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If you've been in a situation like this, the difference in that "secure knowledge" of having a gun vs not having one is.... significant.
Having the gun enabled JTarrou to confidently approach the "Pastor" and verbally talk them down. Having a use-of-force upper hand that allows you to de-escalate a situation is using it.
Of course, but if we're going to count 'defensive gun use' as 'any time a gun made its owner feel safe' we're getting dangerously close to making policy based on feelings. Should we count every time the presence of a gun made someone feel unsafe as an offensive gun use? I don't think police departments would support that sort of standard.
The law does support that kind of standard, so long as the fear is reasonable and provoking fear is intentional.
Assault: ["intentionally place an alleged “victim” in reasonable apprehension of great bodily harm."](
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/what-is-assault-with-a-deadly-weapon/)
Brandish: " For purposes of this subsection, the term “brandish” means, with respect to a firearm, to display all or part of the firearm, or otherwise make the presence of the firearm known to another person, in order to intimidate that person, regardless of whether the firearm is directly visible to that person." (emphasis mine)
If it's done subtly it can be hard to know how to score it, let alone prove it in a court of law, but that doesn't make it any less real or game changing. There's a very real chance that the "pastor" was able to correctly infer that JTarrou was armed from his behavior, and that otherwise he wouldn't have backed down so peacefully. I've been in a similar situation, where out of place confidence clued me in that the people threatening me were almost certainly armed, and that I couldn't afford to risk trying to de-escalate the way I otherwise would. My inference happened to be proven correct, but the presence of weapons changed things on both sides well before they came out.
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We already do that. What do you think "brandishing" is?
I meant merely glancing and seeing someone open carrying in a non-threatening manner.
Would you count every single traffic stop ever as a 'gun use?'
At some point you have to stop counting the crazies, otherwise Paranoid Pete has 7.9 billion defensive gun uses per hour since "everyone's out to get him". I think we've drawn the line in a decent spot, where it has to substantially affect your behaviour before it gets counted.
Let's ignore all of the ones done by unarmed officers.
No, I wouldn't. I'd only call it a gun use if the officer would have otherwise called for backup (or taken some other protective measure). Furthermore, I'm not sure about counting on-duty police officers in defensive gun use statistics, since they can also initiate force instead of just responding to it.
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As I said at the beginning of the story, I'm a bit on the fence on the classification of that night myself. If you're criticizing the methodology of the survey, that's fair enough so long as you recognize that most of the time when a gun is present in a dangerous situation, it is not fired, and sometimes not even brandished. Maybe there needs to be an intermediate category, but the point is, this is why people want guns, and because the situation resolved peacefully, that can be lost as a data point. We should not take the moral restraint of legal gun owners as an argument to disarm them.
Bottom line for me is, I was going out on that porch with or without a gun. Having the gun gave me a better plan than bringing a knife to a hatchet fight with a guy who outweighed me by a hundred pounds.
Thanks, I was.
Perish the thought.
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