Feb. 3, 1997 - Art Bell
02:46:41
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Welcome to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, as the case may be across all these many time zones. | ||
| From the Hawaiian and Tahitian Island chains, eastward across this great land, flyover country, to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet. | ||
| This is Coast Coast AM. | ||
| I'm Mark Bell, and tonight, Alex Jason is going to be here shortly. | ||
| And if you have ever wondered about the use of guns, he's going to be your guy. | ||
| I'll tell you all about it. | ||
| If you've ever wondered what you're able to do to protect yourself and, perhaps as importantly, what you're not able to do. | ||
| He's your guy. | ||
| If you've ever wondered what a crime scene analyst does. | ||
| And a lot of Americans didn't go the OJ trial. | ||
| As a matter of fact, he covered some of that for CBS. | ||
| Forensic animations? | ||
| Shooting incident reconstructions, that kind of thing? | ||
| That's Mr. Jason's territory, and we're going to be talking to him shortly. | ||
| Late in the program. | ||
| Steve Forbes. | ||
| The presidential candidate, Steve Forbes. | ||
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That'll be late this morning. | |
| Or early East Coast time, depending on how you look at it. | ||
| So all of that coming up this morning. | ||
| Alright, who is Alex Jason? | ||
| Alexander Jason from here forth known to us as Alex. | ||
| He says the focus of his professional work is crime scene analysis and shooting incident reconstruction. | ||
| He says his area of specialty is the science of wound ballistics, which relates to the use of firearms against humans, and specifically to the interaction of projectiles and the human body. | ||
| In other words, getting shot. | ||
| He says his interests are in the performance of firearms and ammunition and the human dynamics of shooting, which include both the person shooting and the person being shot. | ||
| He performs ballistic consulting and shooting incident reconstruction for both defense and prosecution. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Plays both sides of the court. | ||
| He's got a long, long, very long resume, very impressive. | ||
| Is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, the Association of Crime Scene Reconstruction, International Wound Ballistics Association, International Homicide Investigators Association, International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts, International Association for Identification, Association of Firearm and ToolMake, Tool Mark, make that, examiners, technical advisor, American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers. | ||
| He is an ex-cop. | ||
| He is the president-elect of the Association of Crime Scene Reconstruction and on and on and on and on. | ||
| This fellow has testified in front of Congress. | ||
| In other words, folks, he is definitely in this area an expert. | ||
| Worked for the San Francisco Police Department from 1970 through 74 as a detective investigator. | ||
| Worked with Second Chance Body Armor. | ||
| That's a very good name for a body armor company, Second Chance. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Alex, welcome to the program. | ||
| Oh, thank you very much, Eric. | ||
| So you do kind of work both sides, defense and prosecution. | ||
| You are an expert for hire. | ||
| I am an expert for hire. | ||
| That is, I'm available for hiring. | ||
| My opinion cannot be hired other than I will give you my opinion. | ||
| You know, I always wondered about that. | ||
| In other words, the guy who signs the check, no influence whatsoever, not in terms of my analysis or my conclusions. | ||
| Now, what will happen is often they'll come to me with a case and say, we think, generally they won't be this blatant about it, but they'll say, we want to get this guy off. | ||
| And we think that there could be a case here for self-defense, that he was shot at first. | ||
| I say, well, let me look at the physical evidence, whatever is available, and I'll give you my opinion. | ||
| So they'll send me a big box full of stuff, and I'll go through it. | ||
| And I'll call up and I'll say, I don't see anything here that's consistent with his version of the event, that it was self-defense. | ||
| There's nothing in here. | ||
| And they'll say something, well, are you sure? | ||
| I said, no, there's nothing in here to substantiate what he says. | ||
| And they'll say, well, thank you very much. | ||
| And that's the end of it. | ||
| They don't hire you. | ||
| They hire me just for that time. | ||
| But I don't testify. | ||
| And they may find somebody else who will do what they want. | ||
| I try to act as a scientist, as a forensic scientist, in terms of, let's put it on a basic level. | ||
| If I were a serology lab and you came to me with a blood sample and you wanted to know the alcohol content, now it may hurt your client, it may help your client, but I just tell you what the results are. | ||
| I don't try to help you or hurt you. | ||
| I just say this is what it is. | ||
| Yeah, but your science is not quite as clear as, say, DNA work or blood work, is it? | ||
| In other words, there's a little bit more wiggle room in trying to present a case for self-defense, or at least many times you would think there would be, not quite as exact a science. | ||
| Well, I'm surprised to hear you say that, Art, but you're quite right. | ||
| You're very perceptive. | ||
| Most people don't understand it to that level. | ||
| But yes, you are right. | ||
| There is more, as you say, wiggle room. | ||
| There's more room for adjustment, you might say, for presenting things in different ways. | ||
| And it's very difficult, and it's a constant struggle to remain objective. | ||
| I don't want to be someone for hire. | ||
| I really try to maintain my integrity. | ||
| And sometimes it's very difficult. | ||
| Sometimes you get clients who say, I don't want you to say that. | ||
| When I were into trial, and they say, well, they might ask you, what if the other side asks you this or that? | ||
| I'll say, well, I'll say this or this. | ||
| So I don't want you to say that. | ||
| I said, well, then you better hope it doesn't ask me the question. | ||
| It doesn't ask me the question because I'm going to have to answer it that way. | ||
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But it's very difficult, but that's how I approach it. | |
| So a constant ethical fight. | ||
| And I'm sure you're fighting constantly to take the high ground as best you can. | ||
| I am. | ||
| In the long run, people don't hire whores, what they're called. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And even someone who is mad at me or resents my opinion or my not cooperating fully as he might think of it will also, I hope, respect me for being truthful. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You've done an awful lot of work. | ||
| You're an ex-cop. | ||
| You work as a, what, as a detective in San Francisco? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| A lot of guns in America. | ||
| Boy, there's a lot of guns in America. | ||
| Oh, there's a lot of guns. | ||
| I've got my own share. | ||
| And I think people do not have very much of an understanding of when they may and when they may not use a gun. | ||
| State to state now, in a lot of the western states, some eastern, even in Florida, you can take a short course and carry a concealed weapon. | ||
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But even that aside, millions of guns. | |
| How many guns are in America? | ||
| Oh, I think there's more than 100 million. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No one really knows, but there's at least 100 million guns. | ||
| Sitting in homes. | ||
| And we have a lot of shootings in America. | ||
| So I guess that keeps people like you very busy. | ||
| But for the listeners of this program, I would like them to know when they can and when they can't use deadly force. | ||
| Well, that's a very good question. | ||
| And this is something that police officers are given intense training, a continual training, an updated training on making those decisions. | ||
| Whereas the average citizen is not. | ||
| And when you talk about people having, requiring, being required to go to classes before they can get a concealed weapons permit or buy a gun in some states, this is true. | ||
| But generally the classes are just on safety, about don't clean the gun while it's loaded, keep away from children, and that's fine. | ||
| But here in California, we have a class now, basic firearm safety course, but it's safety. | ||
| This never tells you when you can and when you cannot shoot someone in self-defense because people are afraid to come out and say it. | ||
| And the problem is if the average citizen calls up the police department and says, excuse me, I want to know if a guy is coming in my window, am I allowed to shoot him if this or that happens? | ||
| Well, they don't want to tell you. | ||
| They don't want to answer your question because they don't know who you are. | ||
| They don't want you going and shooting somebody that night and saying, well, Officer Bill Johnson over here at Central Station said it was okay. | ||
| So they're going to hem and haw. | ||
| And I found that people, I've done a lot of cases where responsible citizens, good people, have used guns in an inappropriate, legally inappropriate manner and have caused themselves all kinds of trouble, gone to prison, just because they didn't really understand when they can and when they can't use it. | ||
| Well, when I talked to you earlier today, you said, look, and a lot of it depends on what you say when the police arrive. | ||
| In other words, if there's been a shooting, your attitude, your demeanor, what you say bears on where that case is going to go. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Well, first I'd like to say to the people out there, rethink what you know. | ||
| Many people think they know what to do and what not to do. | ||
| But most of that knowledge, if they really examine it, has come from Hollywood, from TV and movies, and from a guy at the gun store and a guy over at the shooting range, another guy you met in the Army who told you some stuff. | ||
| And most of that is absolute crap. | ||
| And I tell you, the fountain of misinformation, the central fountain of misinformation on this subject are gun stores. | ||
| Everyone thinks that the guys who work at the gun store know this stuff. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| But they never tell you they don't know. | ||
| They just give you opinions, and it's terrible. | ||
| So having said that, I don't want to encourage anybody to shoot somebody unless they have to. | ||
| And I'm not trying to give anybody a reason to explain why they shot someone to get away with committing murder. | ||
| Well, let's take a case down in Texas. | ||
| Do you remember that recent case in which there was a foreign student and there was a party going on or something and he went to a wrong house? | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| And the fellow who answered the door thought he was a threat, told him to freeze, a word he did not understand in English. | ||
| Naturally, he didn't freeze. | ||
| The shot was fired, and the student died. | ||
| Now, as far as I know, that fellow walked. | ||
| Yeah, I wasn't involved in the case. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I think there was two trials or something, and I think he walked initially, then he was found civilly liable or something like that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Well, this is another thing you have to realize, that even though you may know the law and you think, well, I know I can shoot somebody if they step afoot in my house, whatever, you're going to get sued. | ||
| This happens almost all the time. | ||
| I deal with police departments very often. | ||
| I represent, or I help police departments in defending their shootings. | ||
| And you'll get the most egregious criminals who have been shot, and their relatives will sue on their behalf for clearly criminal acts that these guys are perpetrating. | ||
| It doesn't matter anymore. | ||
| There's money in it. | ||
| So there are lawyers out there who encourage people to sue. | ||
| And if you sue somebody, if he's not the worst criminal in the world with no relatives around, you're going to get sued. | ||
| So you may be right. | ||
| You may be totally justified. | ||
| But you're going to go to court and you're going to pay big money to defend yourself, like O.J. Simpson is. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You did some work on that case for, what, CBS, as a consultant? | ||
| Well, I was a consultant to CBS News on that case, and I did a lot of computer animation for their news broadcast and their coverage of that. | ||
| Care to comment on the outcome of the criminal trial, egregious miscarriage of justice, or do you think it came out the way it should have? | ||
| No, I think it was a miscarriage of justice. | ||
| I think it was a racial vote. | ||
| It became a racial issue, not a political issue, a racial issue, not one of guilt or innocence. | ||
| We all talked about this. | ||
| Interestingly, the civil trial is becoming racial as well, but the other way around, it's really strange. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, Art, if you or I had stabbed our wife, slashed our wife like that, and a friend, we'd be in prison now. | ||
| Were you a cop when that occurred? | ||
| No. | ||
| Sorry, I didn't look at the dates here. | ||
| No, I wasn't. | ||
| No, the kind of thing I see is that people have so many people have guns in their house for self-defense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're not really clear about when they can shoot them. | ||
| For example, one of the things you hear about it is they say, well, if you shoot them outside, drag them back inside. | ||
| Now, if anybody out there listening thinks that that is a viable tactic to use, you're going to get in big, big, big trouble. | ||
| That is an absolutely fallacious argument, a fallacious concept. | ||
| Do not drag the body. | ||
| Well, don't shoot anybody outside to begin with. | ||
| Don't shoot them outside. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, there's no reason to shoot them. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| Every state has their law about this, when you can use deadly force. | ||
| But if you follow the basic guidelines, this is valid in all 50 states. | ||
| And that is you cannot use deadly force unless your life is threatened or the life of someone else is threatened. | ||
| That's the basics of it. | ||
| And what's going to happen when you're involved in a shooting, when the police arrive, they want to make a quick decision as to who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. | ||
| So they're looking real quick to figure out, okay, what happened here? | ||
| And they're going to look at you and they're going to listen to you. | ||
| And what you say is going to place you either in the category of a suspect or a victim who had to shoot. | ||
| And one of the most important things is the concept that you have to understand. | ||
| If you're using a gun for self-defense, you have to be in the situation where you can demonstrate that it was a last resort, that you didn't want to shoot the person, but you had to. | ||
| In other words, you should. | ||
| You should shoot for your life. | ||
| You should not be joyful at taking one more punk off the streets. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And perhaps that's your feeling, and perhaps I would agree with you. | ||
| But you cannot communicate that. | ||
| If it looks like you did this, you were eager to shoot somebody, you're going to be in trouble. | ||
| Well, the classic case, somebody's breaking into your house. | ||
| All right? | ||
| You've got a gun. | ||
| It's dark. | ||
| You don't know what they've got. | ||
| You're not a trained person with a firearm, but they're breaking into your house. | ||
| You shoot them. | ||
| They fall down on your rug. | ||
| You call the police. | ||
| Then what? | ||
| Well, the police are going to arrive. | ||
| They're going to take a quick look. | ||
| They're going to do a real, a quick summation here. | ||
| They're going to look at you and your bathrobe, look at your wife and your crying kids and your nice house. | ||
| And then this guy, hopefully some real scummy-looking guy who's, when they get his idea, he's got a record a mile long. | ||
| You're in pretty good shape there. | ||
| Now, they're going to say, what happened? | ||
| Now, some people will tell you the lawyer that you know at the Kiwanis Club there does wills and things is going to say, oh, don't make any statement. | ||
| You don't have to talk. | ||
| Well, no, you don't have to. | ||
| He's right. | ||
| But then you're probably going to get arrested because they're going to figure you're hiding something. | ||
| There's something going on here. | ||
| Because an honest homeowner is going to tell what happened. | ||
| So are you better off appearing to be conversational, willing to explain what occurred, or shutting your mouth and saying, I want my lawyer here? | ||
| Well, I'm not a lawyer. | ||
| I should be clear about that. | ||
| I'm not a lawyer. | ||
| I'm giving you the real-life situation. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| The real-life situation is if it was justified, then you can explain what happened. | ||
| You say, I was sleeping. | ||
| I heard a noise. | ||
| My wife woke me up. | ||
| I knew there was somebody out in the other room. | ||
| I got my gun from the standard. | ||
| I went out there. | ||
| I said, who's there? | ||
| Who's there? | ||
| And I saw this guy, and he came at me. | ||
| He said, I want to kill you. | ||
| And I just pulled my gun up and I shot him. | ||
| Oh, he said, I'm going to kill you. | ||
| Well, that's very clear. | ||
| Well, okay, I'm just giving you a clear example. | ||
| If he's, Alex, if he's dead and he didn't say, I'm going to kill you, but he was coming at you. | ||
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Yes. | |
| Would you in that situation say he said he was going to kill me? | ||
| I'm not encouraging anybody to lie. | ||
| I'm just trying to make it clear that if you have a situation in which your life was threatened, you had a reasonable fear for your life, or the life of someone else, you can use deadly force. | ||
| Now, saying in that situation, there's no doubt. | ||
| If that's what happened, he said, I'm going to kill you, and he kept coming at you. | ||
| Well, you have a reason to believe that. | ||
| Now, in most states, or many states, it's even more on your side than that. | ||
| It's just the fact that someone came in your house and introduced you or doesn't belong there sort of gives you the right to shoot them. | ||
| You have to check your local laws. | ||
| I'm giving you the basic foundational thing. | ||
| Well, dead men don't give contrary testimony. | ||
| But wounded men do, and witnesses. | ||
| The guy next door, or the cab driver out front, or whatever, he said, no problem. | ||
| I heard someone say, oh, please don't shoot me. | ||
| And I heard someone else say, man, you have no business here. | ||
| You're going to get it. | ||
| I'm going to get even with you. | ||
| Bang. | ||
| Now we have something else happening. | ||
| So what's going to happen? | ||
| The officer's going to come in and they're going to say to you, what happened? | ||
| And they're going to be listening real careful to what you say. | ||
| And they may even get more specific and say, now tell me, you were standing where? | ||
| Here? | ||
| Where were you standing? | ||
| Show me where you were standing. | ||
| And where was he standing? | ||
| And then you went from what room to what room? | ||
| Because they're going to lock you down into a scenario, into a statement. | ||
| And then they're going to take you and put you down on the couch or something. | ||
| And they're going to look around and see if there's anything inconsistent with what you said. | ||
| He said, the guy came in the window. | ||
| Well, we go over the window. | ||
| It's got a screen on. | ||
| It's locked. | ||
| And things like that. | ||
| Then now you're in trouble. | ||
| I went through a concealed course. | ||
| Let me tell you what my instructor told me. | ||
| He said, even if a guy comes in the house, your best bet is to back yourself into a room somewhere in the house as far away from him as you can get, crouch down, and wait. | ||
| In other words, let it be the absolute last resort, even if the jerk is in your house. | ||
| Now, that's good advice. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying, I know people out there, their stomachs are turning, saying, I'm not going to let anybody come into my house and that sort of thing. | ||
| You can do what you want, but what you were told is good advice for staying out of trouble. | ||
| Believe me, I've seen what happens to people, not only in criminal courts, but in civil courts when you're sued. | ||
| So if you can avoid it, believe me, you are better off. | ||
| Shooting someone is not going to make you a hero. | ||
| Not likely. | ||
| You're probably going to have more trouble from the fallout from that than from not shooting. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying you should hesitate in protecting your life, but you should not be eager to shoot somebody nowadays. | ||
| From a legal and civil point of view. | ||
| Yes, and even when you're justified, driver feels eager and don't ever communicate that you were eager. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| Rest. | ||
| We'll be right back to you. | ||
| Alex Jason is my guest. | ||
| He is a certified senior crime scene analyst. | ||
| We're talking about guns and shooting. | ||
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You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks. | |
| Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 3, 1997. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM from February | ||
| 3, 1997. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM from February 3, 1997. | ||
| First Beaver Radio Networks presents Park Bill somewhere in time. | ||
| Tonight's program originally aired February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| Time good morning, everybody. | ||
| I'd like to make more money this year. | ||
| Sure you would. | ||
| Everybody would. | ||
| When you think about the future, do you see the economy getting better or worse? | ||
