This is the part you can print out, as suggested earlier. It can’t hurt, right?
Don’t consent to search requests.
Ask if you are free to get the hell out of Dodge.
Shut up.
Save it for home, where the police presence is—hopefully—negligible.
Man, Orson Welles. Many of us remember him from his days prior to pushing frozen peas and cheap wine and playing bit parts in Muppet flicks. Youngsters take note: the guy made some great films. The Third Man, for example. Orson as Harry Lime, a black marketer peddling watered-down meds in Vienna after World War II. Ol’ Harry wasn’t a gentleman, but the guy had respectable gab. One line is worth repeating here, even though it loses a little something if you can’t hear it in Orson’s stentorian tones: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
It’s a hard old world out here for most of us, and it’s a fact of life that in this world, no one needs a concealed carry license to haul around a cuckoo clock.
The world is still designed for the Borgias, not the clockmakers.
So… guns.
It’d be easy to lose ourselves in the tall grass hunting down all the variations in gun laws that allow walking around with a rifle slung over your shoulder in one state and penalize pellet gun owners in another. We have to stick to the big picture here, so I’ll whittle it down into a nice chestnut whistle.
Due to the Second Amendment establishing the right of just about any homeowner to keep a musket hung above the fireplace on the rack of a strong buck, it’s a given non-felons can own firearms in every state in the Union. The individual states, though, are all over the place when it comes to where you can go with and how you can carry that blunderbuss.
In the great state of Texas, for example, a legal handgun owner with no Texas Concealed Handgun License can still keep their shooter concealed in a boat or car. Drive west to California and it’s a different ball of wax. Want to buy a nice little snubnose .32 Colt just for some home defense? In the Golden State, you will have to present a valid driver’s license, proof of residency, and either already have a Handgun Safety Certificate or be able to demonstrate that you’re safety-savvy in the presence of your potential piece.
In practice, attorneys don’t always deal with the violent side of guns. Sure, we get defendants saddled with murder raps, robbery, or improper exhibition of a firearm outside a particularly antagonistic paintball game, but the bulk of what we see are people trying to have a good time, just blowing off steam, y’know? Maybe they just haven’t bothered to bone up on the laws of the land. The following is a little education and advisory for those readers—people who meant no harm, who were just having fun, who didn’t know that sometimes it might not be okay to whip it out and fill public property, private vehicles, or inaudible fast-food drive-through speakers with lead.
Maybe you’re young, dumb, and strapped with Dad’s .357 Magnum, going wild down I-40. No one’s getting robbed or shot just for the hell of it—you’re no psycho, you’re just exercising carpe noctem with your pals. Up ahead is an exit sign. It bears bullet holes from past party animals, so hey, why not? Fire off a few. Maybe your buddies peer-pressured you into showing off your eagle-eye aim… and that’s exactly when the staties’ lights start a-blazin’.
Nothing too dramatic happens—no shoot-out, you just get pulled over and hit with, let’s say, unlawful discharge of a firearm. Or illegal use! Or being negligent! What happens next will really be determined by where it occurred (in our example, an interstate), time (night here, when all the youngish rascals are getting their ya-yas out), and how it happened—as in, was it accidental? Threatening? A demonstration of this fine bit of American guncraft’s perfect balance gone awry?
Law enforcement takes guns pretty seriously, given how often they end up on the wrong end of one. So it’s a hard fact that this won’t be a situation in which you should even conceive of defending yourself (see Part I: How to Be Your Own Attorney, “Why You Shouldn’t Be Your Own Attorney”).
Good news, or at least not-terrible news is, there are several lines of defense most attorneys will consider bringing to the court to hopefully get you out of this jam so you can ride again…. But maybe keep the gun at home next time, Rambo.
These lines of defense include, but aren’t limited to:
• You didn’t mean to! “Honestly, I was sure it was unloaded, I stuck it out the passenger window to test my hypothesis that my Magnum is less aerodynamic than my friend’s S&W Bodyguards 380—it was for the love of science!” That’s the don’t-try-this-in-real-life dialogue version, but you get the gist. Another factor: the friends who were supposed to be so impressed, aka witnesses. If it’s a tight bunch we’re talking about and everyone can square their stories in the time it takes for troopers to draw down and order everyone out of the car—because when gunfire is involved, they will not take chances—by the time the gang’s all safe and sound in one of the state patrol’s twelve-shades-of-beige interview rooms, they all know for a fact that no one knew the gun was loaded. So just like that, the prosecutor will have a heck of a time making the case. The problem here might be that you had the gun with you in the first place, but if the only thing at issue was damage to state property, things will probably turn out okay.
• Self-defense! Unlawful random discharge while flying down the road at night as self-defense? Unless your attorney can convince the court you’d spotted a flying purple people eater from Area 51 shooting otherworldly lasers at you and your fellow earthlings, that won’t fly. In other situations, though, self-defense might work. Depends on whether you have a buddy in the car whom you’d like to spring an assault charge on, which I do not recommend. It’s a bad idea to lie to get friends arrested. Makes things real awkward at the next Friendsgiving potluck.
• Here’s another juicy fact that could potentially fall in your corner: if arresting officers did not see exactly who pulled that trigger, there essentially is no case. So if there’re a few of you riding, pass that thing around to confuse the issue further.
If you’re somewhere else, say, cruising along Farmer McFriendly’s acreage, randomly popping inanimate objects, your defense may also include “I was on private property.” But you better be sure McFriendly’s gonna tell the boys in blue that you had his permission to be here. Trespassing with a weapon isn’t quite like that stroll in the sunny park I was describing earlier.
Most of us aren’t big fans of no-win situations. Convictions can happen, though. If the court decides you totally didn’t mean to blast that gun, or intended no harm, you might end up with just a misdemeanor. I’m not saying that’s a great scenario. It could be a year in jail, depending on the state you’re in. Plus fines and perhaps repair of whatever damage was done.