Massad Ayoob's Blog, page 123

WE PAUSE FOR A BRIEF ANNOUNCEMENT

I’m going to interrupt the series on hollow point ammunition for a time-sensitive announcement.  My friend Rob Pincus is running for the NRA Board of Directors as a write-in candidate.  If you’re a voting member, he’d appreciate your help.

His announcement is here: http://www.icetraining.info/rob-pincus-for-the-nra-board-of-directors/.

His position statement is here: http://www.icetraining.info/open-carry-constitutional-carry-and-mandatory-gun-training/.

I’ve known Rob for a long time. He’s a very bright and articulate guy, and comes from the home- and self-defense side rather than the sporting side.  We don’t agree on everything, but I’ve always found him open to new ideas and extremely analytical in his approach.

New blood is a good thing for any organization.  I think Rob Pincus would be good for the NRA, and I’m herewith endorsing him.

Share or Bookmark

WHY WE USE EXPANDING BULLETS FOR SELF-DEFENSE

PART I

This past Monday I was at a state bar association headquarters, leading a panel discussion they were filming on gun modifications and gun-and-ammo choices as they relate to shooting cases.  On the same day, half a world away, South African athlete Oscar Pistorius was on trial for murder in the death of his girlfriend. It turned out that the ammunition in the death weapon in South Africa was jacketed hollow point, and the prosecution was making a huge deal about its deadly effects, implying that using it was indicia of malice in and of itself.  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/prosecutor-in-pistorius-trial-says-autopsy-testimony-is-graphic-should-not-be-broadcast/article17391312/.  Oddly enough, at the bar association CLE (continuing legal education) film we discussed the same thing.

The ammo was reportedly Ranger, a Winchester brand which in this country is generally sold as “law enforcement only,” though outside of San Francisco I don’t know of any laws actually banning its use by private citizens.  (Interestingly, the images they showed on CNN looked more like Federal HST.  I watched the talking heads babble on about how the bullet spread itself out into petals that spun like a fan.  Slice and dice…it could have been a Cuisinart commercial.

The panel they were filming on our end was made up entirely of people carrying Glock pistols with Winchester Ranger ammunition.  The police chief who used to command LAPD Metro and SWAT had 124 grain Ranger +P in his 9mm Glock 17. The Sergeant/Rangemaster who had shot a guy with such a bullet was wearing the same Glock 21 he had used that night, with 230 grain Ranger .45 ACP.  And I had the same ammo he did, in my RoBar custom Glock 30S.

The BS arguments about “malicious dum-dum bullets” have been going on for more than 40 years in this country.  Yet such expanding bullets are issued to virtually all of American law enforcement, and are the smart thing to put in personal defense and home defense handguns. The reasons are reduced likelihood of overpenetration, reduced likelihood of ricochet, and faster neutralization of threats to the innocent so deadly that they warrant lethal force in the first place. I think those are incontrovertible arguments.  But there’s also a fourth argument, and we’ll get to that before long.

This will kick off a five-part series, so our readers can have the tools to defend their use of appropriate ammunition when that choice is falsely questioned in a court of law.

Share or Bookmark

A MOVIE THAT GETS IT RIGHT

A little while back, in this post, we all had fun with some of the “gun bloopers” from TV and the movies.  I have now been authorized to tell you about one movie that’s gonna get it right.

Panteao Productions is a producer of high-end tactical training films, as a quick scan of their website at www.panteaoproductions.com will show.  In the interest of total disclosure, three of those films are mine, and like the others are all downloadable to computer or available to you on DVD.  I also shot on his pistol team for many years.  So, he’s a friend of mine…but I also know the guy, and when he says he’s going to produce a film, it gets produced.

Now, Panteao is going to expand into movie theater entertainment with the film “Alexander’s Bridge.”

