Читать книгу Gun Digest's Concealed Carry Preparation & Aftermath eShort - Massad Ayoob - Страница 3

No way out. The Lindsey incident took place in this boxed-in parking lot.

It’s about sunset right now outside my hotel room in Denver, a chilly evening. December 7, 2006. Pearl Harbor is on our minds, of course, this being the anniversary of the sneak attack that changed the history of America and the world. But right now, I’m dealing with a case of a law-abiding gun owner who has suffered a sneak attack from fate.

The case closed today, and it went to the jury about 45 minutes ago. Eleven months earlier, the client, 58, was driving to the Veteran’s Administration hospital to pick up some medicine. His name is Larry Lindsey. Already asthmatic, he had just been diagnosed with diabetes, and overall was not in the best of health. He walked with a cane and a pronounced limp, the legacy of an accident on a city street a few years earlier when a careless motorist blasted through a red light and ran him down on a crosswalk.

On the Interstate that goes through Denver, a young-looking man in a Ford Taurus, racing zig-zag through the high speed traffic, cut into his lane. The smaller car nearly ran Larry’s vehicle off the road. Acutely aware of the dangers posed by such driving – not only reminded constantly by his lingering injury, but by the fact that he had lost loved ones to drunk and reckless drivers in the past – Larry always made a point of calling in such dangerous motorists on his cell phone. But the Taurus had accelerated ahead so quickly, still cutting left and right through traffic, that he hadn’t been able to get the license plate number.

Be able to articulate why you chose the caliber and ammo that were used. Federal +P+ 115-grain JHP (left) is an excellent choice in 9mm, but full metal jacket, right, is not.

He continued on his way. As he reached his exit, he saw a familiar car stopped at the edge of the exit ramp: the tan Taurus, with the same young man at the wheel. Larry instinctively slowed, and suddenly, the vehicle shot out directly in front of him, nearly colliding. Larry swerved and hit the brakes, and barely missed plowing into the concrete wall on the right side of the exit ramp. As he brought his vehicle back on path, Larry saw the Taurus’ driver mouth a curse at him and raise his middle finger in contempt … and then blast through a red light, turning right, in flagrant violation of a big sign that read, “NO RIGHT TURN ON RED.”

This, Larry decided, was just too blatant to ignore. When traffic allowed, he too turned right, following the tan Taurus that was now a considerable distance ahead of him. He decided he was going to write down the license number and phone it in. As he drove he dialed 9-1-1 on his cell phone, and was put on “hold.” Ahead of him, he saw the car take a right, then a left. He followed in time to see it pull quickly into the parking lot on his left.

He slowed, turned into the lot – and stopped dead in the narrow mouth of the parking lot. Instead of going to the right where the main parking spaces were, the tan Taurus had pulled into the third slot on the immediate left of the exit, a short row of Handicapped spaces. The vehicle had come to its sudden stop in front of a large HANDICAPPED sign.

Only a few steps away from the vehicle, Larry figured he’d jot down the license number and be out of there. 9-1-1 Dispatch had not yet taken him off “hold.”

But other things weren’t “holding” at all.

The driver boiled out of the car, coming toward Larry, screaming obscenities. Fifteen or twenty paces ahead of Larry’s car, a very tall and strong-looking young man emerged immediately from the apartment house entryway and proceeded toward him at a fast walk. Then another came out behind him.

Five feet eight, pushing sixty, a little overweight, and crippled and sick, Larry wasn’t sure he would be a match for one athletic young man, let alone three. The third one seemed to drift away, but the tall one was approaching straight at him and the driver of the Taurus was almost at his left door, screaming “I’ll kick your ass! I’ll kill you!”

In his younger days, Larry Lindsey had spent eight years in the United States Marine Corps, much of it in Vietnam, where his MOS was Combat Photographer. His issue weapon had been a 1911 45 automatic back then. A gun guy all his life, he had grown to like the issue pistol, and had chosen as his personal defense gun a stainless steel Kimber Custom Shop Gold 1911 45. He kept it in his console with pretty much the same load-out to which the USMC had accustomed him: in a holster with loaded magazine and empty chamber, backed up by two more loaded mags in a leather pouch.

Larry flipped open the console and took out the holstered pistol, holding it in plain sight where he hoped they could see it. The man on his left screamed another F-word curse…and his right hand dove under his jacket toward his back, as if going for a pistol.

Larry ripped the holster off the Kimber, jacked a 230-grain Federal Hydra-Shok into the chamber, and brought up the pistol.

