Crime scene analyst Alexander Jason debunks myths about self-defense, emphasizing legal risks over "John Wayne" bravado—even justified shootings face lawsuits. He dismisses high-velocity bullets as overrated, citing proper placement (aorta/spine) over speed for stopping power, and warns against targeting non-vital areas like kneecaps. Luminol reveals hidden blood traces, while cases like OJ Simpson and Bernie Ghetz highlight how perception trumps evidence in deadly force scenarios. Foster’s death and BB gun bans in San Francisco underscore legal pitfalls, with Jason stressing proportionality and immediate threats. Ultimately, responsible gun use hinges on training, evidence, and avoiding escalation unless survival is at stake. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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, 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, 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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
unidentified
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
unidentified
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.