From firing a gun to hiring a lawyer ...

LFI-1

The Essentials of Self-Defense

By Kathy Jackson

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This review was originally written in September 2004.

You can contact Massad Ayoob through the Lethal Force Institute, found online at www.ayoob.com.

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Walking into the classroom on my first day of LFI-1, I wasn't sure what to expect. On one hand, like everyone else in the shooting world, I had heard a lot about Massad Ayoob and his teaching. I'd heard that the Judicious Use of Deadly Force Seminar was a must-attend, that Ayoob knew the legal ramifications of deadly force better than anyone else in the industry, that he put on an interesting and provocative class.

On the other hand, there's an awful lot of trash written about Ayoob, in print and online. I'd heard that Ayoob teaches people how to commit murder and get away with it. I'd heard that LFI teaches people not to shoot criminals. I'd heard that Ayoob doesn't really support the 2nd Amendment and I'd heard that he urges people to become armed vigilantes. The insults are often contradictory and most are demonstrably false, but such is the nature of rumor.

I was there to find out the truth – or at least, as large a portion of truth as I could manage to digest in two short weekends.

The Lethal Force Institute has been around since 1981. That's the year Ayoob, an experienced law-enforcement trainer and competitive shooter, went into business for himself, teaching ordinary gun owners – as the critics say – "how to kill people and get away with it."

Ayoob does indeed teach shooters how to win an encounter with a violent criminal, and how to deal with the legal system afterwards to explain why they did what they did. In that sense, LFI graduates are indeed equipped to kill people "and get away with it."

But "getting away with it" is a far cry indeed from what LFI actually teaches. When Ayoob works as an expert witness, he will not testify for anyone he does not personally believe to be on the side of the angels. In class, he is absolutely adamant that his students must follow the law in every respect. LFI classes place a heavy emphasis on the ethical underpinnings of self-defense. Ayoob urges people who have not worked through the moral and ethical questions, or who do not understand the legal issues, not to carry until they have settled these things for themselves. This is hardly the profile of a bloodthirsty vigilante.

LFI-1 is a traveling show that may be offered in dozens of states during a calendar year, and it is also available at LFI's home range in New Hampshire. The complete LFI-1 class takes a minimum of four days. Occasionally the class is offered in a weeklong five-day format, but it is more common to find it offered as two separate two-day weekends.

Judicious Use of Deadly Force (JUDF) is the initial portion of LFI-1. It consists of two very concentrated ten-hour days full of lecture, discussion, and a limited amount of role play.

Stressfire (sometimes advertised as the "LFI-1 Completion Course") primarily meets on the shooting range. Like JUDF, Stressfire fills two very intensive ten-hour days. Both portions together comprise the complete LFI-1 class.

When LFI-1 came to my home state through the auspices of the Firearms Academy of Seattle this fall, I decided to attend the full event. JUDF met in a convention room in Olympia, and Stressfire on the FAS range, near Chehalis, Washington. Approximately 35 students attended JUDF, and 20 returned for Stressfire, which I am told is not an unusual size for this very popular course.

At $350 per weekend,¹ the complete LFI-1 course represents a sizable investment for many people. During the Stressfire weekend, the student can expect to burn approximately 500 rounds of ammunition. Add in the cost of motel rooms and meals away from home during both weekends, and other traveling expenses, and it soon becomes obvious that LFI must offer significant value to justify the course's price tag.

When asked, the overwhelming majority of LFI-1 graduates enthusiastically proclaim that the class was absolutely worth its cost. Many return again and again, bringing friends and relatives along to experience what LFI has to offer.

Standing in front of the class, Ayoob appears utterly comfortable and unruffled. His speech is blunt and straightforward, intensely informative and provocative. His lectures are spiced with humor and invective; no matter how many hours his students have been sitting in the classroom, it is impossible to doze while he is at the podium. Much of the class is video taped lecture, but it doesn't matter. Ayoob on tape holds students' attention just as well as Ayoob in person.

Ayoob gives the unmistakable impression of a man who has done his homework. When he states an opinion, it is immediately followed not just by anecdotes, but by cites of legal cases which support his contentions. He does not stumble or falter in giving these cites -- they roll easily off his tongue, with no apparent effort. This remarkable recitation is often accompanied by personal reminiscence. The man remembers the cases because he was in the courtroom when the decisions were read, or because he interviewed each of the players immediately afterward. From his conversation and lecture, it is obvious that he reads law books in his leisure time, and reads legal biographies for pleasure. This is a man who has immersed himself in his chosen field. And it is very impressive.

The student definitely gets more than her money's worth of information. Breaks were adequate but not exactly generous, and we worked our way straight through lunch. In theory, there's no reason one cannot eat while listening to a lecture. In reality, it is well-nigh impossible to eat and take notes at the same time.