Suddenly, the two men were moving back, and Larry wasn’t in danger anymore. His cell phone was still in his lap where he had dropped it when he went for his pistol. Glancing behind him, Larry saw an opening in the traffic and he backed out into the street, then drove to the nearest corner and pulled into a parking lot there. He dialed 9-1-1 again, and this time, he got through. He told the dispatcher what happened.

Trials can be scary. Law enforcement personnel barricade the streets for a block in each direction around the courthouse because of death threats against the defendant in one case the author worked.

Unfortunately, the tall man who had menaced him had whipped out his own cell phone before Larry was out of the parking lot. His call went in to Dispatch at 3:02 PM, and Larry’s did not get in until 3:03. The first responding officer arrived at the scene at 3:10, a respectable eight-minute response time.

That officer would testify that he never received any radio notification that Larry had called in his complaint. He seemed surprised when he was shown the facts on the 9-1-1 call log, in court, by defense attorney Paul Grant.

The same officer would testify that he had decided almost immediately upon his arrival to arrest Larry Lindsey, who was now in the grip of a full-blown asthma attack. After all, two witnesses had identified the crazy man in a state of road rage who had waved a silver-colored pistol at them, and the man had admitted drawing the gun on the pair the officer now considered victims.

Larry Lindsey was arrested at the scene. He was charged with two counts of Felony Menacing, and later released on $50,000 bail.

The trial began on December 6. Jury selection was done by morning, with the prosecution removing almost every gun owner. This is par for the course. Neither side wants someone on the jury who might identify with the people on the other side of the case. Among the twelve jurors and one alternate finally selected there was but a single one who owned firearms. He had two, which he kept empty, fitted with trigger locks, inside a gun safe. A loaded gun, he said during the jury selection process called voir dire, was just too dangerous to keep around. This, apparently, was enough to satisfy the prosecutor.

The state took the rest of the day to establish its case. A story emerged of a nice twenty-something kid, an immigrant from the Middle East with no record, who accidentally cut in front of a motorist who must have been one of those Angry White Males. The driver had boiled up in road rage, followed him for several blocks, pulled in behind him and pulled out a big silver pistol, with which he threatened to “blow his brains out” along with those of his equally innocent twenty-something friend, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who had done nothing but come out of his apartment building.

The cops took the stand. Yes, said the arresting officer, he had been called to the scene of a crime of threatening to shoot someone without reason…found two complainants willing to testify…found the defendant who admitted having a gun just like the one the complainants had described…and determined immediately that he was guilty and placed him under arrest. Much emphasis was placed on the large caliber of the weapon. The prosecutor elicited from the officer that the hollow-point bullets, 230-grain Federal Hydra-Shok, were designed to expand and tear “larger wounds.” And, oh my God, there were two spare magazines! Enough bullets to kill two dozen people!

On the morning of December 7, the assistant district attorney would announce that her case was closed. Attorney Paul Grant had chosen to call only two witnesses: the defendant, and me. The ADA strenuously objected to my presence, so an informal hearing was held on the record in chambers.

Reloaded ammo is great for practice, hunting, and competition, says author, but he strongly recommends against it for defense use.

It seems that when Grant had sent the routine list of witnesses he intended to call to the prosecutor who’d had the case previously, the fax had not gone through. He hadn’t known that. When he mentioned to the new prosecutor on the case the week before that he would be calling an expert to testify, she went through the roof.

The judge was not happy about the glitch. However, he was diligent in his duties and he recognized that the defendant had certain rights. The prosecutor’s questioning of the arresting officer the day before had elicited testimony that made the pistol seem an avatar of malice because of its caliber, its spare magazines, its hollowpoint ammunition; Grant, who had seen that before, argued that he had a right to rebut those arguments. Incredibly, the prosecutor argued that since it came through a material witness instead of an expert, that material could not be rebutted by an expert. Grant responded, successfully, with a logical argument: whoever had said it, the poison was in the water, and he had the right to administer an antidote of his choice. The judge agreed.

Grant wanted me to testify also as to the standards of care for private citizens in such things, the rules of engagement as it were. The prosecutor adamantly objected. I was, she said, going to tell the jury that the defendant’s use of the gun was justified, and that issue was something only the jury could determine. The judge asked me what my take was on that.

I explained that I had no intention of going to “the ultimate issue,” the guilt or innocence of the defendant, and that I agreed this was a question that only the triers of the facts could answer. However, I added, I believed the defense attorney’s job was to show the jury that a reasonable, prudent person, in the same situation and knowing what his client knew, would have done the same thing. The element of “knowing what the defendant knew” required him to show the jury how such decisions are made by lawfully armed citizens, and what the rules of engagement are understood to be. It was to establish those parameters that he had brought me in.