| We'll ask Steve Forbes about that later this morning. | ||
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We'll see you next time. | |
| Now, back to Alex Jason in the Bay Area, a certified senior crime scene analyst. | ||
| Alex, if some guy comes in and takes my TV and he's got it in his hands and he's on the way out of my house, what should I do? | ||
| Well, you shouldn't shoot him or shoot at him. | ||
| All you can do is perhaps follow him at a distance to get a license plate number or call the police as soon as you can or have your wife or someone there do that while you watch him, get a good description. | ||
| And that's what to do to be safe. | ||
| Now, if you are a real Hema and you want to go up and grab the TV back from the guy and knock him on the head with your fist, perhaps you want to do that. | ||
| I'm not advising that. | ||
| But to use deadly force against him, you are going to be in trouble. | ||
| You're not allowed to shoot at people as they're running away from you. | ||
| Unless they're clearly, like the guy just stabbed a bunch of people or walked down in front of you and he's running, stabbing, chasing other people with a knife. | ||
| That would be different. | ||
| But if he's running away to disengage, to get away from you or the crime, you're not allowed to shoot at them. | ||
| And the police aren't allowed to either. | ||
| Yeah, that's where I was going. | ||
| Are the rules any different regarding use of deadly force for the police or for me? | ||
| No, they're not really any different. | ||
| They're really the same. | ||
| The police are just better trained and better equipped. | ||
| The police can go after somebody and grab them, and if they hit the police officer with their fist, they can take out their club, and then if the guy continues on, they can take out their tear gas, and then at some point he can take out his gun. | ||
| You don't have those options. | ||
| You either probably have a gun or your hands, and that's about it. | ||
| And you're not really clear when you can use either one. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So I'm telling you, the advice I'm giving you is not necessarily what a real man might do by your definition or someone's definition, but it is what will keep you out of trouble. | ||
| Out of trouble. | ||
| All right. | ||
| There are a lot of people wandering about with concealed permits. | ||
| Suppose you see some guy backing out of a bank. | ||
| He's just robbed a bank. | ||
| And by happenstance, you're there. | ||
| What are your options? | ||
| Can you try and stop this man? | ||
| Can you use any sort of force? | ||
| Let's clearly define that. | ||
| Let's say you hear the bank alarm, the big bell going off, and he's running out with the money bag, and someone's running after him, and the people in the bank are coming and say, stop, Pete, Pete, rob the bank. | ||
| And you're there. | ||
| You're the hero of the day. | ||
| You got your gun, your permit. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Well, it's up to you what to do. | ||
| But you're not compelled to do anything. | ||
| You don't have to do anything. | ||
| You're not required to do anything. | ||
| Can you shoot at this guy? | ||
| No, you cannot. | ||
| He is not threatening your life or anybody else's life, I assume, from the way we created this event. | ||
| And I advise that you don't. | ||
| Now, let me give you an example of what can happen when you pull a gun on somebody. | ||
| Here's a case where there was a purse snatching. | ||
| A good, honest citizen at a gas station saw some guy run to a woman, push her, grab the purse, and run away. | ||
| Being a good guy, he had a permit and a gun, and he ran after the purse snatcher. | ||
| And he ran, and he ran about three or four blocks, and the purse snatcher, as most of these criminals are, is not in good shape. | ||
| And he gets winded, so the citizen runs up to him, pulls his gun out, and says, drop the purse. | ||
| Well, the criminal is a pretty wise guy. | ||
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And he knows that he can't be shot legally. | |
| And apparently he thinks this guy knows it too, which the guy did. | ||
| The citizen did. | ||
| So they stand there looking at each other. | ||
| So the citizen grabs him and tries to grab the gun. | ||
| He tries to grab the purse from him. | ||
| Now they have a fight going on. | ||
| But look at the fight. | ||
| The citizen has a gun which he can't use. | ||
| What does it do? | ||
| It's by carrying a five-pound weight in your right hand, and now you have to fight with one hand. | ||
| And at any time, that guy could take the gun from you, and he probably wouldn't mind shooting you. | ||
| So it's a big liability. | ||
| So if you're going to attack this bank robber or some other criminal like that, what are you going to do when you catch him, when you grab him? | ||
| Or if he says, hey, go ahead and shoot me. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Shoot me? | ||
| And he walks over to you. | ||
| You're going to shoot me? | ||
| I haven't done anything. | ||
| These are very difficult situations, and you don't want to get into them. | ||
| The only time you might take your gun out if you think the guy's coming towards you or threatening someone if he had a gun in his hand. | ||
| But another thing to consider, you don't always know what's happening. | ||
| You may think you know what's happening, but you may not know who the bad guy is and who the good guy is. | ||
| It happens to the police all the time. | ||
| And when the police arrive because of the bank hold-up alarm, they don't know who you are, buddy, and you're a citizen with a gun. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And they're going to think you're part of it. | ||
| So it's best just to get a good description, try to remember things, watch them, follow them if you're adventurous, but don't pull your gun out. | ||
| And the police in that situation. | ||
| Suppose, now let's put the police there instead of the citizen. | ||
| The guy's backing out of the bank with a money bag. | ||
| The alarms are going off. | ||
| What options do the police have? | ||
| Well, the police would have a, let's say they got just a hold-up alarm with no further information. | ||
| A hold-up alarm at this bank and this address. | ||
| They drive up there, they see the guy coming out with the money bags. | ||
| The first thing the police do whenever they arrive anywhere, as I did, you look at the guy's hands. | ||
| Is he armed? | ||
| That's the key thing. | ||
| Does he have a weapon? | ||
| Let's say no. | ||
| He doesn't have a clear weapon. | ||
| The police will probably draw their guns and say, please, freeze, and point at him. | ||
| And if he runs? | ||
| If he runs, they're not going to shoot at him. | ||
| They're not allowed to shoot at a fleeing robber unless they have reason to believe that he's going now to get his gun to shoot back at them or get more ammunition or something like that. | ||
| But just because he's running away, you cannot shoot at him. | ||
| It's frustrating as can be. | ||
| So they've got to run after him. | ||
| They have to run after him. | ||
| And that's what they do. | ||
| And then try to grab him, try to hit him with a club. | ||
| And they'll get sued for that, too. | ||
| And so will you. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Speaking of being beaten, way back to Rodney King, I'm sure you looked at that one. | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| How did you see it? | ||
| I saw it as I didn't see anything wrong with what the police did. | ||
| And this may be controversial, but what you saw was sausage being made, the police work. | ||
| If Rodney King had at any time obeyed the police instructions to lay down and spread his arms out, he would not have been hit one time. | ||
| So he is at fault, not the police. | ||
| Now, did the police hit him too hard? | ||
| Well, maybe, but at any time he could have just said, okay, okay, and put his arms down. | ||
| But he kept trying to get up, which they interpreted as a threat to them, which so would I. So it just became another big political issue. | ||
| And I'm amazed at the fury that came out about it. | ||
| He was being chased by police, failure to stop, speeding. | ||
| He was trying to get away. | ||
| They finally get him. | ||
| He does not cooperate with them. | ||
| Well, that's his problem. | ||
| And I'll tell you, as a former policeman, now I'm out of the game, the police business. | ||
| But a lot of times people will run away from policemen and not stop, especially in cars. | ||
| And I'll tell you, the most scary things that I ever did as a policeman was not being shot at, was not going to dark buildings, knowing there's an armed guy inside and so on. | ||
| Traffic stops. | ||
| Well, before that, riding in a speeding police car, chasing somebody, because that is where you get killed. | ||
| And that's where you kill innocent people. | ||
| And especially when you're not driving, it's really frightening. | ||
| I bet it is. | ||
| As a matter of fact, earlier tonight, I think it ran Sunday night, I saw the scariest police chases, and boy, oh, boy, they are scary. | ||
| Man, your heart is really pounding. | ||
| These guys who don't stop endanger more lives and cause more fatalities than any trigger-happy gunman going shooting down a main street. | ||
| What are the odds of somebody getting away? | ||
| If you've got a fast car and you put the pedal to the metal and all that, what percentage of the time do they catch fleeing people? | ||
| Well, I don't know the statistics on it, but I'd say most of the time, because you may be able to outrun the police car, but you cannot run the radio. | ||
| And with the helicopters and this sort of thing, they're going to track you. | ||
| But now, because of the terrible fatalities that have occurred from these type of police chases, the police are required to break off a chase, not to engage in these high-speed chases sometimes, and they have to break away. | ||
| And so the criminals notice now, and even people just go through a stop sign and say, well, I'll just try to get away. | ||
| So that's causing more people to running these days than ever before? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| It's like a free chance to get away. | ||
| Yeah, the helicopter can't be everywhere at once, I guess. | ||
| And if you get caught, you say, okay, okay, now I get caught. | ||
| Well, it used to be an unwritten rule way back in the days that anybody that did that, you beat the hell out of them as a lesson. | ||
| Because maybe the fine they get from failure to heat a siren and this sort of thing is not going to really motivate them not to do that again. | ||
| But if they get their rear end kicked real hard, they may remember that. | ||
| And that was the old school way back, and that's not the way it is now. | ||
| But there was a reason for that, because they know that otherwise it encourages people to do that, to just try to get away. | ||
| What do you feel about the Second Amendment, basically? | ||
| In other words, there are a lot of guns out there. | ||
| A lot of people have guns. | ||
| Should they be able to? | ||
| A lot of police chiefs say, uh-uh. | ||
| Well, yeah, police chiefs, I mean, they're mostly bureaucrats. | ||
| I believe that every responsible person should be allowed to have a gun and to be able to carry a gun unless there's a reason why you shouldn't be allowed to. | ||
| And I do believe that. | ||
| And I think that would be a better country. | ||
| This whole subject of use of deadly force and when you can do it and when you can't for citizens was so important to me, I made a video on this thing, which we've been sold all around the country. | ||
| And it explains this whole situation and goes through different scenarios that this happens or that happens. | ||
| And we interview policemen as far as describing what they do when they arrive at the scene, how they evaluate whether this is justified or not. | ||
| A district attorney who's tried thousands of cases. | ||
| And we actually interview criminals in the prison. | ||
| And I got criminals who had been involved in firearm-related incidents, and especially a bunch of burglars. | ||
| And it was real interesting to hear their interviews. | ||
| And I said, what do you fear most when you go into a house? | ||
| And they would say, well, someone has a gun in there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I even asked, I think I asked all of them that are on tape. | ||
| I said, what do you think? | ||
| Do you think guns should be outlawed for the average citizen? | ||
| They said, oh, well, that'd be crazy, man. | ||
| The criminals would be taken over. | ||
| I'd like to have one. | ||
| And there's some cases where guys, one guy describes, a couple of guys described an incident where they're in a house, burglarizing a house, and somebody came home and they didn't hear them. | ||
| And the guy had a gun. | ||
| And then one guy said, man, I saw that gun and I just turned and I jumped right through the plate glass window, hit the grass, and just kept going. | ||
| And I said, well, then were you more careful the next time you burglarized to make sure no one came home? | ||
| He said, oh, I never did it again. | ||
| I never burglarized a home again. | ||
| I just do businesses from then on. | ||
| They are really afraid of armed homeowners. | ||
| There's some evidence that in states where concealed permits are being issued, crime rates, in fact, have gone down. | ||
| Do you know much about that? | ||
| I know this, that I know when Florida passed this concealed carry permit law, it was about eight, ten years ago now, that if we didn't hear anything about it in the subsequent years, then it was really working. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because the anti-gun establishment were rapidly watching that thing. | ||
| If they could find the slightest variation in anything negative, they would be on the headlines. | ||
| And the newspapers would be eager to report it, as would most of the TV news media. | ||
| So the fact that we haven't heard any doing gloom reports in there shows that it has been working, and crime has gone down, and I think it's a good reason. | ||
| Well, I remember when it was being argued, it was suggested it'll be like the old West, bodies lying in the streets, gunfights in the streets, that sort of thing. | ||
| Didn't happen. | ||
| Didn't happen, and that's a myth anyway. | ||
| There weren't that many gunfights in the Old West anyway. | ||
| When everyone has a gun, people get more polite. | ||
| And if you think people have a gun, then you don't want to start anything. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| All right, let's take another case. | ||
| Recently, I don't know whose report it was. | ||
| It was all over the news. | ||
| There was advice to the American people. | ||
| When you're on the highway, when you're driving down the street, when you're on the freeway, don't look at the person next to you. | ||
| Because looking at them might start something. | ||
| In other words, don't even glance at them. | ||
| Now, let's take a case, more and more frequent these days, I'm sorry to say, where you're on the road, somebody next to you, for whatever reason, flips you the finger, you flip back, and it deteriorates from there. | ||
| Both cars stop. | ||
| The guy in the other car starts coming at you with a tire iron or a piece of pipe or something or another. | ||
| You've got a gun. | ||
| What then? | ||
| Now, bear in mind, interesting example. | ||
| When you're on the street, in your car or walking down the street and you have a gun, either legally or illegally carrying a gun, there's a whole different set of criteria going to be used to judge whether what you have done is justified. | ||
| And you have to be really careful on the street. | ||
| In your house, the police and the whole legal system is generally very sympathetic to you, no matter what happens. | ||
| If you're in your home and someone who doesn't belong there comes there, you're in pretty good shape generally. | ||
| But on the street, you're going to have to really show, first of all, why you were carrying a gun. | ||
| Were you out looking for trouble? | ||
| That's one of the questions. | ||
| Were you looking for trouble? | ||
| Did you think you were a tough guy because you were carrying a gun? | ||
| So you started something with a guy and let him come up to you with a crowbar and then shot him in self-defense, supposedly? | ||
| That's going to be a real issue. | ||
| Well, my answer would be, these are mean streets, and I carry a gun because I went and got a permit. | ||
| That's one answer, one situation. | ||
| So let's say you got to find out a hurdle. | ||
| Then they're going to say, well, what happened? | ||
| And they're going to look for key words, key signals that were your description of what happened. | ||
| If you say, essentially, that guy cut me off way back down to Fort Linda Freeway, and I followed him off here, and he flipped me the bird, and then when we pulled up at the light, he essentially did this or that, which made me so mad that this guy deserved to be taught a lesson. | ||
| And you say something like that, boy, you're going downtown. | ||
| You're in trouble. | ||
| If what you did was out of anger or revenge, there is no legal justification for anger, using anger as a defense or revenge. | ||
| It has to be that whatever happened on the freeway, and I tried to take the next exit, he followed me off at the red light. | ||
| He came out of his car, and I couldn't get through because there's a car ahead of me. | ||
| I rolled my window up, he came over, and he had the crowbar, and he started smashing my window, and then I pulled my gun, I warned him, and then I shot him. | ||
| Now, that would be a much easier case to defend. | ||
| But on the street, it's a whole different world. | ||
| Suppose somebody tries to carjack you. | ||
| Use competitive. | ||
| A lot of that going on these days. | ||
| You know, somebody sticks a gun or a knife towards you and tells you to get out of the car. | ||
| Well, you said some very important words. | ||
| If the suspect had a gun or a knife, now something's different here. | ||
| You are, by definition, being threatened with deadly force. | ||
| If someone sticks a gun in your face, points a gun at you, you can generally use a gun in self-defense, and there won't be any question about it. | ||
| If the guy has a gun or he's found there with a gun. | ||
| Now, bear in mind also, sometimes people will pull a gun, and this is one thing that the anti-gun people never understand. | ||
| They try to equate the number of murders or number of homicides committed with guns and divide that by the number of guns and the number of accidents and say you're at risk for even having a gun, more at risk for having an accidental shooting than a self-defense shooting. | ||
| But guns can be used very effectively every day without a shot being fired. | ||
| You just say, hey, you come any closer, I want to shoot you. | ||
| Yeah, you never hear about that. | ||
| No, you don't hear about that. | ||
| And many times it's not even reported. | ||
| You go out about your way, the guy goes about his way, and that's the end of it. | ||
| Listen, you were a cop, and I may have watched too much Hill Street Blues, but I want to ask a question and try to get an honest answer. | ||
| How many cops carry throwdowns? | ||
| Drop guns. | ||
| Listen, everything's changed. | ||
| In the old days, there were things like that. | ||
| These days, it's just very uncommon. | ||
| And with all the forensic science work that's been done, for example, if you're going to try to shoot somebody outside and drag them back inside, the physical evidence component available to the police is so great that it's very, very difficult to do things like that. | ||
| There was a case just a few years ago where a policeman apparently did drop a gun. | ||
| He shot somebody. | ||
| The guy had not been on. | ||
| He had a gun, an extra gun with him. | ||
| He just dropped a gun. | ||
| He said, that's the gun the guy had. | ||
| Well, they looked at it and they found it had fibers on it. | ||
| And when they looked at his clothing, the fibers matched his clothing, which matched the rug in his house, and that sort of thing. | ||
| So you better be our super duper master criminal if you don't tell a post-cuff like that nowadays. | ||
| And yet the greatest public example standing is the O.J. Simpson case, where there were blood drops leading all the way right back up into his bedroom and so forth and so on. | ||
| And still he walked. | ||
| Well, yes, well, that became a political issue, not one of forensic science or the facts. | ||
| Not normal. | ||
| Let me give you an example of a case that some young listeners might be interested in. | ||
| Here's a guy who owns a convenience store. | ||
| This is a wonderful man. | ||
| I worked on his defense on his trial. | ||
| Wonderful guy, worked as a cab driver, saved his money, worked nice in a warehouse, and he and his wife saved his money. | ||
| I bought a franchise for a convenience store in an inner city area. | ||
| He's a black guy. | ||
| He's working in a black district, and he's a really hardworking, good American guy. | ||
| And he's being robbed very often, robbed, technically means with force or fear, generally a stick-up, and being shoplifted all the time. | ||
| And his store is really having a hard time because of all this activity. | ||
| So one day there's a young guy in there, and he watches him, and the guy shoplifts a bunch of stuff, puts it in his knapsack, and tries to leave. | ||
| So the store owner goes and grabs him. | ||
| And they have a wrestling hustle there, and the shoplifter breaks away and runs outside. | ||
| Well, the shop owner, doing what most people would feel like doing, gets his gun from under the counter, gets in his car, and goes out looking for him. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| And he finds him. | ||
| So he gets out of his car and pulls the gun out and says, get in my car. | ||
| And he's going to take him back to the store. | ||
| Call the police. | ||
| All right, I'll tell you what. | ||
| We're going to have to finish this after the top of the hour. | ||
| So sit tight. | ||
| We'll be right back to you. | ||
| My guest is Alex Jason. | ||
| Interesting stuff, huh? | ||
| More of it coming up next hour. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
|
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You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks. | |
| Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 3, 1997. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM from February | ||
| Coast to Coast AM from February 3, 1997. | ||
| 3, 1997. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM from February 3, 1997. | ||
| You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| Life and Death Issues? | ||
| Alexander Jason is my guest. | ||
| He's a certified senior crime scene analyst, shooting incident reconstruction, forensic animation. | ||
| He's got a long, long history of work in law enforcement with a top in San Francisco. | ||
| I've consulted with CBS on the O.J. Simpson case. | ||
| He's a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Association of Forensic Reconstruction, International War Ballistics Association, the International Homicide Investigators Association. | ||
| And on and on and on and on. | ||
| A very long resume. | ||
| And we're talking about when you can and when you cannot use a gun or deadly force. | ||
| We'll get back to them in a moment. | ||
|
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We'll get back to them in a moment. | |
| Back now to Alex. | ||
| We will call him Jason by his permission. | ||
| And Alex, you're telling us about a friend who had a convenience store. | ||
| Well, this was a client, really. | ||
| Yeah, he had a convenience store in the inner city, and he had a lot of problems with the criminals of shoplifting and robbing of stores. | ||
| And the one shoplifter got away with some stuff, and he tried to stop him. | ||
| And ended up, the guy got away, so the store owner went and got a 38 from under the counter, got into his car, and went looking for him. | ||
| And he found the shoplifter a few blocks away. | ||
| He pulled the gun, ordered him to get in the car. | ||
| The shoplifter did. | ||
| And the store owner was trying to take him back to the store where he was going to call the police. | ||
| So he's now driving with the gun in his right hand. | ||
| The criminal sees it on his right in the passenger seat. | ||
| He's driving the knapsack where the stolen goods were in between them, between the seats. | ||
| And he comes to an intersection where he's trying to look to his left to clear the traffic. | ||
| And the shoplifter realizes it's a good time to get away. | ||
| So he pops the door open, grabs his bag, and starts to leave the car. | ||
| The store owner tries to grab for him with his right hand, in which the gun is, and he grabs part of the bag, and they custle back and forth. | ||
| And it's a long story, but one shot's fired. | ||
| The shoplifter runs away. | ||
| The store owner says, God, should I shoot myself, my hand, or my car, or the ceiling, or something? | ||
| No, he can't find any damage. | ||
| He knows the guy hasn't been hit because he just ran away like a deer. | ||
| So he drives back to his store. | ||
| Well, it turns out the guy ran around, the shoplifter ran around the corner and died. | ||
| He has been shot. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And so now he's arrested for murder and kidnapping, for forcing someone into this car. | ||
| Murder and kidnapping. | ||
| Kidnapping and murder. | ||
| What should he have done? | ||
| He went out, he found the guy. | ||
| What should he have done instead of what he did? | ||
| He should not have taken his gun with him to confront the shoplifter because there's no legal justification for using it. | ||
| It could only get him to trouble. | ||
| He might want to take the gun with him and go drive around looking for the guy just in case this fellow attacked him or something. | ||
| But to confront him with a gun and force him into the car, he's now guilty of kidnapping. | ||
| So he was tried for kidnapping and murder. | ||
| And he was found guilty of a manslaughter charge. | ||
| I forget what type, but he lost everything. | ||
| And now he's being sued civilly by the family. | ||
| Oh, brother. | ||
| All right, here's another case, a very interesting case. | ||
| Shop owners getting hit again and again and again and again, and he's getting real sick of it as they do. | ||
| So he's constantly got these little thugs coming through a skylight into his shop. | ||
| So he erects a little cage below the skylight where the bad guy jumps in. | ||
| Sure enough, the bad guy comes through the skylight, jumps down into the cage, and is promptly electrocuted. | ||
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Trap. | |
| Traps. | ||
| Are they legal? | ||
| No. | ||
| If you design a trap that is designed to kill someone or inflict serious injury, that in many states is a felony in and of itself, the fact that you constructed one, whether or not it's used. | ||
| You cannot do that. | ||
| Now, if someone climbed in, as many criminals do, they'll climb down a chimney or one of these ducks in a ceiling of a restaurant, for example, where the hot air comes out over the grill, and they get stuck in there and they die, well, that's a different thing. | ||
| But if you design something intentionally to kill someone, it's a very bad idea. | ||
| Not only because of the liability that you face, but also because firemen have to get in sometimes, or policemen, or other things can happen. | ||
| So it's a very bad idea, and it'll get you into big trouble. | ||
| Now, there's been cases where people have got away with it and so on, and you may get lucky if you do something like that, and someone will be sympathetic, but I wouldn't count on it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here is a fax. | ||
| I'm getting many of them. | ||
| You're creating a lot of interest. | ||
| It's from a lawyer. | ||
| Art, I'm a lawyer, intensively involved in firearms issues and self-defense, and I've got to disagree with your guess regarding talking to the police. | ||
| Besides, quote, I want to talk to my lawyer, end quote. | ||
| In the excitement of the moment, with the adrenaline pumping, it is very easy to say something you will no doubt regret later in either civil or criminal court unless you need to say something to preserve evidence. | ||
| In other words, the shooting is at a truck stop and a truck with your or your assailant's bullets is about to drive off. | ||
| It's better to spend a night arrested in jail than to spend the rest of your life in prison or paying off a civil verdict. | ||
| You know, what he says is very accurate. | ||
| He knows what he's talking about. | ||
| What I was saying is I'm giving you the general advice that if you don't talk, you might start something. | ||
| You may spend a night in the overnight in jail. | ||
| But he's right. | ||
| You may regret it if you're going to say a bunch of things. | ||
| I would say my advice for what I would do is I would give the minimum. | ||
| I would say I was asleep, I heard the guy come in, whatever, blah, blah, blah, and I shot him, and that's it, and try to keep it to a minimum. | ||
| Now, I know how this stuff works, so I would feel comfortable doing that. | ||
| If you're not, he's probably giving you good advice. | ||
| But sometimes that could hurt you. | ||
| You have to make your own decisions as to what happened and what you're going to do about it. | ||
| But I would listen to the attorney. | ||
| That's good advice. | ||
| But what you're suggesting is if you clam your mouth shut, demand a lawyer, the police are then naturally going to look at you as a suspect and they're going to begin in their minds building a case against you. | ||
| There is that possibility. | ||
| And that's, see, there are sort of mini-trials that happen along the way. | ||
| You know what the trial is, like the main trial where you're charged with murder. | ||
| But there's a little trial when the police get there. | ||
| They're going to vote on whether you're guilty or not guilty. | ||
| And then when the report is sent in to the detectives, they're going to vote on whether it takes further action or not against you. | ||
| And they are just going to go up to the district attorney's office, perhaps, and they're going to make a little mini trial. | ||
| Should we prosecute this guy or not? | ||
| Or what should we prosecute him on? | ||
| So you would like to avoid it at the bottom level. | ||
| And I'm saying, if what you did is clear, there's no problem with it, I think you should talk. | ||
| If you know what to say. | ||
| Well, if you know what to say. | ||
| And the attorney is absolutely right. | ||
| You can get yourself in big trouble by, and most people aren't trained at this sort of thing. | ||
| They can't rehearse this thing. | ||
| They're upset. | ||
| This is a very traumatic event. | ||
| And they may say things that will be against their interest. | ||
| So it's a very difficult subject because we're talking about individuals. | ||
| And I can give you advice, Art, if I know you well enough that might suit you, but it may not suit your brother or my brother or somebody else. | ||
| So it's a very difficult thing. | ||
| So when in doubt, you might want to do that. | ||
| Is there advice that you would give privately, Alex, that would differ from what you're able to say here publicly? | ||
| I assume there is some. | ||
| Well, to be frank, there might be. | ||
| But in general, anything that I would not encourage anybody to falsify things because it's so easy or it's so difficult to maintain the lie when you're not trained at doing that and you don't know what the police know or what they're going to look at or what kind of physical evidence is going to be left behind or what kind of witnesses there are. | ||
| For example, that store owner who had that incident where he shot the shoplifter, he made no statement. | ||
| So the police didn't know whether he just grabbed this guy in the street and killed him. | ||
| They didn't know anything about anything. | ||
| They didn't know he'd been in the store even. | ||
| Because he didn't make any statement. | ||
| Now, I don't know if that would have helped him or hurt him at the time, but the police had no other really alternative than to say, well, we have witnesses to say you pulled a gun on this guy, you put him in the car, and then the guy tried to get away and he shot him. | ||
| So that's could not be a murder. | ||
| So he had really no chance to get a lesser charges filed to begin with. | ||
| Whether or not he should have talked and said something is a very difficult, complicated legal strategy, and it could go any of many ways. | ||
| All right, well, while we're on the subject, here's another one. | ||
| Same thing, really. | ||
| This is Pat from Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota. | ||
| As a police officer at the scene of the shooting, I will take down every word you say, quote, and hope I get it all right, end quote, and use it against you. | ||
| In any shooting situation that you're involved in, shut your mouth, wait for your attorney before you say a word. | ||
| The police department is there for a prosecution, not for the defense. | ||
| Quote, just wait for your lawyer, end quote, and then there will be no chance your statement can be used against you. | ||
| Well, that's probably good advice. | ||
| And I guess I would amend my initial recommendation to say, if you are comfortable and you really understand the subject, and that's why I made this videotape called Deadly Force, Firearms, Self-Defense, and the Law, to educate people on this. | ||
| If you're really knowledgeable about it, you're comfortable and you know what happened, it was a clear case, then you might want to talk. | ||
| If there's any doubt in your mind, just say, look, I'm sorry, I just so upset, I just think I better talk to my attorney first. | ||
| Not the thing, well, I know my rights, and you can't make me talk, and I'm not just be cooperative. | ||
| I'm just so upset, I just think I should talk to my attorney. | ||
| That's the advice I was given, and I just think I should do it. | ||
| Something like that is probably the best approach. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here's my thinking. | ||
| Now, I may not be representative of the majority of the audience, but some of them at least. | ||
| I live way out in the country. | ||
| If somebody were to be coming after me or intent on doing me harm, and I were to call the police, I'm afraid that if I didn't own a gun and I was not able to protect myself, they would be able to get there in time to draw a nice chalk line around my body on the floor. | ||
| That's my attitude. | ||
| So that's why I own guns. | ||
| Is that a reasonable attitude? | ||
| Is it a reasonable conclusion? | ||
| The police do all they can, but 25 minutes, a half hour to respond, whatever. | ||
| They're going to do the best they can. | ||
| But as I said, they're going to get there in time to draw the chalk line around my body, and it won't matter to me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Your protection, your defense of your family and yourself is up to you. | ||
| The police are not required to defend you. | ||
| You can call them like people did in the L.A. riots and say, there's people out here trying to beat down my door, and they say, well, do the best you can. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| And you can't even sue them for that. | ||
| They've had court cases where they've been held that they're not individually responsible to anyone. | ||
| Do the best you can. | ||
| In other words, in a riot or in civil unrest, they are liable to tell you that. | ||
| They're busy. | ||
| Do the best you can. | ||
| See you later. | ||
| That's what they told people in L.A. who called and said, look, they're beating down the door. | ||
| They're trying to get in. | ||
| And they said, well, we can't send anybody out there. | ||
| We're sorry. | ||
| Do the best you can. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| That's what happened many times in the L.A. riots, which was caused by, if you'd like to go off on a little tangent here, in my opinion, by the police inaction, by the police failure to respond to the initial event. | ||
| They could have quelled that thing and had much less reaction. | ||
| But pulling out that idiotic, insane, pacifistic approach just taught these people that, hey, there's no police out here. | ||
| They have nothing to do with Rodney King. | ||
| I mean, a little bit. | ||
| But if you tell anybody, you go to any city and say, there'll be no police from 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock, and you see what happens no matter what political situation is going on, same thing will happen. | ||
| Are there areas in our major cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and you're being heard in all of these and many more, where the police, for all practical purposes, will not go? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| The police, most police are very dedicated, conscientious people. | ||
| And you hear about that, oh, the police won't even go in there. | ||
| Well, they will. | ||
| Sometimes they won't go in without a backup. | ||
| A guy by himself won't go in, and that's just being prudent. | ||
| But I don't think there's any place that police will definitely not go in. | ||
| If it's that bad, then they'll get 40 guys together and go in there and straighten it out. | ||
| So it isn't that bad. | ||
| But that's generally a myth. | ||
| Where gangs control turf, absolutely, in neighborhoods, that sort of thing. | ||
| Well, most police, if you have an area where the gangs are really heavy like that and they're starting to build up that kind of strength, they'll get together and have a task force and bring in the state police and whatever the other authorities and they'll go in there and really go after them. | ||
| I mean, you had a case like that. | ||
| It was Idaho or Montana with those free men. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And those guys kind of ran on their own for quite a while. | ||
| It was a one- or two-man department, and you couldn't handle against them. | ||
| But they finally put together enough power, and then they went in there and did it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Again, this will bear on my situation, not necessarily everybody's, but I'm in the country. | ||
| I'm fenced, and I'm posted. | ||
| And the local police department tells us out here, you must post your property with no trespassing signs. | ||
| What sort of protection does that afford? | ||
| Or legal precedent does that establish when you post? | ||
| You need to talk to a lawyer. | ||
| I can just talk about use of deadly force in terms of what I know, what has happened, how it really works as a policeman and as a... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's a technical issue, and I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But what I want people to know is when they have a gun for self-defense, the other issue, aside from when to use it legally, is to keep it... | ||
| If you have a gun in your home, you have a responsibility to keep it safe, not only from children, but from criminals. | ||
| Because that's a great source of weapons for criminals, is the weapons they steal from home. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So if you have a gun, you should have a safe, I mean a good safe. | ||
| And alternatively, a really good hiding place. | ||
| And I don't mean under your socks or under the pillow. | ||
| I mean a really good hiding place. | ||
| Because you have a responsibility to keep that gun out of the hands of criminals. | ||
| And if it's taken in a burglary, that's who's got it. | ||
| Because you've now armed a criminal. | ||
| And that gun's going to be in circulation. | ||
| So I want to encourage people to be responsible gun owners. | ||
| There's some new technology on the market. | ||
| I wonder how you feel about it. | ||
| I'm hearing about this new electronic something or another that knows what finger is on the trigger. | ||
| And if it's not the owner of the gun's finger, it won't fire. | ||
| I'd be a little edgy about that, and I'd want to really know that sucker would fire every time it felt my finger. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| Well, this has been around for quite a while. | ||
| There's something new, I know, but initially there's one called, I think it's called Magnet Sape or something like that, where this fellow near here, I live near the San Francisco area, and there's a fellow down here who invented this thing. | ||
| And it works, you wear a special ring. | ||
| And you might think of it as a magnet, and you have a magnet on your ring, excuse me, a ring that's a magnet. | ||
| And if that magnet is not sensed by the grip of the gun, you cannot fire it. | ||
| And I tried it and it works. | ||
| So he thought, well, I had this invention. | ||
| He got like the patent of the year from a bunch of associations. | ||
| He got awards from chiefs of police associations and stuff. | ||
| But nobody bought the darn thing. | ||
| Because when you need a gun, you need it, and you need it, it's got to work. | ||
| And you have enough problem with guns malfunctioning, even though they're great, expensive guns are well maintained for various reasons. | ||
| And to put another unknown factor in there is people are just really afraid of doing that. | ||
| Now, eventually, we'll have some sort of biosensing system where people know you by your smell or by some other, by an embedded chip in your hand or whatever. | ||
| And I suppose it'll work flawlessly. | ||
| But until you get something that's really reliable, you're going to have a hard time selling that. | ||
| But I think it's a good idea if it would work. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Mr. Bell, I am a police officer very much interested in shooting recreation in ballistics. | ||
| Could you ask Alex what courses or materials for research he would recommend for me to study? | ||
| Also, is your guest familiar with Dr. Martin Fackler's studies? | ||
| Martin Fackler, Dr. Fackler and I founded, we're co-founders of the International Wound Ballistics Association. | ||
| I worked with him for several years in the Army Research Lab at Letterman Institute doing wound ballistics research. | ||
| And he's really the modern day, he's changed wound ballistics, brought wound ballistics into the modern age. | ||
| And if any of your listeners are familiar with his works, you should regard him highly because he does know what he's talking about. | ||
| And yeah, I'm familiar with him, of course. | ||
| And if the officer was asking about shooting reconstruction, I don't know if he was asking about learning about shooting reconstruction in general. | ||
| Well, no, he wants to know what courses or materials for research he would recommend. | ||
| And here's an opportunity to give out a phone number for your video. | ||
| Yes, okay. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Well, I have actually three videos. | ||
| One called Deadly Weapons, Firearms, and Firepower. | ||
| One called Deadly Effects, Wound Ballistics, What Bullets Do to Bodies. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the third one is called Deadly Force, Firearms, Self-Defense, and the Law. | ||
| And each of them, they're $29.95. | ||
| And they're all over an hour. | ||
| I think average about 90 minutes. | ||
| And they're available from, I'll give you the phone numbers, 800-762-7233. | ||
| Is that a 24-hour number? | ||
| Yeah, that's 800-762-7233. | ||
| And these are used by police departments around the world. | ||
| Oh, they are? | ||
| Oh, yeah, the FBI uses them. | ||
| The CIA bought four of each of these things, except for the W Force one, but the technical ones they did. | ||
| All the police districts in England have them. | ||
| Hong Kong, I can't even think of them all. | ||
| All right, hold tight. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Alex Jason is my guest. | ||
| He is an expert, a certified senior crime scene analyst, and he'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks. | |
| Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 3, 1997. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM from February 3, 1997. | ||
| Don't say that you love me. | ||
| Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell somewhere in time. | ||
| Tonight's program originally aired February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| Alex Jason is my guest. | ||
| Top of the morning, everybody. | ||
| We'll go to the line shortly, so if you have a question, and I know a lot of you do, feel free to begin coming now. | ||
| The End All right, back now to Alex Jason in the San Francisco area. | ||