And take notes we did. I went through an entire legal pad before the first day was over, and my handwriting is not large. Class notes, Ayoob says, are one of the most important aspects of the seminar. Not only do accurate notes enable the student to absorb more of the material covered, but they can help establish the defendant's state of mind and prior knowledge, a consideration that is often essential when self-defense is claimed.

LFI-1 could arguably be considered excellent legal insurance. Ayoob provides his expert-witness services free of charge to any LFI graduate who is involved in a shooting and whose lawyer contacts him. Considering that expert witnesses can cost upwards of $300 an hour, this is a phenomenal deal and is alone more than worth the price of the class.

In the concluding lecture of JUDF, Ayoob points out that the goal of a self-defense shooting isn't to take life, but to save it. He likens the decision to shoot in a moment of peril to an act of medical triage. Just as the medic with limited resources must decide which lives can be saved at the scene of an accident and which cannot, so an armed citizen may have to decide which life to save in a moment of deadly danger. If a knife-wielding assailant is attacking a loved one, one of the two is going to die. If the attack is vicious enough, immediate enough, deadly enough, they cannot both be saved alive. One will die and one will live -- and the armed bystander is equipped to decide which one will survive. To shoot in such a circumstance is to choose to save a life.

Ayoob asserts that those who approach a deadly encounter with that mindset often do better not just in the initial confrontation, but also do better coping with the legal and social aftermath of the violent event. Though they may torment themselves afterward wondering if there was anything else they could have done at the moment of truth, they also fully grasp that their goal was to save innocent life and they accomplished it.

On the range, Ayoob was unafraid to demonstrate the required skills. During the final qualifier he announced that he was putting money on his own performance. "If I beat you, you don't owe me anything, but if you tie my score it's an autographed buck and if your group beats mine it's an autographed five that says 'You beat me at my own game.'" Several people walked away with autographed dollar bills, but no one won that fiver.

Stressfire students learn the Weaver, Chapman, and Isosceles stances, firing at distances ranging from 4 to 15 yards. The class also covers one-handed shooting with both the dominant and the non-dominant hand. No work is done from behind cover, but low kneeling, high kneeling, and speed crouch are introduced as fundamentals that will be used behind cover as the students become more advanced. It was surprising how much lecture time Stressfire included. There was plenty of time on the range, but several hours were spent in the classroom. Once again, the class continued straight through lunch; by this time, most students had learned the trick of juggling a sandwich while taking notes.

Shooting schools generally focus on a very narrow band of survival behavior. All teach how to shoot accurately, and most teach how to shoot accurately under time stress. Some teach tactical skills as well, instructing students on such arcane matters as how to find and assess cover, how to search a room, or how to decide which of multiple targets to shoot first. These things are all commonly available from firearms instructors all across the United States.

But what Ayoob has done with LFI is truly unique. While LFI does teach shooting basics and tactical essentials, the goal is to prepare students to survive an entire deadly force encounter -- from the moral and ethical considerations that must be decided beforehand, to the actual encounter and the fired shot, and then through the legal, social, and emotional aftermath. This larger picture is rarely encountered elsewhere, and no one else covers the legal considerations of using deadly force as thoroughly or from a position of as much knowledge as Ayoob brings to the table.

In listening to class lectures, this much becomes plain: Pulling the trigger takes only a fraction of a second -- but living with the consequences of doing so is going to take the rest of your life.

This isn't a popular point of view in the gun community. "Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six," as they say. While that is true -- and while Ayoob will tell you that it is true -- he's got a more complete view.

"That's the first step," Ayoob says. "First we get you out of the hands of the six pallbearers. Then we need to get you out of the hands of the twelve jurors. You want to keep the rest of your life, too – watching your kids grow up, sleeping with your spouse, driving your nice car and living in your warm house in a good neighborhood. We want you to keep all of it. An 8 by 12 cell isn't much of a life."

Ayoob is a realist. In 40 hours of class time, a student would have to listen very hard indeed to hear him say anything at all about the way things ought to be. Instead, he talks about how things are -- about how the courts are currently interpreting actual legislation, about how cops ordinarily interact with armed citizens, about which legal principles are most often brought to bear in self-defense trials. He talks about expert witnesses hired by the prosecution, about which hardware modifications frequently cause trouble in court and which do not, and about good judges and bad ones.

But Ayoob does not talk about winning gunfights. When he cites Bill Jordan's excellent book, No Second Place Winner, he opines that Jordan was an optimist. "There are no first place winners, either," he says somberly. "The only true victory is deterrence. Everything else is just damage control."

Except where otherwise noted, all articles and images on this web site © 2006-2009 by Kathy Jackson. For permission to quote, please contact author.

This article originally published in Women and Guns magazine. For permission to quote, please contact author.

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