And, of course, the judge agreed.

I went on the stand first thing after court convened. The prosecutor stipulated to my credentials and expertise, a professional move by any advocate against an adverse expert witness because it limits how much of his qualifications and background the jury will hear in the opening moments of testimony.

Defense attorney Grant asked the right questions, and I laid out those “rules of engagement,” which will follow shortly in this chapter. We explained the “furtive movement” element: that when someone such as the young Iranian immigrant made a move consistent with going for a gun, and not reasonably consistent with anything else under the circumstances, it would reasonable and prudent of someone such as the defendant to immediately draw his own gun and take him proactively at gunpoint.

One by one, we cut down the shibboleths that had built up around the defendant’s choice of gun and ammunition during the prosecution’s case. The 45-caliber pistol was quite common in America, very popular in law enforcement, in fact approved for the Denver Police Department and carried by a great many of its officers. The type of gun the defendant had employed was adopted by the United States Military in 1911, had been standard with our armed forces until the mid-1980s, and was still used by our military among pistol teams, the Army’s Delta Force, and the Marine Corps’ Recon unit, which in fact had recently purchased a quantity of Kimbers functionally identical to the Kimber 45 in evidence.

I explained that generations of American service personnel had returned to civilian life after completing their terms of service, and had decided that if the 1911 45 pistol was good enough to be issued to them by Uncle Sam to protect their country, it was good enough for them to purchase to protect their home and hearth and loved ones. In turn, countless Americans who had never joined the military had been taught by their parents to use those same 45s, and bought one or more when they in turn grew up and made the lawful decision to have a gun to protect themselves and their loved ones. This was why the 1911 was so very popular and common among armed citizens, and also the fact that its design features made it ideal for many forms of pistol matches, which the defendant would testify he had competed in regularly until becoming too physically debilitated to do so.

The two spare magazines that augmented the loaded pistol? I explained that this was a typical “load-out” for those who carried a gun. Since before any of us was born, the standard law enforcement rule was a loaded gun plus enough spare ammunition for two full reloads. I told the jury that they would see uniformed officers in the courthouse during their breaks, and that they would notice each had a double pouch on their duty belts to carry two spare magazines to complement their fully loaded weapon. Since many of them had high-capacity pistols, some would be carrying as many as 54 duty cartridges on their person, i.e., a fully loaded Glock 17 with 18 9mm rounds in it and two spare 17-round magazines in the pouches. The military load-out, since the 45’s adoption in 1911, had been loaded gun in holster plus two magazines in pouches. I pointed out that testimony would show that the defendant had served for some eight years as a USMC combat photographer in Vietnam (where he had been wounded in action) and that every day there he carried what the Government issued him: a 1911 45 auto with an empty chamber and full magazine, and two spare fully loaded magazines, in the holster and double mag pouch he was issued. This was exactly what he’d had in the car with him on the day in question, albeit with eight-round competition magazines instead of seven-round GI mags.

As a competitor for many years, the defendant needed at least two magazines to shoot even prosaic NRA bullseye matches, and three to shoot a stage in IDPA. If he just stopped at the public outdoor range for some shooting – which, records would show, he had done just a couple of days before the incident – there would be a finite amount of actual shooting time in between stand-downs to examine and change targets. During those stand-downs, there would be time to refill the magazines. Then, when it came time to shoot, the guy who came to shoot could spend his shooting time doing more shooting, just as the guy who came to a golf course to play golf would rather play eighteen holes than nine. I could see some of the jurors nodding their heads in affirmation. And of course, should a defensive pistol have to be used for serious purposes, more ammo could be required, or a spare magazine might be necessary to clear a malfunction. They “got it.” They realized a person for whom pistol shooting was a sport might want to have multiple loaded magazines for purposes other than mass murder.

The hollowpoints? I explained that virtually every law enforcement agency in the country had adopted such ammunition, including the Denver PD which last I knew had Speer Gold Dot as standard issue for every approved caliber. (Detroit, Michigan is clutched so tightly in the iron fist of political correctness that “hollowpoints” are anathema there, so Detroit coppers are issued Federal Expanding Full Metal Jacket ammunition, in which the operative term is “expanding.”) I then went on to point out the reasons for that, which are listed elsewhere in this book but, briefly, include reduced likelihood of ricochet that could endanger bystanders, reduced likelihood of over-penetration that could jeopardize the same innocents, etc. The Federal Hydra-Shok in particular had at one point been the “gold standard” among American police before the coming of higher-tech JHPs from that maker and others, and remains in wide law enforcement use.