I have resided in free states my entire life and been a sworn police officer longer than I wasn’t. So, I probably sound smug when I tell people in anti-gun jurisdictions “Get the damn carry permit if it’s required. I can’t recommend that you break the law by carrying illegally.” I’ve often heard the reply, “Better judged by twelve than carried by six.” In my younger days, I even uttered and wrote those words myself.

Unfortunately, if you do escape the six pallbearers, the twelve jurors may still send you to prison and end the life you have come to know. Let me share with you three cases that illustrate the point.

Carrying Illegally When the Permit is Denied

Case One: State of New York v. Bernhard Goetz.

The press made Goetz infamous – but a hero to many New Yorkers fed up with crime – when they dubbed him “The Vigilante Subway Gunman.”

He was a New York City resident who had been savagely beaten by muggers. They were quickly released on bail and left him with pain in his ribs for the rest of his life. So, he bought two handguns, a nickel-plated S&W Chief Special .38 and a Walther PPK .380, and applied for a carry permit.

In the early 1980s, NYPD tended to only issue permits to the wealthy. New York State Penal Code 265 allowed the issuing authority to set standards. NYPD had required an applicant to regularly carry at least $5,000 in cash, jewelry, or negotiable bonds to qualify.

A self-employed electronics repairman, Goetz often did carry enough money to take advantage of cash-and-carry sales of components he needed. However, he was arbitrarily denied.

The City had told him he didn’t need to carry a gun. The lingering pain from the beating told him he did. He chose the willful civil disobedience of illegal carry. The .38 snubnose was in his waistband holster when four young muggers accosted him—at least two armed with hidden screwdrivers—who surrounded him in a subway car, and one demanded, “Give me five dollars.”

Goetz famously replied, “Yes, I have five dollars for each of you,” and drew the .38 and fired all of its five rounds. He hit each of them once and sent one errant shot into the ceiling. They fell away from him, one paralyzed for life, and Goetz fled at the next subway stop.

He hid out in New England for days, eventually turning himself in to the Concord, New Hampshire Police Department.

Beware of “Journalists”

I came into it from two directions. Alan Gottlieb, the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, was ready to pay for his defense and called me. I told him to count me in as an expert witness. Likewise, I recommended Bob Kasanof, NYC’s best self-defense lawyer, in my opinion, as counsel. However, Goetz hired Barry Slotnick, John Gotti’s defense lawyer.

Then, New York City newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, whom I thought was to honest journalism as Josef Mengele was to pediatrics, phoned me while I was teaching an Advanced Officer Survival class for the Police Marksman Association with world combat pistol champion Ray Chapman in Salt Lake City.

He snidely began by asking me if I was teaching the cops there to shoot people on subways. I replied that there were no subways in SLC. He asked if it was true that Goetz had been one of my graduates, and I replied, “No, we had never taught him.”

Breslin promptly wrote a column in which he said Goetz had indeed been one of my graduates and had earned a Ph.D in killing people. I called NYPD and spoke to a detective working the case, who confirmed that Goetz had never claimed to have trained with me. However, when they searched his apartment, they had found a copy of Combat Handguns open to one of my articles.

A Breakdown in the System

To make a long story short, lawyer Slotnick forced each of what Breslin called “the four unarmed boys” to admit that, yeah, it was a strong-arm robbery. However, he did nothing substantive to defend the lesser included charge of illegal concealed carry. This is a felony under New York’s Sullivan Law.

The jury found him not guilty of the shootings but guilty of illegal concealed carry. Bernhard Goetz was sentenced to a minimum/mandatory year in jail and declared a convicted felon. As a result, he could never own a gun to protect himself again.

If Slotnick had told the jury, “My client tried to follow the law, and the city literally broke it by denying him the permit when he met their own standards. You can’t send him to jail because the city broke the law!” the outcome might have been better.

There were lawyers in the city at that time who specialized in getting permits for people like Goetz. Going to one of them would have cost a hell of a lot less than the long and ugly trial that left him a convicted felon.

When The Concealed Carry Permit is Inconvenient

Case Two: Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Robert Tessitore.

