Establishing a Legal Reasoning for Self Defense
Your Personal History Matters and Will be Used to Define Your Use of Force
Please go to the Firearms Basics page to read the main objective for this weekly article, my disclaimer, and to review the Four Rules for Safe Gun Handling, and introduction to this article.
My hope is that you will find this article to be thought provoking enough to incentivize you to further your ability to know the law and to effectively run your gun in self-defense. Today I am publishing the full article so if you’re not a paid Substack subscriber I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber at $5 per month or $30 per year or $50 founders’ subscription.
My apology in advance – I proofread the article twice so you can expect typos and other mistakes, and I still do not have a proofreader so I’m sure it will not flow as good as it should. And as is the case with most of my articles there are about 3000 words.
Today’s FLGSD.net Lawful2Shoot? Focus: Establishing a Legal Reasoning for Self Defense.
If there ever comes a time when you are forced to use deadly force in self-defense you will be entering the legal system as a killer claiming lawful self-defense. You will freely admit that you had no choice but to use deadly force to prohibit serious bodily injury or death. Your claim, which must be true, is that you could not avoid using deadly force due to the “attacker’s sudden deadly actions against you”.
However, your claim should not be that you had a right to stand your ground, even though that is a legal truth, and happens to be the legal foundation of your act of using deadly force self-defense. And even though the state of Florida doesn’t impose a legal duty to retreat before using deadly force during a deadly threat, the local detectives, prosecutors, judges and jurors will be looking to find evidence from the scene that you could have safely retreated, deescalated, avoided, or even fled the scene as a ‘reasonable option’ instead of using deadly force. If you don’t proclaim you had the right to stand your ground, then it doesn’t give the legal system an opportunity to distort and exaggerate your lawful actions in self-defense.
If the responding officers, investigators or prosecutor asks why you shot and killed the person, again you should not say, “I have the legal right to stand my ground, so I shot him”. Because that is not what happened and misrepresents the real reason you used a gun in self-defense. Instead, you should say, “I reasonably believed it was the only option I had to prevent my death or serious bodily injury”.
Now the legal system will look directly at your reasoning, which means your entire life’s history.
Your reasoning for using deadly force must be sensible, rational, and not mistaken, and therefore accurate in your determination of the event as it occurred. And you should welcome responding officers, investigators and prosecutors to examine your deadly force actions as well as learn from you your thinking prior to and in the moment of the deadly crisis. It is imperative that the legal system conclude that your reasoning was in fact, what anyone else would reason if in your same situation.
Your statement must be the simple truth. A person suddenly attacked you with deadly force which left you no choice but to prevent your death or grave harm by shooting the attacker. You could not escape death any other way and you wish there was a way of escape, but it was clear to you that there was no time to do so.
I have studied many deadly force self-defense cases over the past thirteen years and the one element in most of these cases that concerned me most was the way in which the legal system worked to evaluate and then judge the evidence of the case. This process varied greatly from state to state, and county to county and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. And the reason it varied was due to the politics involved.
During an imminent deadly attack, it is imperative that you positively know to a moral certainty that using lethal force by shooting the attacker is the only option available. And that you are confident in your ability to do so having practiced repeatedly this ‘legally precise discipline’ in order to lawfully save your life if a serious bodily injury or deadly attack occurred.
The production of evidence begins at the scene of the killing. The defendant’s statements prior to and after retaining legal counsel will be compared to witness testimony and then analyzed alongside the physical evidence collected. After the scene is fully processed the legal system turns to the defendant’s history, both personal and legal histories will be thoroughly scrutinized, and the same scrutiny also occurs for the witnesses’ personal and legal history.
Your history sets the legal foundation for your reasoning. Therefore, when you make the choice to carry a deadly weapon for lawful self-defense you should be confident that any investigation into your life should you have to use deadly force, leaves investigators no doubt as to your high-level education regarding ‘Use of Force’ law in your state.
Your history and its subsequent reasoning should easily be found when your history is examined. It will become the proof and evidence that you have a history of being law abiding, and are someone who has a history of learning gun and self-defense laws. And this evidentiary proof is especially important if you do not have a Conceal Carry License (CCL), even though you would have qualified for the CCL if you had applied.
Without having gone through the process of obtaining a carry license, even though you don’t need one to carry a gun for self-defense in Florida, the investigators will research all aspects of your life to determine if you do qualify for a conceal carry license. And should they find out that you don’t qualify for a CCL you will have been found guilty of unlawful carrying of a firearm. Which is not a good start to researching your use of deadly force in self-defense.
Now upon searching through your home, your personal computer and cell phone, if investigators discover content on the subjects of gun and use-of-force laws your legal foundation will begin to form in the investigator’s minds. Your reasoning and thus your mindset will be the base upon which the members of the legal system will compare their legal reasoning to, which is exactly what you need to happen in order to prove you acted in lawful deadly force self-defense.