| Alex, a gazillion people here want to talk to you, and I have more questions, but let's quickly go to the phones and see what we've got. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Well. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I'm a police officer from Wisconsin. | |
| My first name is Chris. | ||
| Yes, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know everyone has a question or a comment. | |
| And I wanted to say I think we should illustrate to the listeners that owning a gun is a responsibility and that we have to take an effective police officers are trained on how to use a gun. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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And in incidents that we do use a gun, we're trained in that. | |
| And people shouldn't just go out and buy a gun and buy this video and say, okay, this guy's next to my house. | ||
| I should use a gun. | ||
| Because people don't know how to use guns. | ||
| And they're going to hurt themselves or their family members. | ||
| And it was just a safety factor. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I take it. | ||
| You're not an advocate, then, of the general public owning guns. | ||
|
unidentified
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I am, but I think they should be trained. | |
| My kids, for example, I've taken them out. | ||
| I've shown them how to use a gun. | ||
| I've shown them how to respect the gun. | ||
| And it's a tool that police officers use, but many people don't realize the magnitude of power they're holding. | ||
| Well, I absolutely agree with you, officer. | ||
| And Alex, I did the same thing. | ||
| When my son was about eight years old, nine maybe, I took him out, because I've got guns in the house, and I let him shoot at some targets. | ||
| As a matter of fact, you know, water bottles, that kind of thing, plastic water bottles. | ||
| And he was so impressed with what a gun was, that never, ever was he tempted to ever touch one in the home. | ||
| In other words, he knew from that moment on exactly what a gun really was. | ||
| Good advice? | ||
| Well, it sounds like you did the right thing, and you handled it correctly. | ||
| I agree with the officer. | ||
| It's a responsibility. | ||
| I don't encourage everyone to have a firearm. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| If you have doubts about whether you can use it, how to use it, whether you're going to be able to safeguard it, you shouldn't have a gun. | ||
| Don't. | ||
| Just let someone else have a gun. | ||
| But don't do it if you're not sure about it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's move away from the gun for a second. | ||
| Well, just one other thing, Arthur May. | ||
| When people talk about training, they always say, oh, you need training. | ||
| You can hurt yourself. | ||
| Well, yeah, training in how to handle the gun, how to shoot it, and how to safeguard it is important. | ||
| But the thing that's never mentioned is when you can use it and when you cannot use it. | ||
| That's just, strangely, taboo subject. | ||
| But that's what I'm really interested in. | ||
| But I think the other side is important, as Jostra said. | ||
| No, I think it's a very good point. | ||
| Art, please ask your guest about using a baseball bat on an intruder in your home. | ||
| Also, I once heard an expert on self-defense recommend using an oven cleaner spray on an intruder's face. | ||
| In other words, I guess a baseball bat can be, if it kills, a deadly weapon, as can a gun. | ||
| But is there a distinction? | ||
| Well, the distinction in terms of legal use, you really shouldn't count on things like that if you're serious about defending yourself. | ||
| If someone breaks in, that's all it's handy, fine. | ||
| But you have to understand, I could face someone with a baseball bat, but all you do is rush the person. | ||
| You have to get, to use a baseball bat, you have to get within three feet, your arm's length in the tip of the bat. | ||
| So you're placing yourself in quite a danger. | ||
| And in a house, you can't swing it very well. | ||
| You may get one swing which may hit the guy's shoulder, and then he's on top of you, and he's got the baseball bat. | ||
| So I don't think that's a really great effective tool. | ||
| You'd rather have the gun. | ||
| I would rather have a gun. | ||
| I'd rather have my my grandmother who can't swing a a 357 Smith Wesson to stop the car by shooting the engine to limit their means of flight? | ||
| You are not. | ||
| Don't ever do that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Don't even think about it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You're using deadly force, and all that's going to be considered is you shot the guy and you missed. | ||
| Well, what if you do hit his engine? | ||
| Well, what if you do and it stops? | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| But now, you may be a hero. | ||
| I mean, the way things may turn out. | ||
| But what if you miss that? | ||
| What if it ricochets off the hood and hits some innocent bystander? | ||
| You're getting into a real big territory here. | ||
| You're exposing yourself to great personal liability for what? | ||
| To prevent a criminal from getting away. | ||
| If he's a threat, if he's a maniac guy with a machine gun mowing down people, well, okay. | ||
| But I don't recommend that. | ||
| And besides, a 357 Magnum is not going to penetrate an engine block, in spite of what you hear and see. | ||
| And that's one of the things I did in my deadly weapons tape. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| I take an engine block, and I say, here's an engine, here's a 357 Magnum with armor-piercing bullets, and I fire at the engine block. | ||
| And then I show a little mark on the side of the cast iron and wipe it away. | ||
| And it's just absolute nonsense. | ||
| There's so much misinformation about guns and ballistics and wound ballistics. | ||
| That's one of the reasons I made this deadly weapons tape to show what guns will penetrate, how a bullet will penetrate glass or car doors or tires and gas tanks. | ||
| One of the things we did is we took a gas tank half filled with fuel and shot it with all kinds of weapons. | ||
| Does it explode into flames? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's a Hollywood thing. | ||
| Why were black talon bullets pulled off the market? | ||
| For political reasons. | ||
| What is a black talon? | ||
| The black talon is a particularly good design of a hollow point bullet, that's all. | ||
| And it just, it's a method that they found that would retain the jacket and the bullet core together. | ||
| Very often a hollow point will come apart when it hits a target or person or something else. | ||
| And then because it now has less mass, because it's broken up or separated the jacket and the core, it won't penetrate as far, reducing the effectiveness. | ||
| So it was just a way of manufacturing the bullet. | ||
| But because it became press picked up as a killer-diller bullet, they had to ban it. | ||
| But the truth is, it's still out there. | ||
| They just changed the name. | ||
| Yeah, but I just don't understand the psychology here. | ||
| In other words, if you have a gun and you have bullets in it, and you have to use it to defend yourself with deadly force, then you want it to be as deadly as possible. | ||
| And I don't see how you get kinder, more gentle bullets. | ||
| Well, you're absolutely right. | ||
| Isn't it silly? | ||
| They say, well, these bullets are very damaging. | ||
| They're very hurtful. | ||
| Well, yes, that's what they're supposed to do. | ||
| Yes, that's kind of the general idea. | ||
| We had Clinton said something, well, we shouldn't have bullets like this around. | ||
| Well, okay, what kind of bullets do I got? | ||
| Blanks? | ||
| Well, what's the alternative? | ||
| Oh, it's just silliness that the press jumps on, and the average public that don't understand these issues read the headlines and agree with it. | ||
| It's very silly, as you pointed out. | ||
| Yes, all right. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, from Columbia, South Carolina, with a wildcard question. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Bell, you live out on the sticks. | |
| You're about, what, a half an hour response time from the Deputy Sheriff? | ||
| Well, I guess it would depend on where the patrol car is, but that's a good guess if they had to come all the way up. | ||
|
unidentified
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And your home is posted, no trespasses. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm there. | |
| I'm knocking on your door. | ||
| You refuse to answer the door. | ||
| You don't want to open the door to me. | ||
| You tell me to go away, and I refuse. | ||
| And then you pull your gun on me. | ||
| And I want to know what Mr. Jason thinks my rights are to self-defense if you're pulling your gun on me. | ||
| All right, that's a good question. | ||
| There he is at my door. | ||
| He's outside the house. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, outside the house, not attempting to enter, and there is a second part to this question. | |
| And I just want you to bring this point up because I do carry a gun. | ||
| I carry a 357 Magnum revolver with black Talon. | ||
| And I go to people's houses uninvited, unasked, and unwelcome for a living. | ||
| Are you a burglar? | ||
| Are you a burglar? | ||
| Are you a burglar or a salesman? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no, I'm a process server. | |
| you probably know what we're going to have a lot of time I'm all for it. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| What authority does he have? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm an agent of the court. | |
| As a law enforcement officer, I cannot arrest you, but I am there serving a subpoena, a rule-to-show cause, a summons, or some other document of the court. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it is not trespassing, and I have. | ||
| All right, I've got you. | ||
| So there you are at my door. | ||
| I pull a gun on you. | ||
| No, this is a situation where it gets very technical because he's a process server. | ||
| If he's just a guy, a salesman, let's take away your status as a process server because that's a different situation. | ||
| I really can't comment on it. | ||
| It's a very, very unusual one, very specific. | ||
| But let's say you're a salesman, and let's say a salesman comes to my house, and I say, go away, I don't want your thing. | ||
| And he keeps talking. | ||
| So I bring out my gun and I point at him through the screen door, let's say. | ||
| I say, get out of here. | ||
| I think I would be in trouble. | ||
| Now, this is you better check local laws. | ||
| But I wanted to mention something to your listeners before we all come back to it, but how they can find out about this, these kind of laws and things. | ||
| But that's a bad idea. | ||
| You don't bring a gun out unless your life is threatened or someone's life is threatened. | ||
| Okay, but his question was, what are his rights to self-defense once I have pointed a gun at him? | ||
| Okay, now the question is going to be, as he's a salesman or whatever, what were you doing there where I was trying to sell something? | ||
| And the guy tells you to go away, and you didn't go away, and he pulled his gun out. | ||
| Now, if you legitimately felt and you can prove, and you're prepared to demonstrate that you had a reasonable fear that your life was in danger, then you may be able to claim that self-defense where you shot this guy before he shot you. | ||
| But if he's just pointing a gun saying, hey, if you don't get out of here, I'll shoot you. | ||
| I don't think you can shoot him because you're not being threatened. | ||
| Your life is in imminent danger. | ||
| It comes down to the same thing. | ||
| If your life is in imminent danger. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Second part of your Question, Color. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the second part had to do with just please tell your guests that just because I am an unwelcome visitor, you don't have the right to shoot me. | |
| If you present a gun, I will run. | ||
| But instead of just getting a subpoena to appear as a witness in court, which you don't want, you're going to wind up having me come back with the deputy sheriff, and you're going to wind up going to jail for threatening me. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| Anybody, a salesman or a process server, you don't pull a gun unless your life is threatened. | ||
| And a process server, I guess you're going to have to let him in because he's just more powers than the police in some aspects. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not going to come in. | |
| I'm just not going to leave until you... | ||
| If you're in guard about who this guy is, you want him off there, call the police. | ||
| I'm curious, Color, do you like your job? | ||
|
unidentified
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I like, yes, because those deadbeat dads out there, that's quite satisfying, catching up with somebody that hasn't paid child support for three years and finally handing them the court order where they're going to have to do it. | |
| Well, I was confusing you with a bounty hunter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| You're a process server, right? | ||
| Okay, a process server. | ||
| No, good grief. | ||
| People will get real mad at them when they come and they pick you up refusing a subpoena. | ||
| But no, do not point a gun at them to scare them or anything else. | ||
|
unidentified
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I never have. | |
| If they point one at me, I will run. | ||
| All right, good enough. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Now, now, I want to ask you, and you stumbled or we stumbled into this one, what are the laws regarding bounty hunting? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I know that they have the right to, they can break down your door and all sorts of things, but I'm not an expert. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| Where does the legal support for such a thing come from? | ||
| You might talk to someone who's more qualified than I, but my understanding is that you sign it away. | ||
| When you get a bail bond from that agency, you sign an agreement saying, I'm letting these people come into my home anytime, day or night, unannounced. | ||
| They can search through my stuff if I don't show up. | ||
| So you've already agreed to this, and then they're serving a warrant from the court's arrest warrant, their failure to appear. | ||
| So they have a lot of powers, but it's a very unique situation. | ||
| That's what I was describing, the processor, Mr. Dennis. | ||
| Nice, yes, very interesting. | ||
| So as a police officer, have you ever run into a bounty hunter doing his job? | ||
| I think, yeah, I did. | ||
| It wasn't a real unusual character like you see, these guys look like bikers. | ||
| It was just some guy in a suit, casually dressed, sport coat and tie, and he looked like a cop, actually, and he just wanted some backup. | ||
| But they're serving warrants, which are issued by the court, and the policeman has to essentially assist them, really, when they have a valid warrant for arrest. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| I'm a guard from Kentucky. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And no one's touching the base is on equal force here. | |
| You know, the use of deadly force, before you can use deadly force, you better think of equal force. | ||
| Well, not really. | ||
| In terms of if your life is in danger, it doesn't have to be He says, I want to kill you, and he's advancing towards you. | ||
| You can take out a 12-gauge shotgun. | ||
| That's not equal, but you can use that if that's the situation. | ||
|
unidentified
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But you have a protection-trained German shepherd. | |
| I know not everybody does, but would you rather you could use that instead of taking somebody's life? | ||
| Well, yes, if you had another alternative method, that's what I mean. | ||
| The central point of what I'm trying to convey to all your listeners is that you can only use deadly force if there's no other alternative. | ||
| That's the way to keep safe. | ||
| If you can say, look, I tried to get away, I tried to move over here, I tried to block him from coming in, whatever, and this is my last resort. | ||
| If you can convey that effect, that I didn't want to shoot him, and my dog wouldn't attack him when I told him to, or whatever, you tried everything else, then you're going to be generally in very safe ground. | ||
| Well, yeah, you get down to the point where, you know, that fellow seemed to be saying, if somebody's coming at you with a knife, use a knife. | ||
| You can't use a gun. | ||
| That's silly. | ||
| In a knife fight, I'd much rather have a gun. | ||
| and i don't know i think that's reasonable i i mean the deal going on Yeah, horrible as a potential court case or civil case may be, it sure beats being under the ground. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you make your own decisions, but you have to I want everyone to realize the consequences of what they do, that there are terrible penalties, and I'm talking about criminal and civil. | ||
| You have to go to civil court and being sued is a horrible thing. | ||
| Even if you're totally right, it's going to cost you a bundle. | ||
| It's a terrible situation, but that's the way it is. | ||
| All right. | ||
| West of the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| This is Renee from Spokane, Washington. | ||
| Hello, Renee. | ||
| Hi, Renee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I have a concealed weapons permit, and I carry a Glock 9mm. | ||
| If I'm driving through town at night, and I come up to a red light and someone gets in my car and threatens rape, what kind of rights do I have there as far as protecting myself with my gun? | ||
| Good question. | ||
| Good question. | ||
| Now, generally, as I mentioned, the police, let's say you shoot this fellow. | ||
| The police, in a situation like this, are generally very sympathetic to you. | ||
| They see that you were out of citizens and you're coming home from work, and this is a guy who had no business getting in your car. | ||
| You don't know him. | ||
| And now, let's say you shot and killed him. | ||
| So it's your story versus the physical evidence. | ||
| If the physical evidence is consistent with what you said, then there's no witnesses or witnesses who agree with what you say, then that's pretty much it. | ||
| You can generally use deadly force to protect yourself in that situation where you're in a car alone and a guy gets in. | ||
| And then depending on what he says, generally. | ||
| But, well, I'd say generally you can use a gun. | ||
| But you might first, if this was possible, that you had the gun out and you said, get out of the car. | ||
| And then he didn't. | ||
| And he moved towards you, then you shot him. | ||
| That would be generally justifiable. | ||
| And I can't talk about the laws in your state and so on and what will happen in your particular aspect. | ||
| But if a woman driving alone and someone gets into the car and threatens rape, you can generally use a gun in self-defense. | ||
|
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Yeah, and another thing I would be worried about there is if I didn't pull the gun and he found it later. | |
| You know, if I let him move me from one area to another. | ||
| Well, that's, yes, you should not let him do that. | ||
| And I would counsel people. | ||
| I've told my child, if you're walking down the street and someone pulls up in a car and pulls a gun on you and says, get in the car, don't get in the car. | ||
|
unidentified
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Rush. | |
| He probably will not shoot you because he doesn't want to attract attention and you're gone now. | ||
| He might, but if you get in the car, you consider your chances of dying are very high. | ||
| So just run. | ||
| Scream like a buddy bird and run and zigzag as you're running away. | ||
| And that probably will be much better than getting in the car. | ||
| So you're right about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| All right. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And it brings up another question. | ||
| And that is, the way the law will look at an incident of that sort in a car with a woman versus a man, a difference? | ||
| Yeah, there's a difference. | ||
| There always is. | ||
| I mean, if you're a little 85-pound old woman in a wheelchair and some big six-foot-to-gotten to make things extreme, she can get away a lot more than you can. | ||
| They're going to say to you, well, why didn't you run away? | ||
| Or why didn't you punch him? | ||
| Or whatever you could have done. | ||
| But someone who's clearly at a disadvantage, they'll be much more sympathetic to. | ||
| Even in the situation at home, for example, somebody's breaking into the home. | ||
| A woman is home alone. | ||
| They're going to look at her shooting somebody in a different way than they are a man, aren't they? | ||
| Yes, not legally, but not in terms of the statutes, but in terms of human nature, yes, they are. | ||
| But remember, at home, a man or a woman, anybody, if you're in your home, you are a sacred person. | ||
| And generally the law respects that. | ||
| So if you're home, mining your business, someone's breaking in, you have very good grounds for using steady force. | ||
| You can show that your life was threatened, or you felt that your life was threatened. | ||
| Although a person in your situation would have a reasonable fear like that. | ||
| And once again, on your videotapes, you interview criminals who break into homes, and they say their greatest fear is somebody inside having a gun. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They describe what happens and how they felt and what happens when they encounter people like that. | ||
| And they don't forget that. | ||
| Even one guy said, I went to this house and it had a little sticker on the door that said, this house protected by Smith and Wesson. | ||
| He said, so I thought first there might be guns in there, but I thought, nah, I better not, because if there's a guy in there, he'll probably shoot me. | ||
| So he went on to the house next door. | ||
| So what do you tell people about stickers like that? | ||
| I've seen those. | ||
| This house protected by Smith and Wesson. | ||
| Good idea? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't put them on my door. | ||