Bob was your classic Good Guy with A Gun, an upstanding professional man in Rhode Island. He had recently taken the Judicious Use of Deadly Force course that I had taught in his state. A year later, in 2003, he was in the early stages of recovering from debilitating cancer surgery when he got the double whammy of learning that a beloved mentor in neighboring Massachusetts was terminally ill.

He drove north each night to that state to visit and be of help. He was always careful to leave his GLOCK 23 locked in his desk before he left. However, one night, he was so rushed that he forgot the gun was on until he had crossed the state line.

He told me he had taken seriously my admonition to always have a non-resident concealed carry permit in any state he visited regularly. He even had the application on his desk that night. But he held off because it was expensive, and there were many hoops to jump through. (Massachusetts was actually less demanding than Rhode Island, where he did have a permit.)

Naturally, that was the proverbially dark and stormy night when a car with two thugs pulled up on him, and one jumped out with a knife and came at him viciously.

Bob drew and fired once in self-defense, delivering a gut shot. His assailant doubled over and literally jumped through the window into the getaway car, which sped off. The criminal soon bled to death.

This trauma was more than Bob could handle on top of everything else he was dealing with. So, he panicked and fled. He later surrendered to police and was charged with Manslaughter with the added charge of carrying concealed illegally.

Just Jump Through the Hoops

I spoke for him at no charge, as I always guarantee I will do for students who did the right thing. First, as material witness to testify as to what I had trained him. Then, as an expert witness as to details of the actual shooting, and explained why this wasn’t “flight equals guilt.”

Perhaps knowing it had a weak case, the Commonwealth harped on the fact that he had a LaserMax sight on the GLOCK and even owned (gasp!) a Colt Cobra revolver. We dealt with those easily in direct and cross-examination.

Bottom line? The jury acquitted Bob of Manslaughter but felt they had to find him guilty of illegally carrying a gun. A judge imposed a minimum/mandatory one-year sentence for illegal concealed carry. In the sentencing, the judge made it clear that she wouldn’t have sent him behind bars if the law had given her a choice. The lesson? Jump through the damn hoops if you have to, but get the damn permit!

Don’t Carry Illegally: Pay for the Permit!

Case Three: Florida v. Thomas Naim Watkins.

This young man’s story should have been in Reader’s Digest as an example of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, instead of in Combat Handguns. Watkins was born to a single mom in a brutal SoCal ghetto. His mom was able to move only to get her family into public housing in Tampa, FL.

In the SoCal ghetto, he had been beaten up, robbed, and even maimed when he went to the assistance of an innocent young woman being attacked by a knife-wielding criminal. In Tampa, he worked three jobs and managed night school while still giving money to his mom. He figured he could afford $300 to protect himself.

A carry permit in FL at that time cost 160-some dollars. He used the $300 to buy a used second-generation S&W 9mm and some Egyptian surplus military ball ammo. He figured if he ever needed the gun, he’d worry about the legal side afterward. In Florida then, in the 1990s, unpermitted concealed carry was a felony for first offense.

The time came when a large, vicious, buffed-out thug high on drugs and booze attacked the physically small Naim—who in his early 20s looked about 15 years old—and Naim’s equally innocent girlfriend. Naim drew his 9mm.

The thug got him down, beating him savagely. It took five of those ice-pick-like 9mm wounds to the chest to make him stop. Each bullet had gone through and through, five entries and five exits. The prosecutor made hay with what he called “The ten gunshot wounds inflicted by the defendant.”

The two Public Defenders and I established for the record the elements of justifiable use of deadly force, disparity of force, etc. Yet, to our amazement, the jury convicted Naim of Manslaughter.

This Could Have Been Avoided

I later learned that one of the jurors who convicted him had told a third party, “He was a black felon (for concealed carry without a permit), in the ghetto, who killed another black felon. He had to be guilty of something!”

The despicable racist element of the conviction aside, Naim should have taken that $300 and gotten the permit he was qualified for with his clean record. Then, he could have bought one of the many traded-in .38 Special police service revolvers available for $100 in the 1990s and loaded it with some +P hollow points. The defense lawyers and I agreed that if he had done this, he probably never would have been charged. Let alone convicted.

For Heaven’s sake, carry legally!