Now let’s take it a step further. If it should be discovered that you wrote notes and highlighted important sections in books addressing Use of Force Law, this discovery will provide proof that not only did you actually read this type of content, but you went to the next step of mentally processing and retaining the core of the content for the intended purpose of acting lawfully if you should be forced to use deadly force to save your life. The proof of a lawful mental preparedness will be apparent.
And should you take the extra step which causes investigators to find within your files a certified letter sent from you to yourself which contained documentation of pertinent educational courses completed. They will know you understand the legal aspects of proving your legal preparation for using deadly force should it occur.
And additionally if there exists a detailed instruction document listing a step-by-step legal strategy in the handling of several types of potential deadly attacks, which have applications to real life events, which also have further analysis using the five elements of self-defense legal structure by Andrew Branca, the entire legal system investigating you will know your lawyer will be entering this evidence in court as legal proof proving the validity of for your legal claim of self-defense.
Assuming for the sake of this article that you are a lawful person with no felony record, and you don’t have any proofs online or in personal history which demonstrates illegal, irrational, unnatural, characteristics, and are in fact a morally good person who clearly has a history of upholding the law, you then, should…………assume the worst-case scenario and count on investigators to comb through your life with a very fine tooth comb again.
Aggressive prosecutors after they scrutinize your life and find a stellar personal record and proof that you conduct yourself from within a good legal foundational mindset, will look to create a distortion using what they deem to be, the weakest element---which actually in reality is what everyone thinks is a good strong element of your history. They will cheat, use deception and distorted analysis to create lies from your good strong history.
It is therefore imperative when building and establishing a legal reasoning to organize it in accordance with the way an aggressive rogue prosecutor will attempt to reorganize it. He will and manipulate and twist every part of your lawful mindset and your subsequent actions in self-defense. He will turn it into the evidence he needs to prove that you acted out of malice and hatred when you shot the person dead.
One of the distortions I’ve seen in my research of deadly self-defense cases which involved a good moral person educated in self-defense law who also had a stellar personal history and record, is the prosecution will assert, using various legal tactics, that the shooter believed they could take the law into their own hands as judge jury and executioner. Rather than spare the victim’s life and deciding not to seeking law enforcement to handle this situation, they stood their ground in the confrontation and shot him dead. This could have easily been avoided but they stood their ground instead. This is exactly what the defendant said at the scene per the officer’s testimony.
And if you should happen to have “Self-Defense Insurance” this too can be used as proof that you knew you’d need extra protection when defending yourself because you planned to kill someone who you considered a problem. The prosecutor will declare that you wanted to do everything possible, what every it takes, to get away with killing someone. And the key proof is that you could have found a way to not shoot the victim if you really wanted to, but you were counting on self-defense insurance to win your case. You spent a lot of time and money paying insurance premiums so you could get away with killing someone.
There are many distortions and legal tricks prosecutors use in court which are very effective on naïve jurors.
When it comes to a deadly force attack that you did not cause, “Reasonableness” is one of the legal elements which must be proven. And “Imminence” is the key element of Reasonableness in this case . If the attack was Imminent, and can be proven to have been so, Avoidance is no longer possible. So, the key in proving lawful moral deadly force, is to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the attack was immediately upon you, leaving you only one action to prevent serious harm or death, which was to quickly use deadly force in self-defense.
To sum up your steps required in pre-establishing your use-of-force reasoning, you must always conduct yourself from a state of avoidance—remaining free from elevated conflict. Namely, you’re always alert to avoid, know your physical ability to avoid, and have practiced in your mind previously how to actually achieve avoidance in every situation commonplace in your day to day life. In achieving this mental readiness, the second element of innocence of causation of conflict becomes automatic present.
The third element of Imminence also becomes almost automatically present. I say ‘almost’ because judging sudden surprise attacks, from a mindset of avoidance and innocence, is not always easy or automatic---easier said than done. But the odds, chances that you experience the correct legal judgement required to use deadly force in a split second are much higher.
And as far as each person’s particular ability to physically use force varies greatly, let along think, decide, and act with enough time to actually bring the level of force needed to stop an imminent deadly threat in under one second. Therefore it is most imperative that you record this information derived from properly constructed practice sessions. Document your ability to mentally, physically, and lawfully act under extreme duress, attacks which imminently spring upon you suddenly and quickly. However, note that not all imminent attacks are quick, instead some are multi-level coordinated slow deliberate attacks.
How it plays out in real time: When you first deal with officers at the scene, they will be estimating your abilities, using a variety of trained techniques which will form an ‘initial estimation’ and perhaps conclusions concerning your actions. Their opinions-conclusions will be passed along to the investigators who will conduct exhaustive research of your mental, physical and legal aptitude levels as proven by the collected evidence which I addressed earlier in this article.
The investigators will report their finding to the prosecutor who is tasked with building a case they believe that they can win, not on the merits of the case, but instead on the merits of their ability to convince a jury, which they know they alone get to choose without much input from the defense.
