Podcasts

Today’s post is prompted by a report out of the San Bernardino District Attorneys Office regarding a police officer shooting of a suspect who attacked with a crowbar and a hammer. The report does a reasonably good job of stepping through the five elements of self-defense much as we teach them at Law of Self […]

This past weekend I received a text from a legal colleague that simply read “RIP Carry Guard.” The NRA launched Carry Guard in 2017 as a hybrid self-defense training and self-defense “insurance” program. It now appears the long-troubled “insurance” facet has, for perfectly predictable reasons, been shuttered completely, and the training facet appears to be

Today’s post takes a look at a shooting in Alaska this past Thursday in which what had initially looked like a possibly credible case of self-defense instead turned into a chargesof first-degree murder after the purported defender fired one round too many. In further questionable decision-making, the defender also refused to drop his firearm when

Today’s post is about a Florida man who has been criminally charged for using a hand-held stun gun in claimed self-defense. The interesting facet of this case is the nature of the criminal charge: aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Wait a minute, a stun gun as a deadly weapon? I’ve written from time to

Today’s post is about North Carolina resident Antwain Moton, who successfully and lawfully defended his home against an intruder this past Sunday night. There are two facets of this case that are particularly notable. First, the remarkable degree to which Mr. Moton did it right. So many of the cases we cover at Law of

Five years ago, on this exact date, Eric Garner died while violently resisting lawful arrest for a petty crime. Yesterday the Department of Justice announced that there would be no civil rights charges against the police officer most associated with that arrest (although numerous officers were involved). This perfectly reasonable decision by the DOJ—consistent with

Today’s post addresses California bill AB 392, a bill that addresses when police officers are justified in using deadly force, and which has been much in the press the last few months. The concern among many has been that AB 392 will strip away the ability of officers to rely on a reasonable perception of

Today’s post focuses on a one-punch-one-kill confrontation in Florida in which a Mexican television star Pablo Lyle killed a 63-year-old Florida man with a single punch, according to local news reports. Lyle has subsequently been charged with manslaughter. The event took place March 31 but is back in the news now because Lyle has just

This post is just a quick one about the story breaking out of the Philadelphia area in which a father is said to have beat to death a carjacker who stole the father’s car with his children inside. As usual, the news reports appear to be missing the key legal issue here, so naturally I

I often caution that a very common way that law-abiding armed citizens get into legal trouble is not so much that they don’t know self-defense law, but that so much of what they know is actually bad information. And where do they tend to get this bad information? Not from the gun controllers, but too