Including ...Leveraging Tech for Better Personal Safety• President’s Message • Attorney Question • Book Review • Editor's Notebook • About this Journal
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Leveraging Tech for Better Personal Safety
An Interview with Felicia King
Interview by Gila Hayes
Network members, have you considered the overlap of physical security with the technology that we use every day and take for granted? It’s a concern that I struggle to understand, so, when a longtime member with whom I correspond occasionally reached out about leveraging internet technology to thwart known threats, she had my attention. For learners who enjoy video, see https://youtu.be/768_7FaYY9Q for a less tightly-edited version of my talk with IT security professional Felicia King.
eJournal: Members, I’m honored to introduce to you Felicia King. Felicia, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and about your work?
King: Thank you for having me. I am Felicia King from Quality Plus Consulting. We also are branded as QPC Security because security is mostly what we do. I’ve been doing this for about 30 years, and I’m not siloed exclusively in security. I do construction management; I’m a certified welder and I started working on engines when I was 10 years old. So, I’m a little different than most women.
I don’t want people to think that the things I’m going to talk about are enterprise only. Because we’ve been in business for so long, a lot of our customers are retired individuals like retired secretaries or librarians. A lot of the things that I talk about and recommend are scalable from a retired person’s budget all the way up to things that do work for business, as well. That breadth and depth comes from 30 years of consulting, construction management and living with the solutions that we implement. The long-term implications, supportability and total cost of ownership are very important in the things I recommend.
That is all pertinent to our discussion today because we want to enable people to be as self-sufficient and resilient as they can be, while finding good advisors to help them when needed.
President’s Message
by Marty Hayes, J.D.
I was having breakfast this morning with Belle McCormack, the owner and director of The Firearms Academy of Seattle which is the training company I used to own, before the Network took over my life. I hired her to run the academy about five years ago, when I could not do justice to both the academy and the Network at the same time, and then sold it to her about three years ago.
Belle had just completed an Advanced Tactical Handgun course, a course of instruction I designed over two decades ago to allow students the opportunity to experience the type of training that police officers receive in the standard state-run police academy, which consists of not only handgun skills range training, but also training in decision making, hostile threat mitigation, weak-handed training, low light training and a number of other experiential training exercises. You see, it was and still is my belief, the armed citizen should have the opportunity to seek out the very same type of training that law enforcement officers receive before going out into society and facing the criminal element.
Attorney Question of the Month
This column focuses on demystifying legal defense issues so members better understand what they may face if they use force to defend themselves or their families. Defense against road rage is the subject of this month’s Attorney Question of the Month in which we asked our Affiliated attorneys the following:
Here’s the scenario:
A man, let’s call him Steve, driving on a freeway is aggressively tailgated, then almost forced off the road by a driver who pulls his pickup and trailer up even with Steve and into his lane. In this road rage incident, Steve’s front facing dashboard camera records Steve steering onto the paved shoulder, but then steering into and intentionally striking the other vehicle out of fear he is being forced into the ditch and where he may be killed. This raises the question below--
In your state, would the courts consider an argument of self defense if, in response to a road rage attempt to force you off the road, you steered your vehicle into the initial aggressor’s?
Book Review
Surviving Doomsday:
A Guide for Surviving an Urban Disaster
By Richard Duarte
CreateSpace, Dec. 2012
Paperback, 181 pages, $18.95, Kindle, $5.99
ISBN 978-1480270664
Reviewed by Gila Hayes
As a follow up to August’s book review, this month I studied another author’s work about preparing to survive natural disasters, grid down and civil disruptions all falling under author Richard Duarte’s categorization of “WCS – worst case scenarios.” Realistically focused on what city-dwellers can do, Surviving Doomsday is an older book, but is packed with solid, workable solutions for water, food, first aid, self defense, deciding to flee or stay put, getting home in a crisis and more.
Duarte theorizes that people are shocked when an emergency strips away food, water and shelter because “most of us have never really been without the basics, and our attitude reflects it.” By contrast, early homesteaders dug wells, gardened, farmed, raised livestock and if a disaster wiped out their homestead, they got to work recovering and didn’t wait for help.
Editor’s Notebook
by Gila Hayes
We suffered a big loss in mid-October when Ed Lovette passed away. I was so very fortunate to meet Ed in person at a writers’ event at Sig Sauer Academy many years ago. Although a regular reader of his columns in Combat Handguns, that was the only time I was in his presence, but Ed stayed in touch and we corresponded occasionally and spoke by phone now and again.
In addition to his thought-provoking columns in Combat Handguns magazine (back when glossy magazines were delivered each month in the mail), Ed co-authored an excellent personal safety book, Defensive Living, with Dave Spaulding. Ed is best remembered for his book The Snubby Revolver, first released in 2002, which he updated significantly in 2007 and again 2021. A retired CIA paramilitary operations officer, Ed understood that his career was a great training grounds for the mission of teaching private citizens how to go armed and be prepared for self defense because of the “invisible,” covert nature of the CIA officers’ on-duty time. He was particularly focused on extreme close quarters defenses, although, in my opinion, his coaching on threat detection and avoidance, as well as mental preparation, was unparalleled and should have received much more acclaim. I experienced Ed as a quiet, reserved man who would speak out with authority about what he knew but he was never one to seek the spotlight.
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.