Including ...Decisions about Member Assistance • President’s Message • Attorney Question • Book Review • Editor's Notebook • About this Journal
Get eJournal PDF: click here
Decisions about Member Assistance
An Interview with Network President Marty Hayes, J.D.
If we were to identify one most frequently asked question, it would be, “How is the Network’s Legal Defense Fund managed and who decides when and how its resources are used to pay for the legal defense of a member after legitimate use of force in self defense?” We discuss these questions and others about the Network’s mission with its president and founder Marty Hayes in this month’s journal.
eJournal: Thank you for addressing questions by Network members and potential members about the Network’s payment of legal expenses on behalf of members after legitimate use of force in self defense.
Hayes: I am glad for the opportunity to answer these questions. To begin, I need to make it clear that what we are talking about is member benefits and in no way are we discussing insurance. We have made that fact clear since day one and I want to continue clarifying what members have access to, so I am happy to see these questions coming up.
eJournal: While we are frequently asked what we do for members, I think folks sometimes overlook the element of mutual participation between the Network and its members that begins long before a self-defense incident.
President’s Message
by Marty Hayes, J.D.
This will be a short message, due to the length of the lead article, but I just wanted to take a minute to reiterate a couple points I made in the article.
The first point is to emphasize why we developed the Network to not be an insurance-backed membership program, and why we did not attach an insurance policy to our benefits.
The reason is that insurance will not necessarily get you where you need to be at the end of the day, with that “end of the day” being your court battle over the legality of using force in self defense. If you read policies from the other companies that are out there, they all spell out the type of “self defense” that you must have undertaken in order for the policy to cover you. Most make reference to something like “all legal weapons” and others refer to use of firearms only.
Insurance companies like bright lines, and while we all like clarity and certainty in our lives, the fact is that a self-defense situation may be a very muddy gush of dirty water.
Attorney Question of the Month
We’re starting to hear questions from Network members who are planning cross country summer vacations. Naturally, they’re particularly concerned about the potential for violating weapon restrictions and self-defense laws once they leave home where they are familiar with the law. Their concern extends beyond guns and includes worry about restrictions on pepper spray, TASERs, knives and other non-gun self-defense tools, too.
In hopes of aiding these intrepid travelers, last month we asked our affiliated attorneys the following question:
When armed citizens vacation in your state, what weapon and self-defense laws are they most likely to be unaware of and may inadvertently violate?
If a Network member is planning to vacation in your state, what advice would you offer about their self-defense weapons and provisions?
Book Review
The Ultimate Survival Medicine Guide:
Emergency Preparedness for ANY Disaster
By Joseph Alton M.D., and Amy Alton, ARNP
Publisher Skyhorse; 1st edition, August 4, 2015
Paperback 328 pages; eBook 312 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1629147703
$19.44 paperback at https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781629147703/the-ultimate-survival-medicine-guide/ - eBook https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Survival-Medicine-Guide-Preparedness-ebook/dp/B00PSSELYK
Reviewed by Gila Hayes
Armed citizens put a high value on learning when and how to stop someone who intends to injure or kill them or their loved ones and rightly so. With so much focus on staying alive, it is ironic that we’re often less interested in learning how to avoid injury or disease. With self defense, we acknowledge that law enforcement may not be able to intervene in time to save our lives. Medical self-sufficiency suggests it is prudent to also understand how to maintain health and treat injury if access to medical care is interrupted by natural disaster or civil unrest.
Editor's Notebook
by Gila Hayes
People sure seem to like hard and fast rules, but rules betray us when changing circumstances make a rule or what was imposed as policy no longer applicable. The perceived safety of knowing rules and following them without question can quickly turn to danger – not only of failing to act to save life, but also danger of post-survival punishment. Decades ago, Dennis Tueller studied how police responses needed to be scaled to consider the officers’ proximity to threats. He distilled his findings into a principle that law enforcement and private citizens alike have used to save lives for several decades. He has consistently stressed that his findings did not constitute a rule, and an article I stumbled across underscores the danger of inflexible rules directly related to his warning. Take a look at https://www.police1.com/edged-weapons/articles/the-21-foot-rule-is-back-in-the-news-IXEw5hfE4HVKnBIh/.
Early in this journal’s history I had the privilege of interviewing Tueller to commemorate the 25th year since publication of his famous article How Close is Too Close, which introduced what has come to be known as the Tueller Principle. People being people, quickly morphed the principles of awareness, cover and obstacles, threat recognition and allowing for reaction time that Tueller wrote about into – you guessed it – a rule.
About this Journal
The eJournal of the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network, Inc. is published monthly on the Network’s website at http://armedcitizensnetwork.org/our-journal. Content is copyrighted by the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network, Inc.
Do not mistake information presented in this online publication for legal advice; it is not. The Network strives to assure that information published in this journal is both accurate and useful. Reader, it is your responsibility to consult your own attorney to receive professional assurance that this information and your interpretation or understanding of it is accurate, complete and appropriate with respect to your particular situation.
In addition, material presented in our opinion columns is entirely the opinion of the bylined author, and is intended to provoke thought and discussion among readers.