You can check it out here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/alexander-s-bridge.  Their quick synopsis is: “Alexander’s Bridge is a science fiction/action film about an elite team of US Army Delta Force Operators accidentally sent back 150 years to the middle of the Civil War. Finding themselves where a battle is about to take place and where thousands of Federal and Confederate soldiers will be killed or wounded, they must decide what to do. Can they make a difference? Who will they try to help? Will they get back home?”

I’ve read the script. This ain’t “Guns of the South” with M4s instead of AK47s.  Panteao CEO Fernando Coelho has real Delta Force operators like Paul Howe and Tom Spooner on his team, and many more top-notch people from whom to draw technical advice. The movement patterns, the tactics, and of course the gun handling are all gonna be real. The Civil War battle scenes won’t consist of Hollywood extras dressed in blue and gray and given rubber guns to run around with: they’ll be made up of hard-core Civil War re-enactors who are absolutely authentic down to the threads of their clothing,  period-correct boot-laces, and of course, the guns.

I hope I’m not letting a cat out of the bag here, but my favorite part of the script is that it ain’t just about 21st Century dudes rockin’ M4s and kickin’ butt on dudes with muzzle-loading single shots (though some of the players will be using period-correct lever actions like you’d have somehow found the money to buy for your son if he was going off to fight in the War Between the States back then).  The most moving part of the film will come when bone-tired battle surgeons of the 1860s watch America’s Finest apply modern tactical emergency medicine to wounded soldiers.  I like it because it shows the world that Our People care more about saving lives than extinguishing them.

It will be entertainment…but it will also be “enter-train-ment.” With the “indiego” thing, you get to chip in for a piece of the production action.

And once it comes out, the next time you and your friends are joking about how movies and TV always get this stuff wrong, you’ll be able to say…”Well, they got it right on the movie I helped to underwrite and produce!”

Share or Bookmark

WHY GUN PEOPLE NEED TO TRAVEL CAREFULLY

We who travel with firearms need to be careful not to run afoul of the fifty-piece patchwork quilt of United States gun laws.  This goes double on commercial aircraft and triple when we travel to other nations.  Take it from someone who regularly has to go up to airline ticket counters and say, “My name is Massad Ayoob and I have two handguns,” though I try to phrase it more diplomatically than that.

A case in point follows, submitted by one of my friends and graduates. Names are deleted to prevent embarrassment:

An interesting story I thought I would pass forward. My Dad, Wife, Mother, and I went on a trip to the Grand Cayman Islands. We had a great time and did some scuba diving. Dad has some property there and we enjoyed the week with great food and company. 

 

On the way back, Dad got pulled aside after the screening. To make a long story short, the coat he had was one we used to go shooting in Oct of 2013. It had a hole in the pocket where one live round (.38) fell into the liner of his coat. The Caymans have a zero tolerance policy for firearms related offenses. He was immediately arrested from the airport, taken to jail, and booked. We had to get the US Consulate involved in this process from the Embassy and he had significant legal fees etc… A mess. They consider a bullet the same as a gun generally. 

 

The lessons we learned were many, but one is …. check your coat. Despite the fact he had flown several times (2 different trips in the US with that coat) he had a bullet in the liner the entire time. The second and most important detail to share is that he had his concealed carry permit with him in this wallet. This single item, while causing a fuss in some restrictive states with over-zealous officers, saved his ass in Cayman. This made the difference between a day or two of inconvenience and a large fine vs. a week long ordeal and possibly worse! They saw the permit as plausible reason for him to have a bullet in the jacket and also proof he was not a felon in the U.S. either. I’m sure the fact he is a doctor and owns land there and has been there 20 times in the last 35 years didn’t hurt either. Thought I would share…

 

Thanks for sharing, bro.  I shot Saturday’s qualification with a 1911 .45, which is going to be my companion for some weeks to come, with seven-round magazines.  Reason: one jurisdiction I’ll be going through limits people to that cartridge count.  I won’t have my usual backup gun, which mounts a laser sight, with me either: another city I’ll be visiting on that trip has a local ordinance which makes such accessories a crime.