| I just, I don't know. | ||
| I'd rather sort of keep the lower purple. | ||
| I'll have a good steel door with a good lock on it and a good door frame instead of putting stuff up like that. | ||
| But I've also suggested to other people who don't like guns and don't think anybody else should have guns to put a sign on their door since there are no guns in this house. | ||
| You might as well also paint a big target there. | ||
| Jewels inside with a big arrow flashing or something. | ||
| All right, Jason, hold on. | ||
| We're at the top of the arrow. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Alex Jason, actually, my guest, will be right back. | ||
|
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Alex Jason, actually, my guest, will be right back. | |
| Alex Jason, actually, my guest, will be right back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks. | ||
| Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| And I know some of you are joining us at this hour. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You've missed two very, very good hours. | ||
| My guest is Alex Jason. | ||
| Alexander Jason Ashley. | ||
| A very, very long resume. | ||
| A complete resume. | ||
| He is a professional, in every sense of the word, a certified senior crime scene analyst, a qualified expert witness in crime scene reconstruction, shooting incident reconstruction, wound ballistics, and forensic animation in federal and state courts. | ||
| California, Washington, Colorado, West Virginia, Alaska, and Maryland. | ||
| His professional memberships include the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, the Association of Crime Scene Reconstruction, International Wound Ballistics Association, the International Homicide Investigators Association. | ||
| He was a San Francisco investigator, policeman, the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts, International Association for Identification, Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners, a technical advisor, and the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers. | ||
| And I could go on reading for pages. | ||
| And we've been talking about generally when you can and when you cannot use deadly force. | ||
| I think you'll find it absolutely fascinating. | ||
| Stay right where you are. | ||
| He'll be right back. | ||
| All right, before anybody else asks it, since the focus of Alex's work, professional work, is crime scene analysis and shooting incident reconstruction, his area of specialty is the science of wound ballistics, Which relates to the use of firearms against humans and specifically to the interaction of projectiles in the human body. | ||
| The following question I will ask before one of you asks it. | ||
| And it is inevitable, Alex, the assassination of President Kennedy. | ||
| This has got to be right smack dab in the middle of your area of expertise. | ||
| Though you may not have worked on the case, maybe you did. | ||
| What is your opinion? | ||
| Well, I did work on a case in recent years for the NOVA program and for the American Bar Association. | ||
| We actually shot Cadavers show. | ||
| You know, I saw that NOVA show, by the way. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| And I really sort of hesitate getting into this because I find it's more like a religion now than a question of what happened. | ||
| I know, but we've got to ask. | ||
| Yeah, well, to tell you the truth, Oswald did it, and there's nothing in the evidence that's inconsistent with the 6.5mm Cartano, Roniker-Cortano bullet, which is a very unusual bullet in itself. | ||
| And there's so much nonsense written. | ||
| So a lot of people say, well, that couldn't have happened because this happened because I read this and I read that. | ||
| Well, what you read is probably not true. | ||
| There's just so many things that aren't true in that. | ||
| It was fired. | ||
| It was Oswald from the Schoolbook Depository, and that's it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Good answer. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Hello, Mr. Jason, and hello, Mr. Bell. | ||
| Hi, where are you, sir? | ||
|
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My name is Ethan, and I live in Van Huyves, California. | |
| All right. | ||
| My question isn't exciting as yours, Mr. Bell, but I just have a question for Mr. Jason. | ||
| This is just a curious question. | ||
| Is there any laws regarding blowing out an attacker's kneecap? | ||
| Well, okay, what you're saying is, can I shoot to wound? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Essentially. | ||
| And well, that is that, there's really, there's no legal difference in shooting to wound or shooting to kill. | ||
| Using deadly force is using deadly force. | ||
| Whether you shot him in the kneecap or you shot him in the head or you shot him in the hand, makes a difference legally as far as whether you're allowed to use the gun. | ||
| So it's not a situation you say, well, I know I wasn't allowed to use deadly force because my life wasn't threatened, so I just shot him in the knee. | ||
| That will not work. | ||
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Okay, so but if you are threatened, you can't shoot them in the kneecap. | |
| And I know in some cases, if you shoot them in the kneecap, they'll lose their leg from the knee down. | ||
| Well, here's the problem with what you're saying. | ||
| There's a lot of talk like that at the gun range, and people are always coming up with strategies like that. | ||
| But the problem is, first of all, if you do that and the police arrive and you say, well, you know, I shot him in the kneecap because I knew I would stop him and I wouldn't kill him. | ||
| If you have that presence of mind to think about what you're doing and to carefully aim and hit a narrow little thing like a kneecap, then they're going to question whether or not you really need to shoot this guy. | ||
| Was this such an extreme, sudden event with your life in imminent danger? | ||
| And you said, I think I'll shoot him in the kneecap. | ||
| It's not going to look good. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| And the kneecap is very easy to miss. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Here, let me ask you this, and hopefully you'll give a good, honest answer. | ||
| And that is, if you're in a situation where you've got to use deadly force, got to use a gun, are you better off killing them? | ||
| You know, I know that's a really hard question, but frankly, aren't you more likely to end up in court paying out to this person for the rest of their life if you just wound them? | ||
| Is there anything to that? | ||
| Well, first of all, let me answer your question backwards for just a second. | ||
| Assuming it's a good shoot. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Whether or not the person is killed or not, if you kill them, you're probably going to have more suits because all the relatives will get involved. | ||
| Oh, boy, this is our chance to make some big money here. | ||
| So just from what I've seen, that's sort of the way it goes. | ||
| But remember this. | ||
| You're not trying to kill anybody. | ||
| You are trying to prevent a crime from occurring. | ||
| You're trying to protect your life. | ||
| That's what you're doing. | ||
| You're not trying to kill people. | ||
| You're trying to protect a life, your own or someone else's. | ||
| Well, yes, but the presumption of that question is that is what you're doing. | ||
| Now, it goes back to what this caller said about the kneecap shot. | ||
| In other words, if you're a good enough shot that you could disable him by taking out his knee, should you do that or should you shoot to kill? | ||
| Well, you really shouldn't define it that way because in a real emergency event where you're going to use deadly force, you're lucky to hit the guy at all. | ||
| And you should aim for the center of mass, not because that's the most deadly spot. | ||
| That gives you the best hit probability. | ||
| Because you're going to be very nervous. | ||
| Things are moving quickly. | ||
| He's moving. | ||
| You're moving. | ||
| You just want to get some shots there to stop him from attacking you or stop him from doing what he's doing. | ||
| Prevent him from shooting you or stabbing you or whatever you're trying to do. | ||
| And that is, you just shoot. | ||
| You don't think about I'm going to wound him. | ||
| I'm going to kill him. | ||
| And if you do, if you have that presence of mind, don't say that. | ||
| When the police get there, you say, I shot him. | ||
| I don't know where I hit him in the knee, whatever. | ||
| You don't say, you know, I thought I just hit him in the knee. | ||
| Because I know that I can kill him. | ||
| So I thought that sounds like you're some kind of nut. | ||
| This is kind of weird where you're picking your shots or something. | ||
| the guy threatened my life and I shot him. | ||
| What about the great I can't remember the guy's name just offhand right now, and it'll come back to me. | ||
| The subway in New York. | ||
| Yeah, Bernie Ghetz. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The Ghetz case. | ||
| How did you look at that one? | ||
| I mean, he claims he was threatened with whatever it was, a screwdriver or something or another, a knife, whatever. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Now, here's a guy who really got himself into trouble by talking. | ||
| Instead of just saying, they threatened me, they came around me, they were surrounding me, they pulled the screwdriver, and I knew they were going to stab me, and I shot them. | ||
| He said, he told the whole story. | ||
| He was a man. | ||
| He was fed up. | ||
| He'd been beaten up before. | ||
| He'd been threatened. | ||
| He was fed up. | ||
| And he told the police on videotape. | ||
| I saw some of this work. | ||
| And I hated these guys. | ||
| And after I shot the one guy, he said, oh, you need another one, buddy. | ||
| And how about you? | ||
| You don't look hurt that bad. | ||
| That's what really hurt him. | ||
| Sunk his case. | ||
| So that's the kind of thing you want to avoid. | ||
| And if you shoot somebody in a situation where you have to, you don't discuss the stuff about that. | ||
| And I said if he ever did anything to me, I'd get him. | ||
| I knew where he lived, and this is, I thought it was him. | ||
| You get all these involved stories, and you're starting to think, oh, this is some kind of a feud going on. | ||
| And if the guy laying on your kitchen floor is a criminal, who's known to be a criminal, or just not known to anybody, that's one thing. | ||
| If he's your brother-in-law, or he's a next-door neighbor, or he's your wife's ex-boyfriend, there's a whole different story here going on. | ||
| A whole different criteria got to be used. | ||
| So what you say when the police arrive really is of prime importance. | ||
| Just keep it to the minimum. | ||
| Don't tell them what kind of ammunition you have. | ||
| Oh, I only use black talents because I know they're the best. | ||
| I only use this, and I have my super duper at night sights here, and I saw him when he was coming in the window. | ||
| I waited just until I got a good shot of it. | ||
| You just say, you tell the truth, which is if you're going to shoot somebody, it's because your life is threatened. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, all right. | |
| This has done in Campbell, California. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I was interested to hear him talk about the black talon, which is a particularly nasty bullet that, as it opens up, it produces several very sharp points that basically go through the person cutting or animal or whatever it is cutting things up. | |
| And I think the worst part of the bullet was its name. | ||
| If you use that in a self-defense situation, you're going to have very serious civil liability problems. | ||
| Yeah, if they'd called it a pink talent, it probably would have been fine. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's exactly right. | |
| But, you know, on the subject of bullets, like choice of ammunition, I'm wondering if the guest has a recommendation, for example, like the Corbin hollow points or something else as he would choose. | ||
| True, we really have not talked about guns specifically. | ||
| Alex, do you have any suggestions for the average homeowner? | ||
| Yeah, well, I could just say this. | ||
| Look, all the stuff about bullets and this bullet and that bullet, and you get into all this manuscript and you read gun magazines, you're really going down the wrong path. | ||
| The difference between bullets, a basic bullet design, is very little, and whether black talent is going to do more than a silver tip or so on, there's very little difference. | ||
| What you want is a bullet that penetrates deeply. | ||
| And that is a bullet that has a lot of mass to it and will stay together. | ||
| And a black talent is a good bullet. | ||
| I mean, I'm not selling anything or promoting any of them. | ||
| But don't get caught up in this stuff. | ||
| Your brain doesn't know the difference between a black talent and a gray talent or a bullet that severs your spinal cord is going to be a bullet that severs your spinal cord. | ||
| You're going to fall down, and that's it. | ||
| It doesn't matter what kind of bullet it is or anything else. | ||
| So it's not that important. | ||
| I mean, should you pick the best thing available? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it's not like this bullet won't hurt someone and this one will. | ||
| There's very little difference once you have a basic functioning bullet. | ||
| Well, I think there's two things you consider, right? | ||
| Mass and velocity. | ||
| Okay, velocity is not important in wounding. | ||
| And with handgun bullets, is one of the greatest myths that velocity has anything to do with it. | ||
| You want low velocity, not high velocity. | ||
| High velocity causes bullets to come apart. | ||
| And if you get a high enough velocity, there have been tests with bullets like 8,000 feet per second. | ||
| These are in special laboratory situations. | ||
| And what happens when a bullet hits tissue is it just breaks up and blows up essentially. | ||
| So it makes a very nasty surface wound, but it won't do anything to the vital organs which are deep inside. | ||
| So the more velocities you get, the more distortion of the bullet you're going to get, flattening out and breakup of the bullet, and it won't penetrate as far because you get too much frontal area and then it increases the drag. | ||
| So you want a bullet, actually a 38 is better than a 357. | ||
| A lot of people out there, I know they're right now jumping out of their chairs, thinking I'm crazy. | ||
| You want a nice low velocity, like a 38, 158 grain lead hollow point. | ||
| Something that will go thump. | ||
| Something that goes in, into the body, goes through an arm and into the body for self-defense purposes. | ||
| Not something that's going to break up like these real fast bullets. | ||
| You don't want fast bullets. | ||
| You don't want the fastest bullet. | ||
| They're counterproductive. | ||
| What about the difference between a handgun, say a 38, and a 12-gauge shotgun? | ||
| Oh, well, there's a whole different story there. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| But we're talking about home protection here. | ||
| Well, home protection, I mean, you can use either one. | ||
| It's just the shotgun's more difficult to walk around with. | ||
| It could be grabbed and you're going in a corner, that sort of thing. | ||
| But that's our individual choice. | ||
| But the 12-gauge shotgun is a very devastating weapon. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| I'm surprised the gun grabbers haven't gone after the shotgun yet. | ||
| They've gone after semi-automatics. | ||
| Depicting them in the media, of course, as automatic weapons. | ||
| God, that makes me mad to see that. | ||
| But the shotgun is really so effective, I'm surprised they haven't figured out a way to go after them. | ||
| They will. | ||
| Oh, you think they will? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| All right, here's a question from a listener. | ||
| Facts. | ||
| Another Jason. | ||
| And he asks, if I'm in a situation in which I'm being pinned down by my assailant, and I'm in possession of a firearm, would it be legal for me to shoot him? | ||
| And if so, where? | ||
| Well, it doesn't matter where you shoot him. | ||
| I mean, if you're allowed to use deadly force, you're allowed to use deadly force. | ||
| All right, he's pinned down. | ||
| Now, the question is, where are you, though? | ||
| In your bedroom? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, there's a scene that we have in this Deadly Force tape where a woman's in her bedroom, and a guy comes in, sneaks in the house. | ||
| And then she hears him, and she gets her gun, and the guy comes back in the bedroom. | ||
| There she is trying to call the police, but he walks over to her. | ||
| Now, he says to her, she points to the guy and says, get out. | ||
| What are you doing here? | ||
| He says, I'm sorry, I'm in the wrong house. | ||
| And she says, well, get out. | ||
| He says, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| Don't get carried away. | ||
| She says, get out, get out. | ||
| She's pointing the gun, and he says, look, you can't shoot me. | ||
| I haven't done anything. | ||
| What are you going to shoot me for? | ||
| I'm not threatening you. | ||
| And we have a whole discussion of this kind of a case. | ||
| Well, if he advances, continues to advance, then she can make the assumption that he is now in the commission of a robbery, that he intends to take the gun away from her. | ||
| You don't have to wait until the person comes and takes the gun from you and aims it at you for your life to be threatened. | ||
| So a situation like that where you're at home, if you're pinned down, yes, you can certainly shoot somebody or even before that. | ||
| But this is in your house. | ||
| Now, I'm not talking about a street, a barfight or something. | ||
| Different situation out in the street. | ||
| You can only show if your life is in danger. | ||
| Another scenario in the Deadly Force tape where a guy's in the alley walking along. | ||
| We have various scenarios with these two slime balls who harass him and then do different things. | ||
| And there's one case in there where his life is threatened and other ones where he isn't. | ||
| But I'll mention one thing. | ||
| There's one scenario we have where the guy's hassled by these slime balls and he pulls the guy and says, get back. | ||
| And they say, hey, man, don't shoot, don't shoot, okay, man, okay. | ||
| And they back up. | ||
| So he gets back in his car and he leaves. | ||
| But what do the slime balls do? | ||
| They say, hey, man, this guy has no right to be pulling a gun. | ||
| That's what he's doing carrying a gun. | ||
| Let's call the police. | ||
| And they give his rights number and they call the police. | ||
| And this happens. | ||
| And then what will happen is he is going to get, there's going to be a big felony car stop on this poor citizen who just tries to keep the slime balls away from him. | ||
| So in a situation like that, what you do, if you had to pull your gun, which I don't recommend unless you really needed to, then you go and you call the police first. | ||
| Don't let them call the police on you. | ||
| It'll make a whole big difference if you call, because otherwise they're going to make a felony car stop at you on the freeway. | ||
| Pretty sad. | ||
| I mean, in a way, then the criminals, because they have been through the justice system, might know how to better manipulate it in their favor than you would as a just honest citizen who's never encountered anything before. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| That's sick. | ||
| In fact, it leads to this question. | ||
| In most cases and states, if you're in your car, it's treated just as if you're in your house. | ||
| Is that true or not? | ||
| I don't know what most states do. | ||
| I just give the general guideline that if your life is in danger. | ||
| But let me point out something that's really interesting. | ||
| If anybody out there is really interested in learning the specifics, which you can only learn in your state, the way to do it, I spell out in the W. Force tape, is to get the jury instructions, the criminal jury instructions that are available in any law library. | ||
| There's a set of them. | ||
| And let me just read, I have some here from California. | ||
| Well, we're hitting the bottom of the arrow, but what you're saying is that learn what judges tell juries in cases. | ||
| Specifically about different scenarios to show you this is what the jury's going to be ruling on this deed, the ideas in this verdict. | ||
| All right, get that out. | ||
| And after the bottom of the hour, we will give you an example. | ||
| So stand by for that, everybody. | ||
| My guest is Alex Jason, and he'll be right back. | ||
|
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You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| You don't have to shout all things about, you can even play them easy. | ||
| Forget about the past and all your sorrows. | ||
| The future won't last, it will soon be your tomorrow. | ||
| I don't ask the words, I only want to stand, no, it don't come easy. | ||
| And the cup of ice keeps growing all the time, and you know it just ain't easy. | ||
| Open up your heart, let's go together. | ||
| You lose all this good hope that we... | ||
| You're listening to Artfeld Somewhere in Time tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| Tell you something, folks. | ||
| Great radio ain't made. | ||
| just happened. | ||
| All right, back now to my guest, Alex Jason. | ||
| And Alex, a lot of Canadians are listening right now. | ||
| We're heard all over Canada, and they have a very, very different attitude about guns in Canada. | ||
| And a lot of Canadians look down at the U.S., and they think of us as the wild, wild West, and they think we're out of our minds. | ||
| People there don't have a lot of guns. | ||
| And they think we should not have guns. | ||
| And frankly, around the world, it's closing in gun confiscation in Australia. | ||
| A lot of countries are moving away from ownership of guns. | ||
| Is it going to be a battle that eventually is going to be lost for the gun owner, citizen? | ||
| Oh, gosh, Art, it's a big question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm just like you. | ||
