What Cops and Armed
Citizens Have in Common
American police handgun choices have historically been a model for armed citizen choices.
When I flew out to my first Rangemaster Tactical Conference hosted by Tom Givens many years ago, I found myself on the same plane as Andy Stanford, the armed citizen trainer who wrote Surgical Speed Shooting. He told me, “Mas, you’re gonna love Tac-Con. It’s like ILEETA or ASLET, but it allows civilians.” He wasn’t kidding. The International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association today, like the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers before it, covers a broad spectrum of shooting, use of force law, hand-to-hand fighting, and adult learning theory. Tac-Con does much the same. The founder of Rangemaster and Tac-Con, Tom Givens, was a Memphis cop before he began teaching armed citizens.
America’s police and the nation’s armed citizens have much in common. If you think about it, the two are natural allies in the war on crime. However, every concealed carry instructor reminds the citizens in class that they aren’t cops. The cop’s job is to seek out criminals, while the wise private citizen seeks to avoid them.
But when it’s the criminal doing the hunting, and the confrontation occurs, it involves the exact same criminal who is armed and fighting the same way, with the same disregard for the lives and safety of others. The police are the resident experts on violent criminals, and armed citizens can learn much from them about the very same predators.
Cops have a duty to pursue and capture;
armed citizens need only avoid or stop an attack.
Consider the Guns
Historically, our nation’s private citizens have modeled their defensive handgun choices on what the police carry. When most police carried .38 Special service revolvers in uniform, that was the single most popular home defense handgun among the citizenry. When most plainclothes detectives and off-duty cops carried “snub-nose .38s,” so did a majority of private individuals with concealed carry permits. When the sea change to the service auto took place in law enforcement, we saw the same with the citizenry. Even the FBI-inspired transition to the 9mm subsequently affected the dominance of that caliber in civilian classes that we see today, when some of us remember that in the early ’80s, the auto a “civilian” typically brought to class was a 1911 .45. The shotgun had been the primary armament of the village watchman and the home defender from the time of the Pilgrims, but after police switched almost entirely from 12-gauge shotguns as primary long arms to patrol rifles, a huge number of armed citizens replaced their household scattergun with an AR15.
Use of Force Standards
Historically, police have been allowed to use “necessary force,” while citizen defenders were limited to “equal force.” When the ordinary citizen was in a fistfight with a man his own size, weight and age, if he resorted to a club, he was likely to be charged with aggravated battery or assault with a deadly weapon. An officer fighting a man his size who was resisting arrest was expected to resort to a baton. The reason was that the officer had a greater duty, to wit, the obligation to overpower the suspect’s resistance, manacle him, and transport him to jail — all of which can require more force than simply convincing the opponent to stop trying to harm him. But when the lethal force level was reached, the standard was essentially the same: Either could generally use deadly force only to prevent death or great bodily harm to oneself or another innocent party at the hands of the criminal in question.
Much of the public has falsely been led to believe that police can use deadly force almost on a whim and be held harmless in the courts through qualified immunity. On the contrary, the police use of force is guided by the Supreme Court’s decision in Graham v. Connor and the standard of “objective reasonableness.” In essence, those judging the cop who used any kind of force must ask themselves, “What would a reasonable, prudent, trained and experienced police officer have done in the exact same situation, knowing what the officer knew at the time?” This is directly analogous to the “reasonable man” standard that armed citizens had long before Graham v. Connor, “What would a reasonable and prudent person have done in the exact same situation, knowing what the defendant knew?”
“Are cops ‘law enforcement’ or ‘peace officers’?” is almost a silly question. The answer is they are both. To keep the peace, they must enforce the law; the law, in turn, empowers them to use necessary force to do so. The standards for armed citizens and police are closer than the media would have us believe. We’ll go into more detail on that in this space in the future.
