Rob Pincus

Interactions with Law Enforcement Session 4: Firearms in Buildings

Rob Pincus
Duration:   9  mins

Description

This Session explores a variety of scenarios that could complicate your interactions with law enforcement in your home, workplace, or other dwelling when a gun is present and staged for defense. Understand the importance of addressing the presence of a firearm with law enforcement and how you can facilitate a safe and courteous interaction without compromising your use of firearms for personal defense.

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You may be one of the millions of American gun owners who keep a firearm staged for defense in your workplace or in your home. Now, when you're inside of a building, particularly if it's your home, and you control that property, you control access to that property, law enforcement, unless they have a warrant and they're investigating a crime, are gonna need your permission to come into that area, to come into your home, to come into your living room, to move around, to look at things, certainly to search the house or look behind anything, something that's not in plain view. But perhaps you live alone. Perhaps everyone inside of your house is authorized to have access to a firearm and you have firearms openly displayed. Now, if you have a collectible firearm behind a glass case, up on a rack with a little plaque explaining what it is, it's probably not gonna be perceived as any type of threat by any reasonable law enforcement officer that comes to your home, maybe to investigate a property crime, to interview you about something that may have happened in the environment that you live in.

Maybe your neighbor was, had reported a crime and they just wanted to come over and talk to you and see if you saw anybody suspicious in the neighborhood or saw a car parked out in front of your house that shouldn't have been in the last day or two, or last Thursday night at seven o'clock. Well, when that law enforcement officer comes into your house, if they have any reason to perceive that you may be a threat to them while they're there investigating the crime interviewing you, or making contact for whatever reason, it's important to understand that the presence of a firearm will escalate their concern about their own safety. So making sure that you're aware of that ahead of time is really important. If you think about it behaviorally, if you walked into a place of business and you started talking to someone and another customer came in and they were standing within arm's reach of an openly displayed firearm and they were acting in any way uncooperative, agitated, or posed any type of a perceived threat to you, it would probably make you nervous. Well, when law enforcement goes about their daily duties and they come into interaction with people, they're gonna feel exactly the same way.

If there's a fully loaded AR-15 sitting up against the corner of the wall next to the chair that you're sitting in while they're talking to you and you don't like the line of questioning, you're becoming agitated, you're not cooperative, maybe you just have a general disdain for law enforcement for whatever reason, because of your past experiences, something is happening in your community, if they start to read that body language or read that lack of cooperation as potentially threatening and there's clearly a lethal firearm within reach of you, obviously that's gonna escalate the situation and they may have concerns about the firearm in that place that you control because in that immediate moment, while they're doing their job, it poses a potential threat to them. Thinking ahead of time about any firearms that are openly displayed in your home or that are easily viewed inside of your home and what they may mean to any interaction that you're gonna have with law enforcement is important. Because if you know ahead of time that law enforcement is coming into your home, you're not under investigation, or maybe you are for a potential crime, whether you believe you're guilty of it or not, it's gonna be really important for you to acknowledge the firearm and let officer know about it. When the officer comes into a workplace that you control, it's going to be very similar. Let's say that you have your own business.

You're a private business owner and you have an office outside of the public view. And in that office, again, you keep a firearm, maybe hanging on a rack on the wall or leaning up in the corner for the defense of yourself or others inside of that space in a worst case scenario. Well, if law enforcement comes in to, again, investigate a crime in the area, talk to you about something, maybe someone's made a completely false report about you potentially committing a crime and a couple of detectives are gonna come over to talk to you. Well, if you invite them into your office and there's a loaded shotgun leaning up against the corner and they don't know about it ahead of time, it could make them nervous, especially if they suspect that you're a criminal, right or wrong, and you aren't quite sure why they're there. So before you take the officers into your home, before you allow the officers into your office, you might want to let them know, "Hey, sir, by the way, I'm a legal firearms owner.

I take my right to personal defense, home defense, the defense of my workplace and those in it very seriously. And I do have a loaded firearm over here in the corner, or I do have a loaded firearm in the corner of the office room that we're about to go into." Letting them know ahead of time is gonna help you with your interaction with law enforcement in that building space. If they know that that firearm is there and you've told them about it, immediately, that's going to potentially deescalate the situation. That's gonna let them know that you're not hiding the firearm. You're not attempting to use it to ambush them.

