The two things I would strongly advise against doing and have strongly advised against doing, would be a trigger pull lighter than the factory recommends, and removal or de-activation of a safety device.
You try not to give weapons to your opponent. If I have an [opposing] attorney trying to nail my scalp to the wall, I’m not gonna give him the sound bite of “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re here to determine whether this man was reckless, and arrogant, and negligent. Ladies and gentlemen, he was so reckless, he deactivated the safety device on a lethal weapon. And he was so arrogant, he thought he knew more about this gun than the designer.” Tell me how you’re gonna get past that.
As far as the light trigger pull, your problem there, number one, is it has historically been linked to unintended discharges. So problem one, under stress, we SAY we’re gonna keep our finger off the trigger.
The trouble with that study done in Europe with trained emergency-response personnel, indicated that several times, the sensors that were put on the test gun picked up a finger touching it [the trigger], when the officers swore that during the high-stress exercise their finger had never entered the trigger guard. It apparently occurs unconsciously, as the mind says “Hey, if we have to shoot this thing, we want to verify we can reach the trigger.”
Second, you can go to court and say “I didn’t accidentally discharge the gun, I always keep my finger outside the trigger.” And they will then hit you with the bomb. “So, you want this jury to believe that you’re incapable of making a mistake? You’re the first perfect human being in two thousand and ten years. Is that what you’re telling this jury?” Now that is gonna be a pretty tough sell.
Where the accidental discharge theory comes, is they know you have a justifiable shooting, but you’ve got either the rare prosecutor that is politically driven and has some political hay to make by hanging you out to dry, or the much less-rare plaintiff’s lawyer who’s trying to sue you or your insurance company for something – mainly your insurance company.
They know there is no such thing as a justifiable accident. They know that in a state like Florida, or many other states now, even on the street, the so-called Castle Doctrine has been extended. Basically, particularly if you’re attacked in the home, the presumption is that you were right to shoot the intruder.
If you read the fine print, you’ll find all those laws are worded so they do not cover negligence. So all the other side has to come up with is say “Yeah, well, but he killed him by accident, and that’s not what this law is about. Our theory is, he accidentally shot him.” The light trigger lends itself to that. And you’ve basically just given them an argument they can use against you.
The prosecutor who is politically-motivated will use that argument, because he knows it’s a very tough sell to convince the jury that somebody like that, somebody like you, a productive member of society, with a clean criminal record has suddenly turned into Hannibal Lecter and decided to maliciously murder another human being for sport. They know it’s an easy, slam-dunk to convince the jury that somebody just like them got careless for just one second, and did something stupid.
So that becomes their theory of the case, and it’s a much easier sell. They don’t get bonus points for convicting you for murder instead of manslaughter. It’s really real simple, pass/fail. If you win the conviction, you done good. If the guy is acquitted, you’ve made an ass of yourself. So a lot of them will go for that low-hanging fruit, and that is where the false theory of “he shot him by accident” comes from. And that’s one of the reasons I don’t want to see a lighter-than factory spec trigger on a defensive firearm.
The other is in the civil case. The plaintiff’s lawyer is not looking for justice – they are looking for money. There are damn few people who are both so rich and so stupid, that if I won a civil judgement of a million dollars against them, there would be an unprotected, liquid million dollars that I could put my claws on and seize to satisfy the judgement.
Probably everybody reading your blog has a million dollar homeowner liability coverage. The insurance company has the money. And bingo, that’s where they go. If they make their theory that he shot them by accident, it’s homeowner negligence, they can get into the deep pockets of the insurance company. If they say, no, he deliberately, maliciously shot my client to watch him die, the attorney knows there’s not a homeowner’s policy in America that covers you for what’s called a willful tort, the deliberate act that harms another person.
So if they say you deliberately shot him, basically, they are closing off their access to where the money is. So that’s why it’s so attractive to them to say you shot him by accident with a hair-trigger gun. I do not like to leave blood like that in the water for the sharks.
Someone might argue that with a lighter trigger, I’m gonna hit better, so therefore it comes under your thing it’s safer for the bystanders. Actually, no, it fails to pass another legal test called the doctrine of competing harms. History tells us that light triggers are so often associated with accidental shooting tragedies, that trying to say “Well, I did it for safety,” just is not going to pass muster. It doesn’t pass the balance test.
So what I tell folks is, nothing lighter than “factory spec” in the trigger. Certainly make your trigger smooth, I’ve never seen anyone accused of having too-smooth a trigger pull, in 31 years as an expert witness, and 39 years of teaching this stuff, and 40 years of writing about it. But what I have seen again and again, is that the trigger is too light, and therefore reckless and negligent, and guilt-producing, and culpability-producing.
If I don’t like the disconnector safety on a Browning, I would get another gun, or have the one I have smoothed up so my problems with it are solved. If I don’t like the grip safety on a 1911, I’d buy a pistol that did not have a grip safety and be done with it. And the other modifications I think are going to be very defensible, and I my experience has been that they are very defensible.