| I'm sort of an observer hoping for the best and believing that we should have the right to defend ourselves and to have weapons that responsible citizens should be. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I hope we can continue it. | ||
| Well, I guess I was asking for just sort of more of a prediction or an opinion. | ||
| Is it going the wrong way? | ||
| Well, one thing is encouraging. | ||
| It's going the wrong way in some ways, but one thing that's encouraging is that 23 states now have concealed carry laws, and that's the right number. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And you wouldn't predict that happening, but it's happening and seemed to be successful. | ||
| So I know that there's a lot of laws against assault weapons and these silly things that they define as assault weapons. | ||
| So in one sense, it's growing that way. | ||
| But we're also getting a right to carry a gun. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| And we can go either way. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons it's important to vote for the right people. | ||
| Okay, I agree. | ||
| First time caller line, you are on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| Hi, this is Kevin in Nashville. | ||
| Hi, Kevin. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I'm really enjoying the show tonight. | |
| Your guest has given us a lot of really good information and advice. | ||
| And I agree with just about everything you said tonight, excluding the issue of velocity. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I own a couple handguns, and I'm in the security business, and I typically carry a Corbon 135 grain hollow points in my Glock 23. | |
| And if I happen to be carrying my 367, I carry 125 grains in my jacket of hollow points by either Remington or Federal. | ||
| And I'm sure you're familiar with both of these rounds. | ||
| That's all hype. | ||
| That's self-hype. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's not true. | |
| Not true. | ||
| This record of stops. | ||
| Look, if you shoot somebody, let me give you an example. | ||
| Here in San Francisco, some guy came out right at noon on Market Street with a gun and was waving around and screaming. | ||
| So the police were called and they surrounded him and told him to drop the weapon and he didn't. | ||
| And they fired one shot. | ||
| And the guy just flew backwards, gun went flying all over. | ||
| So some fools in the gun business or the ammunition business would say, hey, what kind of gun was that? | ||
| What kind of bullet was that? | ||
| I want to get that kind of bullet. | ||
| So you write down what that was a super duper bullet. | ||
| I would have did that. | ||
| Well, the fact is the bullet just grazed the person's skin. | ||
| It didn't even penetrate. | ||
| It just grazed and gave him a little scratch or like a little abrasion. | ||
| He just reacted that way. | ||
| If I fired a blanket at you, you'd probably jump over backwards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not the force of the bullet or the fraud. | |
| I'm sure you're familiar with Evan Marshall and the fraud IU. | ||
| These are actual shootings. | ||
| These are due to the... | ||
| No, I'm very familiar. | ||
| Evan Marshall is a fraud. | ||
| This complete hoax. | ||
| He doesn't have any data on this stuff. | ||
| So what I'm saying is if you shoot somebody, if I could give you a couple of cases, and you said, with this bullet, this guy fell over immediately. | ||
| With this bullet, this guy continued for 10 minutes. | ||
| The important thing is, where did it hit him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| That's a homogeneous situation. | ||
| If you hit a guy in the spine, it's one thing. | ||
| If you shoot through his lung, that's a whole different story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, I understand that. | |
| It's not the bullet. | ||
| It's placement. | ||
| It's what the bullet does. | ||
| That's the important thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's correct. | |
| and earlier talking about uh... | ||
| preparation of the jacket and the core of the bullet and core bond at the uh... | ||
| I've known him for 20 years or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've known Evan Marshall for 20 years? | |
| Yes, I think so. | ||
| 20 years, maybe longer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he's saying he's a hoax. | |
| His data, supposedly, is a hoax. | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| He says it's all secret. | ||
| He can't reveal sources. | ||
| I challenged him publicly. | ||
| I said, look, if you think you had data like this, you don't want to show it to me because I'm going to steal your information or whatever. | ||
| Well, let's agree upon a neutral party publicly challenging a neutral scientist to review your data. | ||
| See if it's true. | ||
| What is the cut of repair? | ||
| Is it velocity versus the argument we're having right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the gentleman, you're totally correct in stating that velocity is not the only factor. | |
| But I mean, there are years and years and years. | ||
| The 125 grand cinematic is a hell of point. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| What I'm asking is what is the cut of rip between these two gentlemen mentioned? | ||
| Between you, Jason, and the other gentleman? | ||
| Well, the other marshall is, well, there really isn't a controversy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I guess there's still people who believe in that stuff. | ||
| But he says that he went around and wrote down and collected data on shootings and situations where someone fell over immediately after being shot and times when they didn't. | ||
| And saying the most effective bullets are the ones that make people fall over. | ||
| Well, people fall over for all sorts of reasons. | ||
| People faint when a gun is pointed at them. | ||
| They faint when they're shot at and missed. | ||
| There's a wide reaction, a wide variety of reaction to being shot. | ||
| And it depends on all sorts of things. | ||
| And attributing it to the bullet and then the velocity of the bullet is complete nonsense. | ||
| So not only is it nonsense to begin with, his supposed data is completely fraudulent. | ||
| It's all made up. | ||
| I don't have time to really explain it to you, but that's my opinion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In your judgment about a specific hand load and its ability to deliver the wanted effect, of course, a stopping power, what do you base your data on? | |
| Or what's the data that you base your status on? | ||
| Oh, I have lots of data. | ||
| Well, first of all, it's common sense, and you know that there are no magic effects of bullets. | ||
| What a bullet does is it destroys tissue. | ||
| It makes a hole in the body. | ||
| And this is all explained in my tape, Deadly Effects, Wound Ballistics. | ||
| It makes a hole, and where it hits, it destroys that tissue. | ||
| If the tissue is not vital to the body's operational functioning, it doesn't do much in terms of stopping a person immediately. | ||
| If it hits them in the spine or the central nervous system, the person will generally go down immediately. | ||
| That's the important thing. | ||
| Now, there are people who you shoot at and you hit them in the pinky or skinny, like I described, and they'll fiber backwards. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that the bullet had any particular effect. | ||
| It's the reaction to it. | ||
| And you can't attribute that to velocity. | ||
| Velocity, the only velocity you need to bullet is the minimum amount to penetrate deeply, and beyond that, it's counterproductive. | ||
| It gives you more recoil, it does more harm to the gun, and it causes the bullet to over-distort and come apart, which is not a good idea. | ||
| So your argument is you want mass on target? | ||
| You want bullet placement is the most important thing. | ||
| Placement of penetration. | ||
| The bullet is placed in a vital area, and it can penetrate deeply enough to hit like the aorto, the central, the stern, shooter, the front, that sort of thing. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Art. | |
| Thanks for another great program. | ||
| Sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Mr. Jason, it's a privilege to talk to you. | |
| Well, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been a firearms instructor for security in Las Vegas for about 14 years. | |
| And I've got a burning question for you. | ||
| I need to preface it real quick. | ||
| We teach our officers that to have a justifiable homicide, you have to have four elements. | ||
| That'd be ability, opportunity, manifest intent, and then preclusion. | ||
| And I'm sure you're familiar with all those terms. | ||
| We teach our officers that a primary objective in using deadly force is to incapacitate an opponent. | ||
| And my question is, we also train them to use a two-round incapacitation task. | ||
| What's your take on that? | ||
| Well, the doctor and the second shot is for insurance. | ||
| Well, first of all, I just say police and your people, you're not trying to kill people. | ||
| And if you talk to the police in the shooting, they weren't trying to kill somebody. | ||
| They're trying to stop him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Take away his capacity to do you great bodily injuries. | |
| Yes, or to a hostage or whatever else. | ||
| So let's put that aside. | ||
| Now, the reason why you shoot someone is to stop them from doing whatever they're doing or about to do. | ||
| And you should continue to shoot until the person is clearly not able to do what he's planning to do. | ||
| And if that takes two shots or three shots or five shots or 14 shots, that's what you do. | ||
| And that's the current doctrine that's been adopted by, I don't know, most police departments, many of them, the FBI, I don't know, lately they used to have that policy. | ||
| It used to be that you fire one shot and you wait to see what happened or you fire two shots. | ||
| Now, you continue to fire until the person is clearly no longer a threat. | ||
| And that's justified. | ||
| And I've testified in cases where the police have shot people, and they say, well, we shot them five times. | ||
| Isn't that excessive force? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I always have a student ask me, what's that second shot for? | |
| And what we tell them is that in the heat of combat, if you're going to have to draw and fire quickly, the second shot is to ensure that you get one in where it's supposed to go because the first one may not go where it's supposed to go. | ||
| Well, sure, but I think you should continue to shoot. | ||
| Well, I'll give you an example. | ||
| There's a policewoman responded to a dispute at a house, and she drove up there, and the guy came out on the porch and shot her in the chest, and she had a vest on. | ||
| The vest stopped the bullet. | ||
| She shot back and waited. | ||
| She fired twice and waited. | ||
| Okay, she did her thing, fired twice and waited. | ||
| And the guy took the time while she was waiting to raise his gun up and shoot her again before he died. | ||
| Killed her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We tell him two round center masks, then the pelvic girdle, and then the last choice headshot. | |
| Listen, this pelvic girdle is a nonsense thing. | ||
| Some people are going around saying if you shoot someone with the pelvic girdle, the whole body will collapse. | ||
| If you've ever seen a bone, you shoot through a bone and you're hunting an animal. | ||
| The bone is very resilient, sort of like plasticized. | ||
| It does not fracture and crumble apart like a piece of glass. | ||
| That's complete nonsense. | ||
| Do you just keep shooting at somebody until they're no longer a threat? | ||
| Generally, that means when they've fallen over. | ||
| And two shots may not be enough. | ||
| I just say you continue to shoot until the person is not doing... | ||
| All right, so no hard and fast rule. | ||
| Keep shooting until they're down. | ||
| Until they're not doing what they've threatened to do. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That certainly makes sense. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Alex. | ||
| Jason, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I'm Paul from Wisconsin. | |
| Hi, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a law enforcement officer here and been listening to your show. | |
| I agree with everything you're talking about, Alex. | ||
| I guess just a comment and maybe a question. | ||
| Two years ago, almost to the date, we were involved in a fatal shooting of a suspect. | ||
| And I guess I just want to say something to the callers as far as the responsibility of owning a weapon. | ||
| We're trained law enforcement, and the state of Wisconsin, I think, is thought after as one of the leaders in training. | ||
| And what we've gone through in the last two years, and our civil suit is coming up in March, and this is just the start of it. | ||
| What we as law enforcement officers have gone through in the last two years, and we're trained for this, I think people should prepare themselves for if they're going to be in a confrontation, if they do take somebody's life, what they're going to go through after that, and they're going to be responsible for, even if it's justified, what's going to happen to them. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And you make a good point. | ||
| And I see you're very somber about this thing because you really know how it works. | ||
| And that's what I'm trying to educate people that you're not going to shoot somebody and get carried away on a parade as a hero of the day. | ||
| You may, but you may not. | ||
| Those days are over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think the John Wayne mentality, I think people think, well, I have a gun and somebody does something to me, I'm going to take them. | |
| Well, when it's all said and done, you don't feel fantastic about it. | ||
| You go through a lot of mental stress, and it's not the happy thing. | ||
| Okay, that's a good point. | ||
| All right, thank you very much. | ||
| Or I also wanted to mention, if I can mention my phone number again, for anybody who's going to be able to do it. | ||
| Of course you can. | ||
| Describe your videotapes, if you would, one more time. | ||
| Okay, I've got there's three basic tapes, deadly weapons, firearms, and firepower, which shows machine guns and silencers and shooting through engine blocks and windows and all sorts of things. | ||
| There's a basic training to show what guns will do and what they won't do. | ||
| One thing I do in there is I let someone shoot me with a 308 rifle while I'm wearing a bulletproof vest and standing on one leg to dispel the myth that a bullet will knock you down. | ||
| Bullets do not knock people down. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Complete nonsense. | ||
| You had a lot of confidence, I take it, in that prediction. | ||
| Well, I knew the vest would work. | ||
| I was worried the guy was going to shoot me on the leg or something. | ||
| Anyway, the number, I'll tell you what the other tastes, but the number to call is 800-762-7233. | ||
| 800-762-7233. | ||
| And that's the deadly weapons tape I described. | ||
| I made that about 10 years ago. | ||
| It's still being used all over the world. | ||
| Then deadly effects, wound ballistics, subtitle is What Bullets Do to Bodies. | ||
| This is a very technical, dry exposition and explanation of what bullets do. | ||
| There's a lot of gory or graphic footage for people. | ||
| If you don't like that sort of thing, you shouldn't look at it. | ||
| These are used in medical schools and for police training. | ||
| Just done from a scientific point of view and with a lot of anatomical drawings. | ||
| And there's a surgeon in there who's the world's expert on this. | ||
| And then they have Deadly Force, Firearms, Self-Defense, and the Law, which is what you should know if you're going to have a gun for self-defense about when you can use it and when you can't. | ||
| And then I have another tape I'll just mention because you have so many law enforcement listeners. | ||
| We have another tape that we don't generally market, but it's called Forensic Firearms Evidence. | ||
| And that is for police departments, it's a whole training course. | ||
| The tapes I mentioned cost $29.95. | ||
| The other one, this forensic firearms evidence, costs $295. | ||
| It's a training course with two tapes and a book and an exam. | ||
| But a lot of police departments use that for training in in terms of how to utilize evidence from shooting incidents for forensic use to what to look for. | ||
| How to collect the evidence, how to recognize it, how to preserve it, and how to use it in court. | ||
| And that's been real popular. | ||
| It's a very important thing in what I do in using this type of evidence. | ||
| So those tapes are here available. | ||
| I'll tell you again, you can call anytime, 800-762-7233. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Here's somebody who is a martial arts teacher. | ||
| And he asks what he has to do before he gets involved physically with somebody. | ||
| In other words, is it true we've always heard that your hands are deadly weapons when you're trained as a martial artist? | ||
| Generally, that's just a bunch of bull, really. | ||
| It just matters if your life is threatened. | ||
| Now, if you're fighting or about to fight somebody of your own size and he's unarmed, and you pull a gun out and shoot him, you're going to have to demonstrate to the police and maybe to a jury why you felt your life was threatened and try to convince them that they would feel the same way if they were in that situation. | ||
| So whether or not you're a karate expert makes you a little bit more difficult to define yourself as a helpless victim, but slightly. | ||
| But now let's say you're being attacked by a guy who's a karate expert. | ||
| Well, how do you know that he's a karate expert? | ||
| And he told you that. | ||
| If you've seen him twist the heads off three other people on his way towards you, yes, you could get away with that and say that he is threatening my life. | ||
| I really felt the fear of my life. | ||
| If he's just a guy who's gone to a karate stance, no, you can't shoot him. | ||
| All right. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hello there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi, Art. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Hi, Dave. | ||
| In Sacramento, we're a crime scene cleanup company and ad advisory at the SID Lab, Piper Tech Massacre in L.A. Question I have concerns the skeletal and skull cap that's often left behind by transport companies at the crime sites itself. | ||
| Some of the coroners are asking us to save this, and I wanted to know if there's any kind of sizing that we could determine whether or not we could handle it a different way. | ||
| Boy, I wish I knew what you just said. | ||
| I wish I did too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, well, after a transport company takes the body away and we're cleaning up the site, often behind because of explosion of large, you know, the shotguns or a variety of weapons, there'll be pieces of a head. | |
| Oh, skull, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the skull cap. | |
| There'll be a cranium, a piece of the cranium. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And we're being told that this can be used in the reconstruction of evidence. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| They shouldn't leave it behind. | ||
| And if you do frost that when you're cleaning up, you should notify the people to come back and pick it up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly what we're being told. | |
| And what I wanted to ask, though, is there a minimum or millimeter type of size that would exclude things? | ||
| Because sometimes we're finding just pieces of bone and jaws, pieces of jaws. | ||
| But we're not necessarily finding large pieces. | ||
| Yeah, but they can be put together like a jigsaw puzzle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so basically we should keep all that. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, good. | |
| We'll put that in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, the other question I had for you are, are they still using luminol to find previously washed away blood in back bathrooms? | |
| Yeah, well, not just in back bathrooms, but anywhere. | ||
| Luminol is a very effective chemical reagent that you can spray on an area. | ||
| If someone killed somebody and say that there was blood on the floor, you can clean that thing up. | ||
| I mean, you can clean it up and use everything on there and mops and rags and everything. | ||
| It'll look completely clean. | ||
| It'll smell clean. | ||
| But if you spray luminol on there, it will glow in the dark if blood has been there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've been warned by the DOJ to wear nitrile gloves when we're cleaning up on the crime sites because of the use of luminol. | |
| Well, not just because of luminol. | ||
| Luminol is not the big problem, but just because of biohazards, you know, age is luminous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we used the biohazard material in the gloves, but what I'm trying to get at, too, is they're telling us that there's a reaction and any kind of reaction from even fingerprint powder is considered carcinogenic, right? | |
| Well, everything is carcinogenic now, and the state of California got sued about, so they're really crazy about it. | ||
| But you better talk to somebody who knows more about that than I do as far as the health hazards. | ||
| All right, Alex, you said you're frequently up until three, so how about one more hour? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right, one more hour it is. | ||
| My guest is Alex Jason. | ||
| He's in the Bay Area, and he'll be back one more hour of this expert guesting. | ||
| I guess that's what you'd call it. | ||
| I don't know about that last call. | ||
| Yeah, call him back. | ||
| Come back here and get this hit. | ||
| This part of this hit. | ||
| Not my kind of work. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, stay right where you are. | ||
| It keeps coming from the high desert. | ||
| I'm Mark Belt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Mark Belt. | |
| I'm Mark Belt. | ||
