Earlier: This Month's Trials Of The Century: Don't Try To Grab The Gun

The McMichaels' guilty verdict in the Arbery case is setting a very bad precedent, especially bad for law enforcement. Even the victory by Kyle Rittenhouse is of little consolation for those who think that either the public has a right to self-defense or citizen's arrest. But it is much worse for law enforcement and their interactions with the criminal element. It is even worse than what has been quite eloquently described on VDARE.com, it is an open declaration that one may not defend oneself from black criminals, and Antifa terrorists [How Horrible Is The Arbery/McMichael Verdict? HORRIBLE, For All White Americans, by Jared Taylor, VDare, November 26, 2021]. It is so much more horrible in that violence from blacks and terrorists groups is now protected by the establishment, the court system, and prosecutors. And police are the target as well.

In the old days, neither the McMichaels nor the Rittenhouse cases would have been prosecuted. In my 28 years of law enforcement I have seen the change from it being almost open season on violent criminals for both cops and the public, to the opposite. Both law enforcement and the public are now presumed guilty in any confrontation with Antifa terrorists or black criminals and can only escape prosecution with million of dollars for defense attorneys or indisputable video evidence.

Now, morally corrupt prosecutors will try to get the Great White Defendant to make a name for themselves and to further their careers. Of course it all began with Rodney King and the spectacle of lies and manipulation surrounding that case. Honest jurors initially saved the day at the local level, but, similar to the case of the McMichaels, a Republican politician, George H. W. Bush, stepped in to get Stacey Koon and the other officers prosecuted by the anti-White Civil Rights Division, just as a Republican Attorney General, a Republican Governor, and a black Republican District Attorney stepped in to persecute the McMichaels despite the fact that the use of force by Travis McMichael was completely justified in the law, and, more importantly, that use of force was part the training that all law enforcement officers receive in the area of weapon retention and the use of deadly force in response to attempts to take an officer’s weapon.

In my 28 years of law enforcement one of the areas of training that was of the most importance was weapon retention, that is keeping control and possession of the firearm that one carried and used daily on the job. And not just the pistol all law enforcement officers carry daily, but additional weapons used, especially the ubiquitous shotgun. Over 28 years, usually at least twice yearly, sometimes more, we received training on weapons retention. Why, because so many officers are killed each year with their own weapons.

In the training I received over those years, the first rule was fight like your life depended on it to keep your weapon and the second rule was that once you had fully retained your weapon, then shoot the person who had tried to take your weapon. Why? Because there is only one reason for a criminal to take an officer’s weapon and that reason is to kill the officer. You never give up your gun, either in a fight or voluntarily. We were always trained that, as soon as you can in a fight over your weapon, to use it on your attacker, as the attacker wants to kill you and that person will not stop until he has the weapon and then you are dead. That is the lesson of the Onion Field Killings. This was an incident where two Los Angeles Police Department officers surrendered their guns to two criminals who got the drop on them. The two officers were then taken to a field, where one, Ian Campbell, was executed and the other managed to escape. Since then the rule in law enforcement is to never surrender one’s weapon either voluntarily or in a fight over that weapon. And when your weapon is successfully retained, you go on the offensive and use deadly force to end the attack, which means shooting the criminal who tried to take your weapon.

And the number of officers killed with their own weapons remains high, about 8 percent of officers killed in the line of duty.

There are no national statistics on how many times officers’ guns are taken away. But the FBI says that of the 616 law enforcement officers killed on duty by criminals from 1994 through 2003, 52 were killed with their own weapon, amounting to 8 percent.

“What’s remarkable is that it doesn’t happen more often,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest union for law enforcement officers.

Police are trained to protect their weapons if they are attacked, and to resist using their guns unless a threat is imminent. If a weapon is grabbed, the officer always tries to retrieve it and often succeeds, experts said.

[Cases of Officers Killed by Their Own Guns Likely Will Not Change R.I. Policies, by Brooke Donald, Police 1/Associated Press, May 2, 2005]

And if you just don’t want to take my word for it that attempting to take a weapon is a deadly force situation or that such an opinion is out of date, experts in the field of law enforcement training continue to treat defending against attempts to take a weapon as a deadly force situation.

One of the threat areas where many of these liability-driven systems fail is in weapon retention. Let’s just state this straight out: When a subject attempts to remove your gun from your holster, he or she is doing so with bad intent. A gun grab is a deadly threat. But not every defensive tactics program treats a gun grab as a potentially lethal attack. And many that do teach officers to treat gun grabs with the seriousness they deserve, in my opinion, fail to teach a violent enough response…

Most officers agree that when a subject attempts to grab your weapon, things have escalated to a deadly force situation. Far too many officers have been killed with their own guns. But the public and the news media believe that when an officer uses deadly force against a gun grab that officer is using deadly force against an “unarmed” subject.

This is why many weapon retention systems today interject nerve strikes, or joint manipulation, lowering the officer’s force level when they should be immediately responding to the attacker by inflicting serious bodily injury or using deadly force.

[Real World Weapon Retention Tactics, by Christopher Periatt, Police Magazine, January 29, 2016

This brings us to the McMichaels. They were attempting to make a citizens arrest of the criminal Ahmaud Arbery. Travis McMichael had law enforcement experience in the U.S. Coast Guard and was undoubtedly given training on weapon retention and the consequence of death if a weapon were lost to an attacker. Gregory McMichael was a former police officer and investigator, so he would have been well aware of the consequences of loosing a weapon as well.

This is important as it is an undisputed fact that Arbery tried to take the shotgun Travis McMichael was wielding to effect the citizen's arrest. Arbery did the same thing as Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber tried to do, disarm and kill a law abiding white American; Huber and Rosenbaum because they were Antifa terrorists who wanted to kill Kyle Rittenhouse for attempting to stop a riot and Travis McMichael because he had the temerity to stop a black criminal.

This will have further consequences for any member of the public trying to defend themselves from attack or an attempt at disarming and being murdered. That is the obvious point of the politicized prosecutions by both local and Federal officials. Whites are not allowed to defend themselves, especially not when a black criminal attempts to take the gun of an officer.

All those in law enforcement, especially those who denounced Derek Chauvin, hoping that they would be seen as the good guys in the police, should take note. Now a criminal may violently resist arrest, take your weapon, and kill you. The new principle in law is that you may not use deadly force to resist being disarmed.

You may think the McMichaels were bad guys, but no, they weren’t. And you are next. The radicals did not stop at Stacey Koon, they won’t stop at the McMichaels, Derek Chauvin, Kyle Rittenhouse, or George Zimmerman. Eventually, they are coming for every cop.