I have no social media accounts; all purported ones are fake.

People say “I need a gun-friendly lawyer.” I’m not so sure they do.

People say “I need a gun-friendly lawyer.” I’m not so sure they do.

While easting my lunch yesterday I decided to do a little surfing. I bounced around a bit, watched a couple of YouTube videos, and ended up doing something I always regret: checking out some of the more popular gun forums. Why ‘regret’? Because they usually make my head hurt; inanity does that to me.

Yesterday’s was a thread with the title “I need a gun-friendly lawyer.” The writer goes on to say that he needs to find one in his area in case he’s ever involved in a self-defense shooting.

Sadly, no one gave him the correct answer: “no, you don’t. You need a lawyer who’s good at his/her job.”

If you’re involved in a defensive shooting, what you want is a lawyer who understands the intricacies of the justice system, but more importantly understands the unique demands of making the affirmative defense that exists in all righteous self-defense cases: ‘yes, I shot him, and I had a darned good reason to do so.’ Whether that lawyer happens to be “gun friendly” is beside the point – you pick the lawyer on expertise, not affinity with your hobbies.

Though not related to self defense, I have an illustration of the concept. A number of years ago I was a member of a large gun club. Our club had a big parcel of land, part of which was encumbered by a power company right-of-way. There were a lot of complicated legal issues about what could and could not be done on that slice of property, and we needed the best real estate/natural resource lawyer we could get. As it happened, he was at best ambivalent about guns; he told the Board that he didn’t really feel comfortable around them and didn’t want to be. At first this angered the membership, who felt their dues were going to pay an anti-gunner.

Luckily the Board used their critical thinking skills and decided that it was a good idea to have an attorney who understood land use law better than ballistics. He turned out to be a tireless advocate for our cause, prevailing multiple times against a huge legal department filled with good lawyers. If we’d insisted on a lawyer who liked guns, we might not have been so fortunate.

Don’t start your search by looking for “gun friendly” attorneys. Instead look for attorneys who have experience with prosecutions for serious charges. That might be a criminal defense attorney, maybe a former prosecutor who now works the other side of the street, or perhaps the lawyer who defends police officers when they’ve discharged their firearms in the line of duty. What you want is someone who can defend you, not who agrees with you. Once you’ve found that person, then you can decide if his/her opinions on firearms are likely to be a help or a hinderance in your case.

Of course if you can find a good defense lawyer who is also sympathetic to the rights of gun owners, so much the better. You’re not likely to find them on some ill-defined list of “gun friendly attorneys”; instead, such people tend to hang with the Armed Citizen’s Legal Defense Network. Because of that it’s an organization well worth your time to investigate.

Critical thinking: much better than listening to some anonymous guy who calls himself “Rock-A-Glock47”.

-=[ Grant ]=-

  • Posted by Grant Cunningham
  • On August 10, 2011

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