Most people believe the defense attorney has an equal say in the jury selection process. This is never true. It is the prosecutor who has more than ninety percent of the power in the jury selection process. When the jurors enter the courtroom, they will be individuals who are exactly what the prosecutor needs to achieve a guilty verdict.
The prosecutor is more than skilled in determining which jurors he can manipulate, or he would not have selected them. And you can count on the prosecutor manipulating the element of “Reasonableness” in the juror’s mind so that there will be no reasonable doubt in their thinking that the defendant is guilty of murder.
For this reason, and I would assert that this is the most probable reason, that the jurors have no idea whatsoever what would have been reasonable or unreasonable in the deadly force attack you experienced.
For instance, if the jurors saw a video from one or two sources and from more than one angle, of you using your gun during the shooting, the jurors could reasonably come to the conclusion that they would have had time to not shoot as you did, and would instead have in some way avoided shooting---every jury will have more than one possible scenario where a shooting didn’t have to occur and that the shooter could have avoided shooting. They will reason that the shooting should have been a last resort and it clearly wasn’t as the video demonstrated. Never mind that fact that hardly anyone is certain as to what a last resort actually is in a real time deadly crisis because they have never experienced one.
Therefore, your personal history and education in use-of-force law and deadly force lawful implementation must be on record, and filed away on your phone, your personal computer, and within your personal history and person records. These files are the evidence your lawyer will introduce in court. It will educate the jury and absolutely disgust the prosecutor.
Your defense attorney’s mission is to make the situation of the imminent attack upon you so accurately real in the juror’s mind that they believe correctly that what you did was exactly what they would have done. Reasonable doubt as to your guilt will be nullified by the truth proven by the evidence produced by the legal system’s investigation and your defense attorney’s evidence as proof of a lawful claim of self-defense in the courtroom.
My Personal Effort to Establish My Reasoning for Using Deadly Force Self-Defense.
I’ve established my reasoning for using self-defense in every way available to me. Which has been enrolling in several proven use-of-force educational sources over the past thirteen years and completing their courses and earning documentation for those achievements.
I have also written content which demonstrates my comprehension of several state’s use-of-force statues and case law and have learned the various implementations of Florida statues within the six-seven counties and twenty state jurisdictions. And I went even further by publishing that research in newsprint, website forum comments, and my website FLGSD.net which currently offers forty-three articles addressing non-deadly and deadly self-defense laws and real-time cases and situations myself and others reasonably could experience in their day to day lives.
If the day should come when I am forced to use deadly or non-deadly defensive force to save my life from serious injury or a deadly attack, there will be no question as to my reasoning in choosing the proportional force necessary to stop the threat level imposed on me.
My implementation order of Andrew Branca’s system of The Law of Self Defense begins with a basic mindset of Avoidance, which I believe automatically proves Innocence, which in turn provides understanding when the point in time when an Imminent attack occurs, which will in most cases provide the information that I need to reason the correct legal proportional response to prevent my serious injury or death. All four elements collectively understood during a real-time threat will be found to be the same as any other person would do if in the same circumstances, and therefore I will be judged as Reasonable by a judge or by jurors, which is “IF” the prosecutor decides to prosecute.
If you have any questions or considerations or if you would like advice or any level of training whether it be personal, residential, or business, I offer “Free in Person Consults” within Highlands County---otherwise there’s an added fuel charge for areas outside of 25-mile radius from Avon Park- $25 minimum.
My Information Sources: The following sources are the basis upon which I write my articles. My conclusions, opinions, and assertions mostly are in line with these sources’ content; however, my usage and applications of their content are arranged in accordance with real-life self-defense situations which I have both experienced firsthand and have studied in hundreds of videos which captured such events.
The following order of sources reflects my educational timeline in the lawful use of firearms, weapons, self-defense, and use-of-force law, since 1998. Prior to 1998, I learned via gun-culture osmosis. The order of my progressive awakening: Rory Miller, Massad Ayoob Andrew Branca Jon H. Gutmacher Katz & Phillips CCWSafe , and many other self-defense, force-on-force, use-of-force law, training publications.
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“Aim to Win the Physical and Legal Battles by Knowing the Law and Learning to Defensively Shoot.”
Florida Gun & Self-Defense offers firearms and self-defense education and training. Single or group classes or customized training are available. Visit FloridaGunSelfDefense.com for more information. Or call Dave Douglass at 863-381-8474
I have been a firearms instructor and trainer since 2012 and a skilled tactical and self-defense gun operator since my training began in my twenties. My content is based upon and in accordance with Florida gun and self-defense laws. I am not a lawyer but have studied Florida Use-of-Force Law and Gun Law for the last twelve plus years and counting. My articles are my interpretation and opinion and do not constitute legal advice for you. If you need legal advice, secure competent legal counsel in your relevant jurisdiction. I am an adamant supporter of an original historical literal interpretation of the Second Amendment. You can email me at davidpdouglass@hotmail.com