Here’s Why Warning Shots Can Wreck Your Life

Attorneys and self-defense instructors told the Daily Caller News Foundation that firing a warning shot is almost a surefire way to face legal trouble, assuming one survives the incident.

In two recent incidents, armed citizens fired warning shots, with one armed citizen in Benton County, Washington, ending up being jailed on suspicion of murder for a few days while the police investigated until the prosecutor admitted the shooting was actually self-defense. In the second incident in Franklin County, Missouri, police filed no charges against the armed citizen, but experts warn that those who advise firing warning shots are missing the mark.

“Warning shots are generally forbidden for police and strongly recommended against for private citizens. There are often more earwitnesses than eyewitnesses, and they may interpret ‘Stop or I’ll shoot’ followed by a BANG as ‘He threatened to shoot someone, then carried out the threat,’” Second Amendment Foundation President Massad Ayoob, an expert witness and instructor in the use of force, told the DCNF. “The suspect in question may claim that the warning shot was a murder attempt and the shooter simply missed.”

“Also, the bullet has to go somewhere,” Ayoob continued. “In one case, an officer in a city fired a warning shot upward to halt a felon running away from him, and the bullet struck and killed an innocent citizen on the top floor porch of a tenement building. To put the bullet somewhere safe, the shooter has to take his eyes off a potentially dangerous suspect. There are many downsides to firing warning shots.”

United States Concealed Carry Association (USCCA) principal training advisor Rob Chadwick agreed, warning that the use of warning shots could lead to trouble in court.

“Firing a warning shot means discharging a deadly weapon without stopping the threat. Instructors teach that every round needs an identified target and a safe backstop,” Chadwick told the DCNF. “Laws on warning shots and self-defense vary by state, but in any jurisdiction a warning shot invites prosecutors to argue the shooter never faced the level of danger that justifies deadly force.

Marc Victor, owner of Attorneys For Freedom Law Firm, said after trying “thousands” of cases, he viewed warning shots as “high risk” in the legal aftermath of a self-defense incident.

“Prosecutors like to use them really in a couple of different ways. First, if you’re firing a warning shot, lots of prosecutors will make the argument that because you had the ability to fire a warning shot, the whole situation was not imminent,” Victor told the DCNF. “Because, as imminency is a very important piece of building a self-defense case, and so the prosecutor very commonly in these types of cases will say, because you had time to fire a warning shot, you were not at an imminent. threat of death or serious physical injury. The reason I say it that way is because when you fire a warning shot, you’re now in the category of deadly physical force.”

“You’re going to have to make the case that you are at an imminent risk of death or a very serious physical injury and so they will use the warning shot as their evidence that the imminency card was missing. So that’s number one,” Victor continued. “The second thing that we see commonly on warning shots is prosecutor will argue this was an escalation. You weren’t trying to use the least amount of force, what escalated the situation. So now you’re the aggressor, you’re not responding to the aggression.”