A reminder, I’m not an attorney. None of this is legal advice. Simply passing along my framework, previous experience, and training.

Continuing from last week’s post on disparity of force and the pillars of justified force.

Most if not all law enforcement agencies around the country have a policy that describes escalating uses of force to control subjects based on the subject’s level of resistance. Your opponent chooses the level of force you may justifiably use. Your goal is deescalating the level of force needed by increasing the level of control and gaining compliance or removing the ability to resist. Generally the defender may use one level of force above the level being used by the aggressor in order to quickly resolve the situation and ensure the defender prevails. This “one level” is often very unclear because the continuum is not linear and has overlapping levels on each step.

A reminder, I’m not an attorney. None of this is legal advice. Simply passing along my framework, previous experience, and training.

Reasonable Person Standard - This legal concept is simply that if you pulled the hypothetical perfectly average person off the street and told them your facts and reasoning they’d say “yeah that sounds likely/plausible/okay to me”. As you become more skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable in the law, tactics, and application of force you stop being “reasonable” yourself via your specialized and above average traits. In policing there is a “reasonable officer” standard which assumes levels of training, experience, and judgment that the average person does not have and is, for police, a more permissive standard. Uses of force are generally based on a reasonable person standard, and so it is very important to think of how things would be perceived by that very perfectly average person if they were to judge the totality of events that occurred including what you were thinking and was known to you at the time.

One issue I have with a lot of concealed carry weapons courses is they do not teach self-defense and use of force like it is taught to police officers. A lot of people find themselves in trouble by relying on a vague understanding of the law and self-defense tactics, often mostly informed by popular culture, sometimes misguided politicians. Many of these things are flat untrue and unwise. Sometimes a strict reading of the law to get a wanted conclusion is used completely ignorant of case law and prior applications of that law or others that cancel or restrict it. Another issue is teaching self-defense law as protection from lawyers primarily, lethal assault second. Many of these courses advise tactics that sound good to make a lawyer to fail a character assassination, or mitigate negligence. In reality this advice makes you far easier to kill, sometimes to the point of being unable to prevent it, and the character assassination works anyway. My goal here is to share my approach where you are armed with knowledge so you can defend your life first and the lawyers have less ground to stand on to question that defense. I’m not an attorney. None of this is legal advice. Simply passing along my framework, previous experience, and training.

Zeroing your weapon is a critical part of having your kit maintained and squared away. There are lots of different thoughts on zeroing schemes. For a 5.56x45mm carbine a 50m zero is a good standard, for sidearms 25m. There are good reasons to do other things and more advanced zeroes to select for a specific gun or ammunition type. If you know how to do that, you should do that - such as ballistic point blank zeroing. It is a good idea that across your weapons you have the same scheme. That way you do not need to memorize lots of different holds and your instinctual shooting will work across all of your weapons. If you zero one AR as 50&200, don’t do a different AR at 25&300. Exception would be if you have something like an ACOG with a Bullet Drop Scale, zero that at the range specified by the manual (usually 100m). Different chamberings will have different trajectories, so it is fine to have your .30-06 hunting rifle as a 100&300 zero, and your AR as 50&200 as your brain is going to know for sure those are different guns and the holds are different.