 

The best online resource I know of for staying up to date on the various regs in various places is handgunlaw.us.  For you Android and iPeople, the best app I’ve seen is Legal Heat.

 

Follow Ayoob’s Law Number Nine: Never break the law. Know the law better than the other guy, and you should never have to break it.

Share or Bookmark

SCHEDULING TRAINING

Todd Louis Green, one of the brightest stars in the handgun training world today in my opinion, made this excellent point recently on his blog.

I totally agree with Todd.  I learned early that if you don’t read you can’t write, and if you don’t learn you can’t teach.  The person who thinks he has it nailed and will teach without continuing education has doomed himself – and his curriculum – to fossilization.  That’s why lawyers have CLE (continuing legal education) requirements annually, and docs have CME, and cops have mandatory in-service training.

Sometimes, though, the schedule gets in the way.  For me, February was a case in point. Pistol champ Mike Seeklander  ran a course tantalizingly close to me, but by the time it was announced I was committed to teach elsewhere.  By all accounts, the course was excellent – half of the people I shoot with regularly went, and loved it – but I was trapped in the front of a classroom in the frozen North.  I’m hoping to catch Seeklander’s program later this year.

February also saw one of the best training smorgasbords ever served to law-abiding armed citizens, Tom Givens’ Polite Society conference in Memphis.  I had been scheduled to teach for half a day and soak up learning from top people in the field for the rest of the Friday-Saturday-Sunday event.  Alas, I had to cancel because I was scheduled to appear at a trial which would encompass that Friday, and it would take me all day Saturday to drive to Memphis.  My teaching slot (and classroom slot) were quickly filled by others. The trial postponed at the last minute, too late to get into the seminar.  Significant Other and I went to a pistol match as a consolation prize.

I’ll be taking a solid week of training in March, long since locked into the schedule, and plan to make that one come Hell or high water.  I hope to wallow in new ideas like a shark in a feeding frenzy.

Just ‘cause I’m old enough to look like a fossil don’t mean I gotta be one.

Mike Seeklander coaches Terri Strayer on a weak hand shooting technique.

Share or Bookmark

SYG IGNORANCE: THE CURE IS KNOWLEDGE

Blatant misinformation about Stand Your Ground laws and principles continues to abound.  Sometimes, when you have to tell someone “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” it’s not an insult, but simply a statement of fact.

Here, Howard Nemerov imparts a much needed dose of the curative after a typical BS editorial in a major newspaper:  http://pjmedia.com/blog/e-j-dionnes-stand-your-ground-fantasies/ .

Knowledge is the only cure for ignorance.  However, when you have metastasizing willful ignorance – sometimes complicated by long-festering intentional deception – it takes repeated and massive doses of truth to fight the infection.

Share or Bookmark

Dunn Is Not Done

The verdict is in – Guilty on four of five counts, but a hung jury mistrial on the fifth and foremost – yet State v. Michael Dunn is far from over. The sentencing phase is still to come, and State’s Attorney Angela Corey has promised a second trial in the death of Jordan Davis.

We’ve now heard from two jurors, both of whom emphatically said race was not an issue in their deliberations. It certainly is to the media, though, and thanks to the media, it’s a huge issue in public opinion.

Pundits are saying that Dunn will spend the rest of his life in prison with multiple twenty-year sentences for attempted murder, including Florida’s mandatory sentencing for crimes committed with guns and shots fired.  I won’t be counting those chickens until they’re hatched. That outcome presumes consecutive sentences.  The judge, who strikes this writer as having been very fair and impartial throughout the proceeding, has the option of giving the sentences concurrently.  By some estimates, that could mean only twenty years total.  One pundit expected 80% service of sentence before eligibility for parole: down to sixteen years.  Credit for time already served in jail awaiting trial, and Dunn might be down to fifteen years, getting out of prison when he’s still younger than me.

