Gun Digest's Concealed Carry Preparation & Aftermath eShort. Massad Ayoob
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Concealed Carry Preparation & Aftermath
No way out. The Lindsey incident took place in this boxed-in parking lot.
It’s about sunset right now outside my hotel room in Denver, a chilly evening. December 7, 2006. Pearl Harbor is on our minds, of course, this being the anniversary of the sneak attack that changed the history of America and the world. But right now, I’m dealing with a case of a law-abiding gun owner who has suffered a sneak attack from fate.
The case closed today, and it went to the jury about 45 minutes ago. Eleven months earlier, the client, 58, was driving to the Veteran’s Administration hospital to pick up some medicine. His name is Larry Lindsey. Already asthmatic, he had just been diagnosed with diabetes, and overall was not in the best of health. He walked with a cane and a pronounced limp, the legacy of an accident on a city street a few years earlier when a careless motorist blasted through a red light and ran him down on a crosswalk.
On the Interstate that goes through Denver, a young-looking man in a Ford Taurus, racing zig-zag through the high speed traffic, cut into his lane. The smaller car nearly ran Larry’s vehicle off the road. Acutely aware of the dangers posed by such driving – not only reminded constantly by his lingering injury, but by the fact that he had lost loved ones to drunk and reckless drivers in the past – Larry always made a point of calling in such dangerous motorists on his cell phone. But the Taurus had accelerated ahead so quickly, still cutting left and right through traffic, that he hadn’t been able to get the license plate number.
Be able to articulate why you chose the caliber and ammo that were used. Federal +P+ 115-grain JHP (left) is an excellent choice in 9mm, but full metal jacket, right, is not.
He continued on his way. As he reached his exit, he saw a familiar car stopped at the edge of the exit ramp: the tan Taurus, with the same young man at the wheel. Larry instinctively slowed, and suddenly, the vehicle shot out directly in front of him, nearly colliding. Larry swerved and hit the brakes, and barely missed plowing into the concrete wall on the right side of the exit ramp. As he brought his vehicle back on path, Larry saw the Taurus’ driver mouth a curse at him and raise his middle finger in contempt … and then blast through a red light, turning right, in flagrant violation of a big sign that read, “NO RIGHT TURN ON RED.”
This, Larry decided, was just too blatant to ignore. When traffic allowed, he too turned right, following the tan Taurus that was now a considerable distance ahead of him. He decided he was going to write down the license number and phone it in. As he drove he dialed 9-1-1 on his cell phone, and was put on “hold.” Ahead of him, he saw the car take a right, then a left. He followed in time to see it pull quickly into the parking lot on his left.
He slowed, turned into the lot – and stopped dead in the narrow mouth of the parking lot. Instead of going to the right where the main parking spaces were, the tan Taurus had pulled into the third slot on the immediate left of the exit, a short row of Handicapped spaces. The vehicle had come to its sudden stop in front of a large HANDICAPPED sign.
Only a few steps away from the vehicle, Larry figured he’d jot down the license number and be out of there. 9-1-1 Dispatch had not yet taken him off “hold.”
But other things weren’t “holding” at all.
The driver boiled out of the car, coming toward Larry, screaming obscenities. Fifteen or twenty paces ahead of Larry’s car, a very tall and strong-looking young man emerged immediately from the apartment house entryway and proceeded toward him at a fast walk. Then another came out behind him.
Five feet eight, pushing sixty, a little overweight, and crippled and sick, Larry wasn’t sure he would be a match for one athletic young man, let alone three. The third one seemed to drift away, but the tall one was approaching straight at him and the driver of the Taurus was almost at his left door, screaming “I’ll kick your ass! I’ll kill you!”
In his younger days, Larry Lindsey had spent eight years in the United States Marine Corps, much of it in Vietnam, where his MOS was Combat Photographer. His issue weapon had been a 1911 45 automatic back then. A gun guy all his life, he had grown to like the issue pistol, and had chosen as his personal defense gun a stainless steel Kimber Custom Shop Gold 1911 45. He kept it in his console with pretty much the same load-out to which the USMC had accustomed him: in a holster with loaded magazine and empty chamber, backed up by two more loaded mags in a leather pouch.
Larry flipped open the console and took out the holstered pistol, holding it in plain sight where he hoped they could see it. The man on his left screamed another F-word curse…and his right hand dove under his jacket toward his back, as if going for a pistol.
Larry ripped the holster off the Kimber, jacked a 230-grain Federal Hydra-Shok into the chamber, and brought up the pistol.
Suddenly, the two men were moving back, and Larry wasn’t in danger anymore. His cell phone was still in his lap where he had dropped it when he went for his pistol. Glancing behind him, Larry saw an opening in the traffic and he backed out into the street, then drove to the nearest corner and pulled into a parking lot there. He dialed 9-1-1 again, and this time, he got through. He told the dispatcher what happened.
Trials can be scary. Law enforcement personnel barricade the streets for a block in each direction around the courthouse because of death threats against the defendant in one case the author worked.
Unfortunately, the tall man who had menaced him had whipped out his own cell phone before Larry was out of the parking lot. His call went in to Dispatch at 3:02 PM, and Larry’s did not get in until 3:03. The first responding officer arrived at the scene at 3:10, a respectable eight-minute response time.
That officer would testify that he never received any radio notification that Larry had called in his complaint. He seemed surprised when he was shown the facts on the 9-1-1 call log, in court, by defense attorney Paul Grant.
The same officer would testify that he had decided almost immediately upon his arrival to arrest Larry Lindsey, who was now in the grip of a full-blown asthma attack. After all, two witnesses had identified the crazy man in a state of road rage who had waved a silver-colored pistol at them, and the man had admitted drawing the gun on the pair the officer now considered victims.
Larry Lindsey was arrested at the scene. He was charged with two counts of Felony Menacing, and later released on $50,000 bail.
The trial began on December 6. Jury selection was done by morning, with the prosecution removing almost every gun owner. This is par for the course. Neither side wants someone on the jury who might identify with the people on the other side of the case. Among the twelve jurors and one alternate finally selected there was but a single one who owned firearms. He had two, which he kept empty, fitted with trigger locks, inside a gun safe. A loaded gun, he said during the jury selection process called voir dire, was just too dangerous to keep around. This, apparently, was enough to satisfy the prosecutor.
The state took the rest of the day to establish its case. A story emerged of a nice twenty-something kid, an immigrant from the Middle East with no record, who accidentally cut in front of a motorist who must have been one of those Angry White Males. The driver had boiled up in road rage, followed him for several blocks, pulled in behind him and pulled out a big silver pistol, with which