Moral and Legal Issues Associated with Firearms Ownership and Use
- Three Hours
- Classroom only, no range work or live fire
- No special equipment required
- Suitable for all
- Fee : $75
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. Traditional fire-arms classes teach you how to shoot, but shooting is rarely – almost never – the best solution to a problem.
Here are two very important concepts that Code Green’s Moral and Legal Issues Associated with Firearms Ownership and Use class will teach you, helping you to have more than a hammer, and to perceive situations as more than just nails :
- How to avoid getting into a situation where the only solution involves the use of lethal force. This is probably the most valuable skill of all.
- When you should – and when you should not – use lethal force. This is the second most valuable skill – if you delay a response too long, you risk being overpowered by your attacker; and if you make the wrong judgment call, you could wind up either dead or facing a long jail term for manslaughter or worse.
This is an essential course that we urge everyone who owns – or is considering owning – a firearm to attend. We teach you how to be aware of your situation, how to defuse or avoid confrontations before they even start, how to draw mental ‘lines in the sand’ to trigger your own escalating response to a worsening problem, and help you to understand when it is appropriate – and when it is not appropriate – to consider resorting to deadly force.
We discuss non-lethal alternatives to deadly force and if they should be used instead of, or prior to, deadly force.
And, if the worst comes to the worst and you end up needing to use deadly force, we help you to understand and anticipate what will come next when the police arrive, and how to best present your side of the story and to minimize your legal exposure.
The sad reality is that if/when they police arrive, and they see a dead person on the ground and you standing over them with a still smoking gun, they’re of course going to instinctively and immediately view you as the bad guy and the dead attacker as the victim.
We teach you about your differing liability at home and elsewhere, explain the ‘Stand your ground’ and ‘Castle Law’ doctrines, and touch on how different standards apply in other states.
Should you first fire a warning shot in the air (or down into the ground)? Should you first shoot to wound rather than to kill? How many times should you shoot at an attacker?
These are all essential questions to which you must know the answers to, because if you do the wrong thing, you risk criminal prosecution. The answers to these questions are not obvious and will probably surprise you. Attend our Code Green class and you’ll be given the information you need to make better informed decisions on these vital questions.
Please note : We will help you, during the course of the three hours, to understand these issues, but we can’t give you definitive black and white answers to all scenarios, especially where the situation is grey rather than clearly black or white. Even attorneys who specialize in this area of the law, and who have had not three hours, but more than three years of training and thirty years of professional experience, are unable to unambiguously give you 100% definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers to all situations.
But we can at least give you some general appreciations of the principles that apply, and you’ll leave the class knowing a lot more than when you entered it. Oh – and if you’re not happy with the quality and value of information you’ve received? Yes, that’s right – the Code Green Training Guarantee of course applies.