Re-trial? Ms. Corey might want to rethink that. We know now that three people on the jury held out for self-defense in the shooting death of Jordan Davis.  25% of the jury.  That smells like reasonable doubt to me.  Some of Dunn’s advocates claim the teens were seen removing something from their SUV and hiding it before returning to the shooting scene. I don’t recall any such witness testimony actually going before the jury. However, if such a witness surfaces and proves willing to testify in the second trial, the “phantom shotgun” Dunn claimed Davis wielded is going to be a whole lot more solid, and his story a whole lot more credible, and it could turn into a Not Guilty.

If you haven’t already, go to legalinsurrection.com and read the incisive commentary by Andrew Branca, an attorney and lethal force law expert who sat in the courtroom throughout the Dunn trial, as he did throughout the Zimmerman trial.  It’s simply the most bullshit-free analysis of the issues in each case as they unfolded in court. Don’t neglect the extensive reader commentary found with each entry, much of it from seasoned criminal lawyers.

Share or Bookmark

DUNN AND ZIMMERMAN

So here I am, in five-below-zero Cleveland on a Monday morning, watching CNN’s sandbag interview of George Zimmerman, and listening to Nancy Grace and assorted other talking heads conflate his case with Saturday’s verdict on Michael Dunn in the Jacksonville “loud music” homicide.

It makes me want to wander outside into the snow. There’s less bullshit out there in the cold, clean air.

The Dunn verdict gives me no heartburn.  He sent bullets toward three young men who were fleeing from him and had themselves shown him no overt threat; that suffices to sustain the jury’s guilty verdicts on three counts of attempted murder, and for firing at the vehicle.  There is much rage that the jury could not agree on a verdict on the charge of murdering the fourth young man, Jordan Davis.  The defendant came across well with his testimony, unsupported by any other testimony, that he perceived Jordan to be bringing a gun to bear on him when he fired the fatal shots.

Did that suffice to give at least one juror reasonable doubt as to guilt? To believe that Dunn might well be telling the truth?  That seems to be the primary assumption of commentators so far.  It’s certainly a possibility, but it might also have been that the jury simply couldn’t agree on premeditated murder vis-à-vis lesser included offenses.  In his closing statement, prosecutor John Guy told the jury that the state didn’t want anything less than a Murder One conviction.  It may turn out to be a case of “be careful what you ask for, you might just get it.”

Just hypothetically, if Michael Dunn was telling the truth and there was a shotgun in the other vehicle when he opened fire upon it, the defense claim that the young men in that vehicle dumped the evidence is rendered largely moot by Dunn’s own actions. When he fled the scene, he didn’t just trigger the whole “flight equals guilt” thing; he removed from the scene the one person who could have told police that there might be a shotgun they should be looking for.  It puts him somewhat in the position of the guy who kills his parents and then pleads the court’s mercy as an orphan.  The cops can’t find something they don’t know to look for.

There was much fail in Michael Dunn’s actions.  The innocence he claimed was nowhere near as clear as Zimmerman’s, based on his statements at the scene, and the totality of the evidence.  The cases don’t really belong in the same discussion, and neither has a damn thing to do with Florida’s Stand Your Ground law.  Dunn emerges as, at best, a bad example of stupid behavior whose only positive legacy will be learning points for more responsible armed citizens.  Zimmeman remains a whipping boy for the willful ignorance of those who prefer superficial sensationalism to research into the actual principles of law and justice.

Part One of the CNN Interview:

 

Part Two of the CNN Interview:

Share or Bookmark

AH, HISTORY…

Here’s an entry promised earlier…

After a shooting, witness’ recollections may vary widely.  Add to that what we would now consider sloppy investigation – the way it was done on the Frontier in Old West times – and 19th Century history starts to get a little fuzzy by the time it filters down to 21st Century readers.

