Author: Andrew Branca

We have covered the recent shooting death by police of a handcuffed suspect in Georgia:

• GA Police Officer Shoots and Kills Handcuffed Black Suspect
• Handcuffed GA Man Killed by Police Had Extensive Criminal Record

By now we've all heard expounded the major theme propounded by protesters that a handcuffed suspect could never present a danger of death or grave bodily harm necessary to justify the officer's use of deadly force. Let's bust that myth. On Friday commenter MikeAT, who runs the very interesting blog A Cop's Watch, was kind enough to provide links to a couple of terrible cases in which handcuffed suspects not only presented police officers with death or grave bodily harm, they actually killed them. Both cases referred to by MikeAT are drawn from the web site "Officer Down Memorial Page."

Police Officer Guy P. Gaddis, Houston Police Department

Officer Guy Gaddis [24-years-old] was shot and killed while transporting two handcuffed prisoners to jail. One of the prisoners had managed to conceal a gun and shoot Officer Gaddis twice in the back of the head. The suspect was convicted and sentenced to death. He was subsequently executed on January 22nd, 2014.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post titled "When can you legally use a gun against an unarmed person?"  That post discussed the self-defense law element of proportionality, with a particular emphasis on disparity of force, to explore (as the title suggests) when a gun could be used against an unlawful attacker even if that attacker was armed with no more than their bare hands. Out of Oregon this past Monday comes a classic real-life example of exactly this scenario, in which one man armed with a .38 pistol shot another, completely unarmed man in the chest, killing him, as reported by local KTVZ News 21.  Although the matter has not yet been adjudicated, no arrests have been made and all witnesses are cooperating with the police investigation.  Further, the Sheriff leading the investigation has made public statements emphasizing the disparity of force between the shooter and the victim, strongly suggesting he considers the use of the gun to be justified.

Well, this weekend I learned there's a guy named Ray Rice who's got a pretty mean left hook, at least when he's punching his wife in the face on an elevator. It seems he also plays something called "football," or at least he used to do so until surveillance video of the punch was released by some kind of news organization called TMZ. What caught my attention about this story was not, of course, Mr. Rice or football or TMZ, about all of which I know pretty much nothing, but a raging series of debates I see on Twitter today about the matter. As is typical of such debates argued in the 140 character "jabs" of the Twitterverse, there's a great deal of mis- and cross-communication, undoubtedly much of it deliberate. (UPDATE: Note that this topic can now also be viewed as a Law of Self Defense University Video Lecture, or listened to as a Law of Self Defense Podcast, here: http://is.gd/1HOsaT) The key issues leading to angry pitchforks and torches appear to be:

• Is it ever permissible for a man to physically strike a woman?  Here the two sides are "No, never," and "Yes, if done in necessary self-defense."
• Was Ray Rice's punch to his wife's face an example of a lawful use of force in self-defense?

Yesterday I wrote of yet another vicious deadly-force gang attack: "Caught on video: Another black-on-white racially motivated gang attack."   In that post, I cautioned that gang attacks of this kind were likely to end very badly for the attackers once they stumbled upon a victim who was lawfully armed and prepared to defend himself. It wasn't long before I received an example of this type of attack happening in Milwaukee, four days prior to the September 7 attack described in yesterday's post. As reported by the Daily Caller (video embedded below), on September 3 a gang of teens attempted to rob a group of people in Milwaukee. According to police spokesman Lt. Mark Stanmeyer, the gang had been involved in dozens of robberies in prior days,

Fast on the heels of the gang attack upon the white couple described in yesterday's post, "Caught on Video: Vicious Group Attack by Thugs on Young Couple," comes another video capture of a gang of black teenagers beating unconscious what appears to be a randomly selected white man intent on nothing more than doing his grocery shopping, as well as two store employees who came to his aid. Breitbart news site Big Government reports that:

According to Memphis police, the group emerged from a restaurant in the same strip mall and immediately attacked a 25-year-old man as he left his car in the parking lot and headed for the grocery store. Two grocery store employees ran to the man's aide, and the black mob attacked them as well, brutally beating all three victims into unconsciousness.

