Here's something that I honestly don't give enough thought to. CCW / self defense insurance. I've been seeing an add that keeps popping up on FB & it has me wondering what you guys are doing or suggest . Thoughts ?
I'm not a big fan of the self-defense insurers. Most of them aren't really insurers in that there is no security behind what they promise. It's a defined benefit plan, and if you ever need to file a claim, you just have to hope they make good. But there are two huge reasons I don't like them. The first is that many of them don't provide a benefit that is worth anything. A good criminal defense will run at least $25k in a self-defense shooting. Perhaps upward of $50k if you take it all the way to trial and need experts. The same goes for the civil side. If there is some merit to the civil case, your legal bill can easily exceed $50k. A lot of the services offer a benefit of $10k for each of the criminal and civil cases. It's something, but it's not going to be enough to get you a top flight lawyer. At $250/hour, which is a reasonable rate for an experienced attorney, $10k gets you 40 hours. You're not getting a good criminal or civil defense for 40 hours. So if you get a pre-paid service, make sure you know what the benefit is, and that it's substantially more than that.
The second thing I don't like about the programs is you don't know who your lawyer will be. When you dig into a lot of these services, you find that they are really owned and operated by a lawyer, and the lawyer may or may not have any experience litigating cases. I have a friend who is assigned counsel for a pre-paid self-defense service, and she's never taken a felony case to trial before. She's never taken a complex civil case to trial, and she's never done a civil use-of-force case before. So woe to you if you sign up with that service (which shall go unnamed) and have to make a claim. Be sure you sign up with a service that either pays the benefit directly to you so you can hire whomever you wish, or sign up with a service that is very clear about who their lawyers are and do your homework to confirm that they're legit. Also, you'll want to find a service that has Ohio-licensed attorneys on call.
This has never been a feasible arguement in shootings. It is quite frankly a gun store wives tale. Any lawyer worth anything will draw comparison lines between self defense rounds and that the police use the same.This may seem petty to some but......when you have a firearm loaded with a "self defense" round such as a hollow point if and when you go to court you will be challenged for having your firearm loaded with the intent to kill someone. For this reason my ccw has a target round in the chamber followed by a clip full of hollow points. If the first round stops someone that's great and I had the gun loaded with a target round. If not I got more for ya
Thanks for your service.
In any shooting situation everything will be analyzed and the shooter will be questioned on everything.
Why do you use such a large caliber? Even though they know said caliber is standard
Why do you use those evil, killer bullets? Even though they are standard.
Why did you shoot 6 times? They would know that standard is shoot until the threat stops.
Anything can be made an issue. Carrying standard hollow points is the least of my concerns.
So, is anyone else using extra insurance ?