| Freebier Radio Networks presents Art Bell somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight's program originally aired February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| It absolutely is. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| A riveting program. | ||
| Alexander Jason is my guest. | ||
| And he is an expert, a certified senior crime scene analyst. | ||
| Was an investigator, police officer in San Francisco, qualified expert witness. | ||
| Has A background that would take me the next 10 minutes to read. | ||
| And we're talking about the use of deadly force when you can, when you can't. | ||
| And attendant issues. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The End. | |
| End. | ||
| you Well, all right. | ||
| Alex, here, I've got a couple of factors I want to read. | ||
| Alex stated that using deadly force against your wife's ex-boyfriend was a different matter. | ||
| My question is as follows. | ||
| My wife to be ex came to the house and just walked in. | ||
| I didn't know him at the time. | ||
| She was asleep on the couch. | ||
| Now, if I would have had a gun and I had shot him, would I have gone to jail for murder? | ||
| I don't know to give you a specific answer to that specific question. | ||
| It depends on your state laws about that sort of thing. | ||
| But what I was saying was if an intruder comes into your house who's perceived to be a criminal, and it has criminal intent to burglarize your house or rob you or kill you, that's one thing. | ||
| If it's your ex-wife's boyfriend, or whoever it was, it's going to look like they're going to look to make sure this is not some kind of a jealousy dispute or a three-way triangle kind of thing. | ||
| So it's going to be looked at very differently. | ||
| So that's what I meant. | ||
| If it's a clean situation in terms of you're minding your own business, you're at home, someone breaks into your house, has no right to be there for criminal intent, that will be much easier to explain to the police and have them accept than if it's someone who is related to you. | ||
| So if you shot that person, yeah, you'd be going downtown for a discussion. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, what about the classic? | ||
| You come home, you walk in the house, and there is your wife with another man in bed, and you pull out a gun and shoot him. | ||
| No, you can't do that. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| Because the reason, if someone asks you, well, why did you shoot him? | ||
| You say, well, I'm not going to let anybody do that to my wife. | ||
| Well, that's not a legal justification. | ||
| You have to have someone's life in danger. | ||
| Suppose you said, well, I thought she was being raped. | ||
| Well, good luck. | ||
| Good luck, huh? | ||
| I mean, if you can convince the police of that, and then perhaps the DA and perhaps a jury, then, you know, fine. | ||
| It's probably happened. | ||
| That would be certainly a better line than I was jealous and angry. | ||
| Yeah, I'm just mad at that guy. | ||
| All right, here's another one. | ||
| Besides the Kennedy assassination, and you're right, it's religion. | ||
| We'll leave it alone. | ||
| And this one comes close to being religion as well, but it's forensics, and it's interesting, and it's Vince Foster. | ||
| Oh, I don't really know, to tell you the truth. | ||
| People ask me about that. | ||
| I've never gotten into it. | ||
| Because, see, when I have to give an answer to these kind of questions, I have to really research it. | ||
| And, like, I found an old Army buddy of mine I knew years ago, and he's a JFK nut. | ||
| And so he gives me, it peppers me with all these questions. | ||
| I don't have time. | ||
| I just can't give you the answer. | ||
| I have to do a whole research project to answer these questions specifically. | ||
| So I'm very cautious about what I will comment upon unless I really know the case that Ben's fostered. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just haven't delved into it. | ||
| I've got enough work to do that I need to do and get involved in something like that. | ||
| It's an interesting case, but I don't know. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Every time a gun is fired, we evolve less as a culture. | ||
| Guns are reactive measures against something. | ||
| In other words, revolution even with only faith, not in the religious sense, as my only measure against evil in society. | ||
| So he's against guns, sort of as a religion, saying that we evolve or devolve every time a gun is fired. | ||
| How do you react to that kind of argument? | ||
| Well, it's a real philosophical. | ||
| It is, yes, it is. | ||
| I would just say I respect your right to feel that way, but don't I hope you'll respect my right to feel the way that I do that I would like to have protection at certain times to use a gun or other instruments to protect myself if I don't threaten other innocent people. | ||
| Okay, here's another good one. | ||
| We've been talking about guns, but suppose you've got a really mean, junkyard kind of dog out in your fenced yard. | ||
| Somebody jumps your fence and your big mean dog rips out his juggler vein and he's dead in your yard. | ||
| Now what? | ||
| Well, the question is, did you order the dog to kill him? | ||
| No. | ||
| He just did it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's not a question there. | ||
| If you're not involved, then it might be a question of whether you have a hazardous dog or not. | ||
| But you're getting into real specific legal things that I'm not really qualified to answer these kind of questions. | ||
| A lawyer should answer them. | ||
| But I just tell you, my general opinion is that if someone jumps into your yard where the dog is, then you're not going to have a problem. | ||
| Generally tough luck, huh? | ||
| If the dog is running around the street and does that, then I think you have a harder time. | ||
| All right. | ||
| First time caller line. | ||
| You're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yes, good evening, Yard. | ||
| My name is John Colin from Montana. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a couple comments and a couple questions regarding the gentleman that put the bulletproof vest on. | |
| How do you feel about my shooter 264 Magnum? | ||
| Do you think a bulletproof vest would stop that round? | ||
| Well, sure, if it was the right vest. | ||
| Well, I'm saying that you can make a vest that will stop anything. | ||
| It might be a 200-pound vest for a certain thing. | ||
| It might be impractical. | ||
| So they're vests in their vests. | ||
| Now, the vests that stop rifle bullets have to have, by current technology, steel or ceramic in them. | ||
| They can't be the Kevlar polyaramid type finders alone. | ||
| They have to have something more than that. | ||
| But for handgun bullets, you can generally stop almost all handgun bullets, the normal handgun bullets, with fabric. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Being a big game hunter, a lot of people say, you need the big bullet. | |
| But my magnum in that little bullet, I kill elk regular, and I have no problem. | ||
| My other comment is with handguns and the shotgun, I think art is kind of partial to the shotgun, and I am as well. | ||
| I have no use for handguns, and that probably upsets a lot of people. | ||
| I think they hurt people. | ||
| I mean, myself, for my home security, I'll take my 10-gauge double-barrel. | ||
| We'll call it short-barrel and not sawed off because sawed-off is not legal. | ||
| Four and a quarter-inch buckshot. | ||
| I mean, you don't have to aim it. | ||
| All you have to do is point, shoot through walls. | ||
| Well, that could be a hazard too, Kenneth, if you have if you're shooting through walls and could be somebody, good person on the other side, one of your family members or something. | ||
| I'm not against witches. | ||
| I'm fine, but if you like that gun, that's a hell of a gun. | ||
| But I hope you don't deny me the right to have a 22 if that's what I wanted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
22 handgun. | |
| So the fact of the matter is, I believe the 22 is the weapon of choice for professional assassins. | ||
| Is that true or a myth? | ||
| It's generally a myth in that there are very few professional assassins, so it's really hard to say what they get trained on in school or their equipment load, because there are so few. | ||
| The 22 is effective for that sort of thing, because you could make it subsonic. | ||
| A silencer is not really effective on a weapon unless it's a subsonic round. | ||
| The bullet itself goes less, velocity is less than the speed of sound. | ||
| Otherwise, it makes a sonic crack. | ||
| So for that reason, you could take a 22, and 22 would also be very small. | ||
| And for assassin, you could get it right close to somebody, so you don't really need a big bullet if you're going to have proper placement right in the head. | ||
| So it can work, but it's not really like anybody shot in the head with a 22 have been assassinated. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Alex Jason in San Francisco. | ||
| Hi, where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I'm Pat from L.A. Yes, sir. | ||
| Two quick comments and a question. | ||
| In Texas, I understand that if you kill a man that's committing adultery with your wife, you're allowed to kill him, and that's a law? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| That's a Texas law. | ||
| I doubt if it is. | ||
| If it is now, maybe it was, but I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've heard of people actually getting off within recent years on that. | |
| That's just my comment. | ||
| Another comment, Kennedy assassination. | ||
| I saw a film that showed the driver with his left hand have a gun over his right shoulder. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't know. | |
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| Everybody's seen it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| The glint. | ||
| They say it's a weapon. | ||
| I saw nothing more than a glint. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't see a weapon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, now I saw the weapon part that I saw, but that's okay. | |
| I didn't know you guys had seen that. | ||
| My main question is, I'm too afraid to have a gun in my vehicle. | ||
| And I carry a BB gun CO2 60 shot. | ||
| What kind of trouble am I letting myself in with the police and misunderstandings and things like that? | ||
| Well, the problem is, what do you carry it for? | ||
| For what purpose? | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| He's gone. | ||
| Well, if he carries it to use to hold up to, like, if someone's coming at him, he could just scare him with the BB gun because it looks like a real gun. | ||
| That has some good points and some bad points. | ||
| What it does is if someone sees that and perceives it as a real gun, which could easily be done, then they're justified in using deadly force against that person with a BB gun because they think it's a real gun. | ||
| So then you can't defend yourself. | ||
| So it's kind of a bad idea. | ||
| So if you're going to have a gun, you ought to have a real gun. | ||
| Well, maybe or no gun. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And then if the police don't like this stuff, then often I know in San Francisco, for example, it's illegal to have a BB gun. | ||
| It is? | ||
| It's illegal to have a BB gun to possess one, not shoot one, but to possess one. | ||
| It's illegal to possess a BB gun? | ||
| In the city level of San Francisco, it's illegal to, unless they change the law, which I doubt, it's illegal to own, possess, or have in your drawer or anywhere else a BB gun. | ||
| Oh, my. | ||
| Why have you chosen Zanford as a place to live? | ||
| You get down to the nitty-gritty, don't you? | ||
| I'm trying to save it. | ||
| You're trying to save Sanford. | ||
| You really do like big projects, don't you? | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Jason. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Art. | |
| Enjoying your show as usual. | ||
| This is Rick from Plattsburgh. | ||
| Plattsburgh, New York? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I am. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have first a favor, a couple of quick comments, and then a question. | |
| The favor is, I lost your feet at 5 o'clock, so if you could keep me on so I could hear his answer. | ||
| All right. | ||
| The comment I wanted to make is you had a lot of law enforcement people call and telling about their experience, that they're all trained and everything. | ||
| The reality of this situation is this. | ||
| I live in a very small community. | ||
| Four years ago, I was burglarized. | ||
| House was trashed. | ||
| Possessions stolen. | ||
| I don't care about possessions. | ||
| They can be replaced. | ||
| Luckily, we were not home. | ||
| Two years ago, there was a very brutal rape and murder two miles from my home. | ||
| It was so vicious, the guy actually tortured this young mother for hours before he finally murdered her. | ||
| I have a petite wife and a young daughter at home. | ||
| I own a handgun. | ||
| It's right next to my bed. | ||
| I have gone over the scenario of what I would do in a situation if someone were to break into my house and threaten us. | ||
| This is the reality of the situation for all those people out there that don't think that we should own handguns. | ||
| I'm in my home, and the scenario is this. | ||
| Someone comes in my house, they turn at the bottom of my stairs, and I'm up in time enough to see them turn at the bottom of my stairs. | ||
| That's about 20 feet. | ||
| I can say to them, Halt, I have a gun. | ||
| Don't come any further, or I can shoot. | ||
| I would have enough time to do that. | ||
| If, on the other hand, I'm at the top of my stairs and the guy is halfway up the stairs, the reality of it is I'm thinking of my young daughter and I'm thinking of my wife, and I'm thinking if he gets by me, they can't, they're helpless. | ||
| That's a reasonable expectation, generally, and you should check your local laws, but I want to tell you how in a minute. | ||
| But you generally don't have to wait until the guy's on top of you or anything like that, in your house. | ||
| But you might check your local, I don't know what New York State laws are, but if you're in your home and someone's coming in there with criminal intent, either to brutalize a home or to kill somebody, you don't have a problem with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The reality is, is that I'm not going to be thinking, gee, does he have a weapon in his hand? | |
| No, does he mean to hurt us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is he bigger than I am? | |
| Is he going to kick my butt? | ||
| No, you don't have to worry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm thinking he's not getting to my wife and daughter. | |
| No, you're right. | ||
| And in your home, you don't have to go through all that stuff. | ||
| Anybody in your home, I would suggest that you do, as you said, challenge the person first, make sure it's not in the store looking for his baseball or something. | ||
| Challenge them, and then, if these guys are coming at you, I wouldn't hesitate. | ||
| But this is my opinion, not the water. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think, you know, all these law enforcement agents are saying, you know, well, we're trained, you know, to make sure they've got a witch. | |
| I just want people to realize, you're not thinking about that. | ||
| That's the last thing in your mind. | ||
| I'm not going to ask the guy, gee, are you just here to steal the family jewels? | ||
| Or do you mean to hurt us? | ||
| In your home, it's a different story. | ||
| You're justified generally in doing something like that. | ||
| But let me explain something. | ||
| There's jury instructions, and every state has them. | ||
| If you find them in the library, you can look this kind of stuff up. | ||
| They're very specific. | ||
| Yeah, you were going to read one, as a matter of fact. | ||
| Here's one. | ||
| This is just one. | ||
| They're written in human English terms, so you can let the lawyer understand this stuff. | ||
| Here's one that the judge would read to the jury. | ||
| And it's titled, Resisting an Intruder Upon One's Property. | ||
| That's the title. | ||
| Now, this is California. | ||
| This is only California. | ||
| And it says, a person may defend his home or habitation against anyone who manifestly intends or endeavors in a violent or riotous manner to enter that home or habitation and who appears to intend violence to any person in the house. | ||
| The amount of force which the person may use in resisting such trespass is limited by what would appear to a reasonable person in the same or similar circumstances necessary to resist the violent or unlawful entry. | ||
| He is not bound to retreat, even though a retreat might safely be made. | ||
| He may resist force with force, increasing it in proportion to the intruder's persistence and violence if the circumstances which are apparent to the homeowner are such as would excite similar fears and a similar belief in a reasonable person. | ||
| And that means that if you are afraid you have that fear, whether it's true or not, if somebody else in that position would have also perceived the situation the way you have, that's what the jury has to decide. | ||
| Now you can find these jury instructions in the law library. | ||
| You look them up and like Tate discusses this. | ||
| And that'll give you specifics about this stuff. | ||
| Because it's very difficult to get information. | ||
| If you call the police department, they're not going to tell you this stuff. | ||
| They think there may be some kind of meth that's going to kill your wife and then say that Officer Jones said it was okay. | ||
| If you ask a lawyer friend of yours, he probably doesn't know about this stuff. | ||
| He's probably doing wills and business law and other things. | ||
| And this is a very specific area. | ||
| And if you ask the guy at the gun store, he's going to give you wrong information. | ||
| So the best thing you can do is to get the jury instructions for your state or if it might say, get my tape. | ||
| And by the way, people, they called me, the people that take the orders, and they said people are calling me, but please don't ask the people who answer the phone about the, they just take the orders. | ||
| They don't know anything about the guns or about the law or anything. | ||
| So just if you want to buy a tape, they're 800-762-7233. | ||
| 800-762-7233. | ||
| And you can call, they'll give you the address if you want to send in for a check or if you want more information or something, they'll help you there. | ||
| Yeah, they're probably asking the poor operators about specific situations, and they're probably going, I'm sorry, I couldn't begin to advise you. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They're saying, well, I have a 22 or something who's asking, you know, they just take orders. | ||
| They don't know anything. | ||
| All right, West of the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this boat Ron Spokane. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, actually, I was going to plug his tape. | |
| I actually saw it 10 years ago, and nobody's called. | ||
| I know you're kind of pushing this tape. | ||
| Well, you saw the I've seen this tape. | ||
| The deadly weapons tape, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, and it was beautiful. | |
| It was excellent. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| In fact, I was about 18. | ||
| No, I was 20 years old when I saw it. | ||
| I'm 30 now. | ||
| And I have reflected back on it many times. | ||
| Is this the tape where at the end you actually do shoot the engine block with a 60-caliber game? | ||
| Well, we shoot a car with a 50-caliber machine gun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
50-caliber machine gun. | |
| It does go through the block, actually. | ||
| Right, it shot through the seat. | ||
| Okay, that was an excellent tape. | ||
| You actually shot to some clay blocks through some brush and showed tumbling of bullets, right? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excellent tape. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Any listeners, buy this tape. | |
| Yeah, I've got to say, I'm getting similar messages. | ||
| People saying, gosh, you know, I just realized who this guy is. | ||
| And I've seen the tape, and it really is incredible. | ||
| So I'm getting a lot of comment like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's a great tape. | |
| But I have actually a few questions. | ||
| I've been in a few precarious situations here recently as of Christmas time in Seattle Eleventh Book. | ||
| And I had a gentleman jump in the front seat of my car at a gas station. | ||
| I'll tell you what, hold that thought. | ||
| Let us finish after the break. | ||
| Stay right where you are, both of you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| We'll see you next time. | ||
| You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time. | ||
| Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 3rd, 1997. | ||
| If indeed, in a moment, we will rapidly get into the awaiting GPU and see what's out there. | ||
| From the high desert, talk radio all evening long. | ||
| Stay right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stay right there. | |
| Well, all right. | ||
| Back we go to Alex Jason, my guest, and our caller. | ||
| Caller, sorry to hold you over, but you know, the clock and all that. | ||
| So go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you there? | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There we are. | |
| Well, what we had going on is I had this gentleman getting in the front seat of my car, uninvited. | ||
| And a good lesson to be learned here. | ||
| Always lock your doors, but never left. | ||
| He had jumped in and he wouldn't get out. | ||
| And he wanted a ride, but actually, he wanted more than that. | ||
| He wanted some money. | ||
| After I told him to get out of the car, and he wouldn't, it came down to give him some money and he'd leave. | ||
| And, you know, basically, I just couldn't get him out of the car. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, what I did is I just drove right to a police officer, hopped out, walked up to him and told him the situation. | ||
| They arrested him. | ||
| But, you know, they couldn't hold him. | ||
| And it was a real funny thing, you know, because he didn't pull a weapon out on me or anything. | ||
