the rise of welfare statism and media-supported presidential dictatorship. The slow collapse of U.S. liberty into tyranny of the majority has produced an intellectual opposition called anarcho-capitalism. The “an-cap” movement believes with Thoreau: “That government is best which governs least. … That government is best which governs not at all.” But how can a state-free society deal with crime? An-cap thinkers offer two solutions. This essay disputes both.

This book is an entertaining but preposterous polemic that blames both 18th-century code duello and early 20th-century Jim Crow for somehow creating a late 20th-century sociopath.

Monkey-dance challengers are loud and seek an audience. Apologize and back away. Predators seek secluded venues with no witnesses. Adopt an interview stance and warn them. Ninety percent will then flee. One in ten resource predators will still try to take your property and escape. Let them. No property is worth going to prison or spending your life savings to avoid prison. Process predators will try to take you somewhere private or bind your hands. Fight for your life.

When judging a home-invasion self-defense shooting, jurors expect women to be gun-incompetent and men to be gun-competent. They more often convict and give longer sentences to anyone who violates either expectation. Jurors are also influenced by seeing a weapon as “evil-looking”. They more often convict and give longer sentences to users of military-looking rifles, pump-action shotguns, or semiautomatic pistols than respectively, to users of hunting-looking rifles, double-barreled shotguns, or revolvers. Finally, female jurors are harsher than males.

Prosecutors routinely try to convict armed citizens who defend themselves. A favorite technique is to ask a trick question that is unanswerable due to its hidden assumptions. E.g.: “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” The trick question about ammunition in this essay’s title is meant to show malice by an armed citizen during his or her trial. It has often succeeded, resulting in unjust convictions. This essay presents five jury-persuading answers to the trick question.

You are attacked in an attempted rape or robbery. You shoot the attacker. He tells police that he was minding his own business when you shot him for no reason. He is wounded. You are not. Who do the police believe? Who gets charged with a crime? In the eyes of police and prosecutors, many self-defense incidents become he-said, she-said scenarios in which the choice of whom to prosecute is essentially a coin-flip. A video of the event can resolve it in your favor.

In order to be found not-guilty of assault or murder you must persuade judge and jury that: (1) The person you shot had the power to kill you (ability). (2) The person was close enough to kill you (opportunity). And (3) The person wanted to kill you (intent). In a prior essay , we described fifteen negative factors that might convict you despite evidence of self-defense. Today we look at the reverse, the three elements of a successful self-defense argument.

A knife-armed attacker 21 feet away can kill you before you can draw and shoot. Whether the attacker is young, old, fat, thin, fit, sedentary, male, female, makes little difference. From a standing start, an attacker can cover 21 feet in 1.5 to 2.0 seconds. That is how long it takes you to draw and shoot. Watch the video below. Remember it. Post a comment that you watched it. You may someday need to prove in court that you knew this fact, and that is why you fired.

A quirky aspect of U.S. “racial” classification for the past century has been its increasing alignment with left versus right political ideologies. The strangest twist is today’s Black political opposition to armed citizens. In reality, throughout history U.S. gun laws have aimed at ensuring that Blacks are defenseless while Whites are armed.

“So the police can arrest me, handcuff me, drag me to jail, lock me up, and give me a permanent criminal arrest record for doing something so completely legal that no prosecutor would ever file charges, and I would still have no legal recourse?” Yes, that is correct. This essay explains how justice became so strange.