Cell phone video of the attacks as captured by an observer is embedded below. The screen cap of that video in the image above captures the moment that one of the attackers stomps down upon a fallen store employee's hand, which had been protecting his face, so that the attacker could next swing a kick directly into the now unprotected face. The victim was, not surprisingly rendered utterly unconscious by the vicious attack, as were the other two victims of the gang. The attacking gang can be heard laughing throughout, as can spectators.

What timing.  Just last Sunday I put up a post exploring the question of "When can you legally use a gun against an unarmed person?"  In that post I explained that deadly force, such as a gun, can be used in lawful self-defense even against an "unarmed" attacker, where the "unarmed" attack nevertheless presents a threat of death or grave bodily harm.

Disparity of Force Can Justify Defensive Use of Gun Against Even "Unarmed" Attack

In determining whether a deadly force threat is presented by an attacker the law looks to see if there existed a deadly force disparity of force between the attacker and the defender, such that the defender would be unable to reasonably defend themselves without resort to a deadly force themselves (typically in the form of a firearm). There are many circumstances in which a deadly-force disparity of force can exist.  One, of course, is where the attacker is himself armed with a deadly weapon, such as a gun or knife. Such a deadly force disparity of force can also exist, however, even in the absence of an deadly force weapon wielded by the attacker. (It should be noted, of course, that anything can be a deadly weapon, if used in a manner likely to cause death or grave bodily harm--and this includes one's hands/fists and feet.) One of the most common deadly force disparity-of-force circumstances is where there is a disparity of numbers, such that the attackers substantially outnumber the defenders. Another is disparity of gender, where the attacker is male and the defender female--a disparity further aggravated when the woman is dressed in a manner not conducive to physical self-defense (e.g., wearing heels and a dress).

It's become so commonplace for "journalists" to be blind to obvious cause-and-effect relationships that fall outside the acceptable Progressive narrative that James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has long used the tag-line "Fox Butterfield, Is That You?" as he notes these occurrences in his daily (and excellent) "Best of the Web" blog posts. Perhaps the quintessential such observation is "Prison populations continue to increase, even as crime rates decline,"  the implication being that this represents some kind of counter-intuitive conundrum along the lines of:  how can we be locking up more criminals if there are fewer criminals to lock up? It takes an exceptional type of intellectual obtuseness not to recognize the distinct possibility that these two events may be not only correlated but causative--put more criminals in jail, and there are fewer criminals on the street to commit crime.

Self-defense killings rise in New Orleans even as murders fall

Although always humorous, one such observation he noted yesterday particularly caught my eye as it touched upon a subject near and dear to my heart, the use of force in lawful self-defense.  Specifically, the New Orleans newspaper Times-Picayune ran a story entitled "Self-defense killings rise in New Orleans even as murders fall." It is axiomatic that if you raise the price of something, you get less of it. In New Orleans it has become increasingly likely that the price for attempting to unlawfully use deadly force against another person is the lose of the aggressor's own life--a higher cost is hard to imagine. It only makes common sense, then, that higher levels of self-defense, particularly self-defense that results in the death of the attacker, would be accompanied by a decreased incidence of unlawful killings.  For one thing, a deadly force attacker has been killed, thus substantially limiting his ability to contribute to the murder rate in the future. Second, other criminals wishing to stay alive begin to re-direct their criminal activities away from those that might involve themselves being killed. These observations are, of course, nothing new.  Dr. John Lott wrote a seminal text--"More Guns, Less Crime"--on this topic as long ago as 1998 (coincidentally, the same year I published the first edition of "The Law of Self Defense.")  Just a few weeks ago his Crime Prevention Research Center published the most recent of many such reports noting that on a national level between 1999 and 2013 (a 14-year period) murder rates have declined even as the percentage of adult Americans permitted to carry concealed handguns has sky rocketed.  (The entirety of this report is embedded at the bottom of this post.)