| But, you know, he gave me three choices. | ||
| He told me either give me some money or you call somebody who can get some money. | ||
| And then he didn't give me the third choice. | ||
| Sometimes I'm thinking, well, it was obviously, to me, bodily harm. | ||
| And what I'm getting at is, is there a problem? | ||
| Is people's perception of their life being in danger different to different people? | ||
| I mean, I'm hearing. | ||
| No, no, no, it's a very good point. | ||
| I can imagine he would perceive his life was in danger if he didn't comply in one way or the other. | ||
| But here's the bottom line on it. | ||
| Now, how the police would look at it is this. | ||
| Let's say, so he went through this whole thing, and then you, meanwhile, got the gun up under your seat and just shot him. | ||
| And they would say, well, now, wait a minute. | ||
| You know, the guy didn't threaten you, and he may have said that the choice number three was he didn't, but there was no imminent threat. | ||
| Now, if he just jumped in the car and you pulled your gun and shot him, you sort of have a better case than if you had this chat with him about what he wants and so on. | ||
| Because then the assumption would be jumping in the car, he's going to rob you, he's going to get you. | ||
| But what the police are looking for is an understanding that there was a threat to bodily harm or a crime that's being committed, a serious crime, one of the serious crimes, rape, robbery, murder, that sort of thing. | ||
| He was intending to do that. | ||
| So it's just an odd situation. | ||
| So if you said, well, the guy told me this and he told me that, and then he said I had three choices, and he didn't name the third one, so I figured that was a bodily harm. | ||
| So I just took my gun and I shot him. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The people would be taking a close look at that. | ||
| Now, then it would come up to be like, what's the press saying about this? | ||
| Poor innocent hitchhiker killed by a savage white racist? | ||
| How is this portrayed? | ||
| And that would make a big difference. | ||
| So in that situation, you did the right thing. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Question for you. | ||
| General question. | ||
| Alex, do we have a fair justice system? | ||
| In your opinion? | ||
| I know it's a very general question, but is it fair? | ||
| I mean, the perception is if you've got money, if you're accused of a crime, you can get the right experts, maybe people like you, the right attorneys, dream teams, that sort of thing, your chances of walking are much better. | ||
| Is that fair or just the way it is? | ||
| Well, a deep question, Art. | ||
| You know, I'm a forensic guy. | ||
| This is a philosophical thing or political. | ||
| I think I see a lot of things that aren't fair, I'll tell you that. | ||
| But if you say, okay, well, how are you going to fix this? | ||
| What do you want to do? | ||
| You're in charge. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I know one thing I do is in civil matters, make the loser pay. | ||
| That would help things quite a bit. | ||
| But in the criminal things, where you say, yeah, if you have a dream team, you're much better off than the guy who's got the public defender. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| I don't know what to do about it. | ||
| I'm not saying that nothing should be done. | ||
| I'm just not the guy to ask. | ||
| I don't have all the answers. | ||
| I've got you, and I appreciate that, too. | ||
| First time, CallerLine, you are on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, this is Roger in Clear Lake, California. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wanted to know if he could give me a little more information about both the BBs being illegal, BB guns, and also what about the guard dogs and attack dogs on your property and how they would be used in the situations he's talking about. | |
| All right, well, we just covered that one. | ||
| I think there's one thing about guard dogs. | ||
| I know there was a case where somebody, I think they murdered, well, was convicted of murdering his wife by ordering his dog to attack the wife and killed her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pitbull, I think. | |
| And he was convicted of murder. | ||
| So any instrument you use, you know, if you tell a two-year-old, if you could train a two-year-old or three-year-old, go over there and stick this into mommy or whatever, I mean, you can commit murder. | ||
| Not the child, it wouldn't be convicted of murder, but you would. | ||
| So by any instrument, by any method, that's illegal. | ||
| Now, if someone's attacking you and you order a dog to attack them, yeah, that's okay. | ||
| A dog is not generally considered deadly force, but I don't think it's really been defined. | ||
| I know I had a case once where we had to use some dogs, and I got this guy I knew at the Central Space Beach Barbara, a dog expert. | ||
| I said, you know, if I take the dog out of somebody, is somebody shooting somebody, or what is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have a big discussion about it. | |
| All right, here's a question I'd like to ask you, which you're free not to answer, Alex. | ||
| But somebody with your depth of knowledge of crime scenes, ballistics, all the rest of it, if you wanted to commit a murder and not be caught, could you? | ||
| You have to be able to control all the variables, and that's very difficult to say that I'm going to control everything that I'm going to no one will see what I do, no one will know what I do. | ||
| It is possible, and it probably happens more often than we know. | ||
| I mean, I've got a lot of cases, a lot of cases I'm given that they want to know, is this a suicide or a murder? | ||
| And it's very difficult to tell. | ||
| A lot of times I tell them, look, you can't tell. | ||
| It's consistent with either one. | ||
| Especially where you have the, like the husband says that he came in, the wife is going to commit suicide, she had the gun to her head, and he reached over, he grabbed the gun, tried to pull away from her, and she fired it. | ||
| So you have both hands in close proximity to the gun, you have gunshot residue perhaps on both hands. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You just can't tell. | |
| So sometimes that happens. | ||
| I'm sure it does. | ||
| But could I plan one? | ||
| Oh, gosh, I have to wear a decontamination suit. | ||
| I mean, you wouldn't believe that. | ||
| Well, you saw some of the stuff at the OJ trial. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The depth of forensic science now, when they really go to town and collect everything properly and analyze it properly, you'll have a hard time getting away with something. | ||
| Awful lot of difference between now and 100 years ago. | ||
| Or even 15 years ago, 10 years ago. | ||
| Think there. | ||
| DNA. | ||
| I mean, good grief. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| West of the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Alex Jason in San Francisco. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi, Art. | ||
| You've had a lot of questions and things about guns and things. | ||
| What about using the pepper spray stuff? | ||
| Is that considered a weapon or what is it? | ||
| Well, it's not deadly force, but what is it, Alex? | ||
| Well, each state, I think, defines it. | ||
| And I think in California, just talking about making it a felony to use it inappropriately. | ||
| I forget how they define that, but you have to check on your own state. | ||
| It's not deadly force. | ||
| And you can use that even though you're not in fear of your life. | ||
| But you have to check your local laws about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, and I have one more question. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you know about UFOs? | |
| Tell me already about it. | ||
| Don't shoot at them. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
| How are you tonight? | ||
| Oh, fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Tim in Orlando. | |
| Yes, hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm losing you in Charlotte, and I can't quite pick you up in Chicago anymore, but I'd sure like to hear the answer. | |
| Earlier tonight, he was talking about velocities, or somebody was calling, talking about velocity ballistics and such. | ||
| And as a former medic and also as a former Army officer, I know a little bit about that. | ||
| And it seems that if you look back at the Army, there was a change in philosophy in warfare before, just before the Vietnam War. | ||
| And early on, they used to use 45s, 306s, those type of rounds. | ||
| And generally the idea was to kill people. | ||
| And then with Vietnam, you came out with high-velocity, low-mass ballistics, and generally they maimed. | ||
| And that was the idea because then it takes that guy out plus somebody else to carry him away. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's lots of resources to put them in the hospital and treat them, sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| So really, you know, a 45 generally, when it hits, it penetrates and knocks the person down. | ||
| Well, it doesn't knock them down. | ||
| That's a myth. | ||
| But it does penetrate very deeply. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, indeed it does. | |
| Indeed it does. | ||
| In fact, working in emergency rooms, you know, we see wounds from 22s. | ||
| And 22s are really an odd weapon ballistic. | ||
| I mean, I've seen them hit the skin and hit a rib and then travel all the way around to the other side and come back out without doing much damage. | ||
| You see, another variance in 22s that makes them so odd, and that's why you have so much anecdotal evidence describing different occurrences, is because sometimes they're fired from a handgun, sometimes from a rifle. | ||
| So you go to the bottom effects. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you get a little more spin on the bullet with a rifle, and it tends to penetrate a little better. | |
| But another thing, too, is if it hits the chest, it gets inside there and bounces all around, tears things up pretty good, too. | ||
| So it just all depends on the velocity and the amount of mass of the bullet. | ||
| Well, not only the velocity, it's what the bullet hits. | ||
| If it hits something important, you've got problems. | ||
| If it doesn't, you don't as much. | ||
| So that's really the key thing. | ||
| But it's not velocity alone. | ||
| I have a picture I use in when I give talks where I show a foot. | ||
| This is a naked foot of someone who's been shot through the foot along the plane of the sole of the foot. | ||
| So it went in, so just under the heel, just about the sole of the foot, came out just before the toes. | ||
| So it just went under the skin and came out. | ||
| And I show it to people, say, what do you think did this? | ||
| What kind of a weapon? | ||
| What kind of bullet? | ||
| You don't got to estimate. | ||
| But it's an M16. | ||
| Because M16 does no more damage than a .22 caliber bullet, slightly more, but nothing significant, if it doesn't yaw. | ||
| But this is, I guess, time maybe for another program or something about how bullets work and what they do. | ||
| But generally, the velocity of an M16 is much higher than a.22. | ||
| The velocity of an M16 is like 3,200, 3,100 feet per second, and a 22 is like typically 1,100, maybe 1,200, 1,300 feet per second. | ||
| But the effect is not very different if the bullet doesn't yaw. | ||
| I'm sorry, I'm getting too technical here. | ||
| But anyway, velocity is not the thing. | ||
| Placement. | ||
| What the bullet hits is the important thing. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Where are you, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excellent. | |
| Roseberg. | ||
| Excellent Roseberg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| There's one thing that Alex hasn't mentioned. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And this I feel is fundamental. | ||
| By the way, he's been excellent all night, Art. | ||
| You've got a great guest on tonight. | ||
| But here's the one thing he hasn't mentioned. | ||
| As he has stated, the one thing in self-defense that you don't want to have to do is shoot anyone. | ||
| And the best way to avoid that is to use guns with a large hole. | ||
| In other words, if you're using a pistol to defend yourself, use a 45. | ||
| Because when someone sees that big hole, they know that you mean what you're going to say. | ||
| And when you're using, above all else, a shotgun, anytime a woman points a 12-gauge shotgun at someone, he's going to jump out the window, down the stairs. | ||
| He is not going to face it. | ||
| And if he does, you better shoot him immediately because he's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, because he's nuts. | ||
| So it's a good point. | ||
| It's another small thing in your favor, but yeah, sure. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| Big holes are good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Big holes are better than small holes. | |
| West of the Rockies? | ||
| No, you would have been on the air. | ||
| East of the Rockies? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Wildcard line, first-time color line. | ||
| I'll get it straight. | ||
| You're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is Eric in Phoenix, Arizona. | |
| Hi there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Eric. | |
| Just a couple of quick points to make, and then I'll let you take over. | ||
| The first is: if you do have to use deadly force, whether it be in the home or out in the street, the person's down on the ground, should you continue to cover the person with your weapon? | ||
| And if so, what do you do when the police arrive? | ||
| Yeah, oh, that is a very good point. | ||
| Let's say someone is armed, has a gun, and you shoot him, and now he's down on the ground. | ||
| You have to consider him still a threat. | ||
| You don't know if he's dead or if he just ducked down, if he laying on the ground, or he's actually shot. | ||
| Not like in the movies, where you see someone shot in the movies and the blood flies out in the front where the entry wound is. | ||
| It's not like that at all. | ||
| Most wounds are not visible when you shoot somebody. | ||
| The skin will heal, and not heal, excuse me, will contract around the wound, and it's much smaller than the diameter of the bullet. | ||
| And if you have clothing on, especially dark clothing, you don't even know if you shot the guy. | ||
| And they're not going to fall over backwards. | ||
| That's all a myth. | ||
| They might, but that's a reaction to being shot out of fear. | ||
| But the bullet doesn't do that. | ||
| So you generally don't know if you shot someone. | ||
| If they fall down, look at what they're doing with their hands. | ||
| If the gun is now disconnected and the gun's falling away from the body, keep your gun on him. | ||
| And if he starts to move towards the gun, you can shoot him again, probably. | ||
| So when we, in a movie, in a movie, when we see somebody shot and they literally fly across the room. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's generally baloney? | ||
| Well, it's not a general. | ||
| It's always baloney. | ||
| And even with a 12-age shotgun, you should think about the very fundamental physics, that the recoil cannot be greater than the impact of the bullet. | ||
| Or the impact of the bullet cannot be greater than the recoil, which means they're opposite. | ||
| If the bullet would knock a man down, it would knock down the man firing the gun. | ||
| Do you know how many movies you're going to ruin for me now? | ||
| I mean, I have seen people blown from one side of the room through a window and then fall about 100 stories. | ||
| You know, and that's why I've made that takeover where I stand on one leg and get shot with a bulletproof vest to show that a bullet doesn't do that. | ||
| And it's just that if someone comes up behind you and sticks you in the rear with a pin, you might jump two feet in the air. | ||
| That's not the force of the pin or the middle of the angle, the velocity of it, just your reaction. | ||
| I bet you have not had a lot of consultant jobs in Hollywood, have you? | ||
| Well, actually, they do. | ||
| They call me once in a while, but they don't really want accuracy. | ||
| They want other things. | ||
| They want fun stuff. | ||
| They're not interested in doing things. | ||
| If you saw someone shot in a movie, the way it really is, where a guy stands there and he gets shot and he goes, ugh, ugh. | ||
| And there's no dramatic impact. | ||
| No, you're absolutely right. | ||
| But you've still ruined the movies. | ||
| Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Alex Jason. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, this is Tina in North Pole. | |
| A North Pole, Alaska? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| All right. | ||
| Well, I'd like to say that the situation for women is a little bit different in some of the scenarios that you've mentioned. | ||
| In other words, a man jumping into my car and I'm alone with my children, I would be more justified in shooting him. | ||
| Well, you would. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| But just bear in mind, the law makes no distinction. | ||
| It doesn't say, well, women, however, can do this and men, however, can only do that. | ||
| So legally, we have equality, you know, that doesn't mention any difference in gender. | ||
| So the law technically is the same. | ||
| However, when police get there, they're going to evaluate the situation, see you, the little baby in a baby seat, and so on. | ||
| And they're going to be much more sympathetic and it's just common sense that they're going to give you a lot more latitude. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| But I'm just trying to tell people the basics to keep them out of trouble. | ||
| And then you can sort of go from there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I have a question. | |
| If I'm walking out of a grocery store and I'm heading to my car and a man is charging at me and I don't see a weapon, but I feel that he's going to attack me, am I justified in shooting him? | ||
| Oh, yeah, good. | ||
| You know what happens is... | ||
| He may be. | ||
| But here's the question that they want to answer. | ||
| Why did you shoot the guy? | ||
| That's the key thing. | ||
| And how you respond to that question is going to make the difference between whether you're justified or not. | ||
| And what happens is if you find out who this guy is, if he's the mayor's son, or if he's the guy who was chasing a basketball and you missed a trick of what he was doing, or if he's a crazed maniac from the metal institution, just got out, he's got a big machete, then that's something else. | ||
| But they're going to take a hard look at what happened here? | ||
| Why did you shoot him? | ||
| Or why did you think you had to? | ||
| Maybe you did have to, but they want to know that. | ||
| So you have to be able to discuss that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All right. | ||
| Well, she's going to say, I thought he was going to grab me, jump me, whatever. | ||
| Okay, then they're going to look at him. | ||
| And let's say if he's still alive, they're going to say, well, what were you doing? | ||
| He said, well, I want to help her with her groceries. | ||
| And then you're going to be in big trouble. | ||
| And if he has a record of being a rapist and stuff, that's something else. | ||
| But let's say he's dead. | ||
| They're going to have a real hard look at this. | ||
| A guy in broad daylight comes out and she shoots him. | ||
| And if you say he didn't say anything to me, did he say he was going to kill you or he wanted to rob you or something? | ||
| You say no, he just came after me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're going to say, why don't you just back up and scream? | |
| So that's a real touchy area. | ||
| If you can justify it, if you can explain it in terms that another person in a similar situation would feel the way you did, then generally that's justifiable. | ||
| But that would be a hard one to justify just on that basis because at night you're all alone and that sort of thing, that would be more in your favor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's different at night? | |
| There's no computer involved in this. | ||
| It's what humans understand, that you know that you're more at risk. | ||
| You're coming out of work. | ||
| It's at night you're alone in a dark parking lot and some guy attacks you. | ||
| That would be much different than at broad daylight in a shopping center and you're coming out of a supermarket and there's all kinds of people around where you could have just said, help, help, and there were all kinds of people that could have helped you. | ||
| But you shot him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just because he was coming at you? | ||
| Maybe he tripped and he was falling. | ||
| You're going to have to explain that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, it comes down, Alex, doesn't it, to that reasonable man thing? | ||
| Reasonable person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| The reasonable test. | ||
| The test of reasonableness. | ||
| Would another person, a reasonable person in the same situation that you found yourself in, Feel the same way you did. | ||
| That's what they're going to ask the jury. | ||
| That's what the police are going to be thinking. | ||
| That's what the district attorney is going to be thinking. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Listen, my friend, we are out of time. | ||
| You have videotapes. | ||
| They're, I guess, world-renowned because I'm hearing so much about them. | ||
| If people want them. | ||
| They can call 800-762-7233. | ||
| 800-762-7233. | ||
| And I'll send you information about them or you can buy them with a credit card or whatever. | ||
| Well, it has been a very illuminating night, to say the least. | ||
| And I appreciate you being here, Alex. | ||
| Well, thank you for the invitation. | ||
| I appreciated your callers. | ||
| Take care, my friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye-bye. | |
| So, thank you all. | ||
| It was another great program. | ||
| And from the high desert, I'm Art Bell. | ||
| Good night, America. | ||
| Good night, Canada. | ||
| Good night, Cosmos. | ||
| All of you out there, wherever you are. |
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