My personal philosophy of self-defense has been altered this summer by some studying and learning about violence other than warfare. What changed was my belief in intimidation or scaring people off, or call it "Deescalation" if you want. In the military we would call it a "show of force," or a "demonstration," in order to divert attention or intimidate an enemy. It's a tenant of Army doctrine that I have used effectively in combat. I drove a company of tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles through a neighborhood the day after an ambush to scare them; and it worked.
How is this relevant? I used to advocate the occasional open carry for people with concealed carry permits. There are three reasons I personally open carried a pistol on occasion, even though I have and teach concealed carry. The first is simply a business decision and probably not relevant to most people, but it was a form of advertising for my firearms instruction business. The second is the most rational, which is that I did it because I can. I tell people that a right not exercised is a right forfeited. I still believe this to be true, by the way, and I still get advertising out of open carry. The third one is the one I am having an issue with; the demonstration of firearms makes for a more polite society.
There are two parts of politeness. I believe the more people who are afraid of guns are exposed to good people with guns, who are not committing crimes with those guns, the less afraid of those guns they will be. It is desensitization and it really does decrease people's irrational fears about guns; it shows that guns do not just go off like a hand grenade and kill everybody in the room. That I think is actually a very valid reason too. But, the other aspect of making society polite is a type of demonstration. This is the concept that has changed in my personal philosophy.
It is intimidating and can lead to legal consequences regardless of intention. In a hyper-sensitive, hyper-polarized and hyper-wussified society that some people live in, my arguments for open carry can be thrown right out the window. It is illegal to intimidate somebody with a firearm. Intimidating them is a very subjective, victim-defined state of being. Which is a very bad place to be if you are the gun holder and the cops show up and somebody accuses you of intimidating them or displaying a firearm in a threatening manner.
So, I am changing what I teach about open carry to be more coherent with the rest of self-defense philosophy. You are only ever justified in using a weapon if you have a legitimate fear for you life. Using a weapon to "deescalate" a situation, while it might save your life and the life of your opponent, can be a huge hornets nest you do not want to put your hand into. There are also some tactical reasons why you may not want to open carry, unless you have some weapons retention training. But, defending yourself with a demonstration of force, while it might morally seem like a better option than killing somebody, legally it may be the worst thing you can do. Also, it can become a slippery slope where you are more likely to USE your firearm not as a bullet projecting machine, but as a visual indicator of threat.
Why am I changing my belief? For one thing, a friend of mine got charged with Menacing with a firearm in the last year, for doing nothing wrong. But also, I want to get my students and readers to stop "fighting" and just kill people who need to be killed. I have to define "fighting" in this context: getting into a pointless competition of testosterone-driven stupidity. Road rage, bar fights, dick measuring contests of all types, trying to become the baddest dude on the block. Those are all contests. You are not justified in killing people in contests. So, if you are truly justified in defending yourself, you should never have to display or brandish a weapon at somebody. You should just draw and fire because you are in mortal danger. If you are not meeting that standard of threat, you can't use a weapon to defend yourself, and brandishing or threatening somebody with a weapon is USING it. If it is a truly life or death situation, and you just brandish a weapon at somebody, but are unwilling to pull the trigger, you have given a tool and Initiative to a bad guy. In those situations, where there is no posturing or dominance behavior, there is just violence, then you are justified in using a weapon in self-defense.
I think shooting sports, Mixed Martial Arts and video game reset buttons have on the one hand coarsened us to CONTROLLED violence, but on the other hand brainwashed us into believing those things are reality. Those are very sterile. Actual combat is very chaotic, uncontrolled and messy. It is generally to be avoided at all cost, and introducing an attempt to intimidate people to "deescalate" a situation with a show of--impotent--force, usually will end very badly. Either, you committed a crime by "menacing" somebody through a threat of force, in which case you can face criminal justice consequences. Or, worse, if you are unwilling to pull the trigger and just want to "scare off" the bad guy and he does not buy it, he will take that weapon from you, victimize you however he was going to in the first place, and then kill you with it in the end. So, unless you are justified in using a weapon to kill somebody IN SELF-DEFENSE, the use of it to NOT KILL SOMEBODY will be wholly INDEFENSIBLE at your trial.
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Soule
Easy 6
PS: I will caveat this to say, however, open carry by itself is not an act of intimidation, and until you get a concealed carry permit, it is always better to have a gun and not need it than need it and not have it. So, get your concealed carry, but until then it's better to offend some people than die for want of a gun a week before you got your permit in the mail.
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