You want to let them know about it. You're meeting your responsibility for a peaceful, cooperative interaction. Once they let you know what they want you to do with the firearm, again, it's gonna be best to cooperate or comply. Now, again, this isn't a time to have a legal debate with the officers. If the officers say, "Well, we'd prefer that that firearm weren't in the room.

Can you secure it?" Maybe they'd say, "Well, you know what? If there's a firearm in there, we'd prefer that you step outside to talk to us." If they said to you, "No problem, we understand. But if you don't mind, we'd prefer that you stand on this side of the room while we're talking to you about this situation." I would suggest that in all three cases, you very seriously consider cooperating with the law enforcement officers. And when it comes to the point of view leaving your home and stepping outside or leaving your workplace to talk to them or maybe having an interaction in the public space that would make you uncomfortable because of customers or your neighbors seeing you talking to the police, it's completely reasonable for you to ask for another resolution to the situation. Maybe to let them see the firearm, to let them enter the home first, to let them go into the office first.

Any of those things are gonna make them feel more comfortable. Now, obviously, if you aren't actually a threat to the officers, if you don't have something to hide, if you aren't actually thinking that you're gonna try to hurt the officers, it shouldn't bother you to have them stand closer to the firearm than you are when they're inside of your office or inside of that home space. I understand that that may seem like some kind of a violation of your rights or some kind of distrust, but again, put yourself in the position of the police officer. They don't know you. They're there doing their job.

They'd probably rather not be interacting with you. If they had their way, they'd probably not be in a situation where they had to worry about whether or not you were a threat or that firearm was gonna be used to hurt them. So if they can be more comfortable in their interaction with you by standing to the left or to the right while in that room, I would suggest you let them do that. Now, of course, it's important to understand the law. It's important to understand whether or not you need, under the circumstances you're dealing with, to let the officers into your business or into your home at all.

It's important to understand whether or not they have the right to search through your home or why they're asking you the questions. These are all completely reasonable issues that as a responsible gun owner, as a citizen of the US, that you have a right to understand and a right to ask about, but make sure that you're not creating a dangerous situation as you try to understand the laws and the reason for the interaction, for the police officers being in your home or in your workplace in the first place. And this is where we get to worksheet number two. Now, this is another important worksheet for you inside of this class. I want you to go ahead and either pause right now, take a look at worksheet number two, or at the end of this video session, make sure that you give a lot of time to researching the laws and answering the questions on worksheet number two about legally having a firearm staged for defense inside of your home or workplace.

Remember that if it is your workplace, if you own the building, if you're a proprietor, if you're the owner, if it's private property, the laws are probably gonna be very similar. But if you happen to be in someone else's building, if you're leasing space, you may have to get their permission to have the firearm. If you don't own the building, if you don't own the business, but you're just an employee, the rules governing employee actions and employees' possession of firearms on the property may not be laws. In a worst case scenario, let's say that you've been fired from your workplace, but you have a firearm there. Maybe someone felt reasonably or unreasonably threatened by you inside of that workplace and the police were actually called or the sheriff's office was called to come to the building and escort you from the property.

Think about how that could escalate. You've got the emotional strain of losing your job. You've got the emotional strain of people that you may have trusted and worked with and gotten along for years now saying they don't trust you. Plus you've got law enforcement asking you where the firearm is and telling you that they want to secure it as they escort you from the property, possibly in front of your peers, customers, and other people in your neighborhood. This can be a very emotionally traumatic moment.

Similarly, police officers coming into your home and telling you that you're a suspect in a crime, that they need to ask you some questions that may be difficult, may be stressful, and may be traumatic, but also, they want to take away what you perceive as the tool that you would use to defend yourself, not against them, but against a truly evil aggressor inside of that property, the tool that you would use to defend your family, maybe your kids, maybe your parents. And they're gonna tell you that they want it unloaded or that they want to secure it, or that they want to go to another room because it makes them uncomfortable. When you start adding in these emotional stresses and you combine them with a potential misunderstanding of the law or a violation of law that you didn't even know you had committed, you can see how these situations could escalate very quickly. So worksheet number two is gonna be very important for you to make sure that you understand that you are complying with the law, that you're aware of what the laws are, and that you're prepared to deal as politely, cooperatively, and elicit as much of a professional interaction from law enforcement as possible. When law enforcement arrives at the building or law enforcement arrives at your home and you know that there is a firearm there that they could perceive as a threat, again, I think it's incredibly important that you let them know and that ahead of time, you're familiar with the laws about that firearm being loaded, being accessible, in your state and the rules or laws governing your access to that firearm in property that you don't own.

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