We’ve all seen the meme ‘I’d Rather by Judged by 6 than Carried by 12’. I, for one, don’t want either and I’m going to do everything I can to ensure neither happen if I’m ever involved in a lethal force self defense situation. Truth be told, if you do absolutely everything right and meet the five elements of self defense, you’ll probably never need to be judged by 12.
I get it. When we first get our guns, we have a little touch of ‘I can take on the world’. When we put our guns in our holsters, however, we also put a huge legal target on our backs. In order to claim self defense in a lethal shooting, five elements must be present: innocence, imminence, reasonableness, avoidance, and proportionality. If any one of the five are missing, there is no self defense case and in fact you have no defense at all.