While doing some research recently on the Northfield Bank Raid in Minnesota in 1876, that became apparent. No two historical accounts place the exchanges of gunfire at that hectic scene in the exact same order. “Jesse James was inside the First National Bank and killed the cashier!” “No, Jesse was outside, and it was his brother Frank who murdered the cashier inside!” “No, Jesse wasn’t even there, and he was turning his life around anyway…”

“The gunman killed by an armed citizen with a skillful 80-yard rifle shot was Bill Chadwell.” “No, it was another bad guy, named Stiles.”  “You’re all nuts, Stiles was just one of Chadwell’s aliases!”  And so it goes.

Hell, historians agree that Jesse James was killed by the “dirty little coward,” Robert Ford, but no one seems to agree on what he killed him with. Some historians can’t even agree with “they’s own selfs.” In “Jesse James: Legendary Outlaw” by Roger Bruns, we find on page 83, “…Bob Ford drew his Smith & Wesson .45 and shot the infamous outlaw through the back of the head.” However, turn the page and on P.85 we find this photo caption: “Bob Ford, the assassin of Jesse James, posed for this photograph with the weapon he used to kill the infamous outlaw.” The revolver in that photo is clearly a 7 ½” barrel Cavalry Model Colt Single Action Army.

In “The Escapades of Frank and Jesse James” historian Carl Breihan wrote, “Without hesitation Bob drew his Smith & Wesson and sent a slug crashing through Jesse’s head. This nickel-plated revolver, Serial No. 3766, Model No. 3, was the same weapon Jesse had given Bob as a present some days before.” (P.277)  He adds, “Inquest records show that the gun used by Bob Ford was a Smith & Wesson and not a Colt as generally believed. Charley Ford said, ’Bob had a Smith & Wesson, and it was easier for him to get it out of his pocket.’ Bob Ford admitted, in part, “I could see that it was all over with Jesse when that Smith .44 slug tore through his head.” (P.280)

And some would have it that Ford killed James with one of James’ own guns, snatched from a two-holster gun belt James had just unbuckled and set on a table.  Colt or Smith & Wesson? .44 or .45? Bob’s gun, or Jesse’s?  A gun snatched from Jesse’s holster, or given to Bob by Jesse, or …?

Ah, history…

Share or Bookmark

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

In the last entry, I promised to discuss some historical matters here, unless something more newsworthy came up.  Something certainly did.

I recently received the following from the office of  Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. A career prosecutor with a stellar record, and always fair to armed citizens and cops alike, this former state Attorney General probably has a better handle on real world crime and punishment and justice issues than anyone else in the United States Senate. She is sponsoring Senator Cornyn’s Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2014.   Here’s what she has to say:

“Dear Colleague—

“We ask that you join us in cosponsoring The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2014 (S. 1908)—critical legislation that will protect the Second Amendment rights of our constituents while they are travelling or living away from home. The United States Constitution guarantees every American the right to travel freely from state-to-state, and our fundamental right to self-defense should be fully protected when we do so.

“The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of2014 would allow individuals with the right to carry a concealed firearm in their home state to exercise that right in any other state that also allows that practice. Under this legislation, persons concealed carrying outside of their home state would still be required to abide by the rules and regulations of the state in which they are physically present. In other words, this legislation would treat concealed carry permits just like drivers’ licenses. For instance, if you are licensed to drive in State A, but are driving through State B, you are required to follow the posted speed limits and other rules for operating a motor vehicle in State B. This legislation works the same way with respect to concealed carry rights.

“The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of2014 fully protects state sovereignty, because it does not establish national standards for the practice of concealed carry, does not allow for a national concealed carry permit, and does not allow individuals to circumvent their home state’s permitting laws. Additionally, this legislation would not allow individuals to carry firearms who are prohibited from doing so under current federal law.

“The practice of concealed carry increases public safety, protects fundamental constitutional rights, encourages responsible gun ownership, and is now allowed in all fifty states. We ask that you join us in strengthening the Second Amendment by cosponsoring the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2014.”

Folks, your blogger here thinks national concealed carry reciprocity is long overdue. Please reach out to those who represent you on Capitol Hill and strongly urge them to join Senator Ayotte in getting this important, life-saving legislation passed into law.

Share or Bookmark