by Rich Grassi As discussed before, I'm strongly inclined to add a safety rule to the List of Four. I'm prompted to do this by the efforts of stalwart Stephen Wenger and he was via the efforts of one or more Arizona attorneys. I've never been accused of being particularly kind to attorneys as a group but in this case they make plenty of sense. Rule Five, Maintain control of your defensive tools, is important for many reasons. For one, there are still too many cases of children and idiots getting access to a firearm with tragic results. For another, there are states that have statutes that make securing firearms obligatory. For another, there's at least one state where the supreme court can't tell the difference from a .357 Magnum revolver and dynamite and consider the storage of either to be of equivalent effect. With all the permit carry going on, I've yet to see someone carry their licensed destructive device concealed. I digress. Another reason for Rule 5 is that, in a physical struggle, even a concealed firearm becomes known to the violent offender. He can feel it. Even money, he'll go for it. Alternatively, have you ever had to draw a pistol in an encounter and not had to shoot it? About half of the gun grab attempts on police are attempts on drawn handguns. What does it take to maintain Rule 5 during a violent assault? Training. While there are many outfits out there that profess to teach "weapons retention," there's one that's been in continuous use since 1976; that was developed to counter a huge number of gun grabs encountered by members of a single police agency in an effort to keep officers safe. There's one that is court-defendable because it's been defended in court. There's one that's taught by practitioners from Washington State to California to Florida to the U.S. Virgin Islands to Rhode Island to Denmark to Canada. The one system that has all that in common is Mr. James Lindell's Handgun/Long Gun Retention and Disarming System. How do I know about it? I've been privileged to teach the system to practitioners and to instructors since 1997. I'm happy to say that it still seems to come as second nature. The Kansas City MO Police Department had come up against an unprecedented number of gun grabs. Officers were getting shot with their own guns. The boss went to the Supervisor of Physical Training for the academy and asked him to do something. The Supervisor was James Lindell. They'd come to him in 1970, tired of their officers of smaller stature coming out second place in physical confrontations. They needed something that worked every time to stop fights short of shooting offenders. The Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint was the system Lindell devised. Recently, the KCPD celebrated 40 years of successful use of LVNR!

NLETC Photo.

Lindell's gun retention system is every bit as effective as LVNR in terms of defending your firearm from reaching hands. Aside from LVNR and Gun Retention, Lindell's National Law Enforcement Training Center (now a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation) also does instructor development in Control and Defensive Tactics, Weapon Ground Defense, Ground Defense and Control, Power Handcuffing, Knife Defense, OC Counter-Assault, Trainer Development and Medical/Legal Issues. The Mid-Missouri Mini-Seminar, featuring Control/Defensive Tactics, Handgun/Long Gun Retention and Disarming and LVNR, will take place at University of Central Missouri - National Police Institute, Warrensburg MO. Classes will be taught by NLETC Vice President Sonny Lynch, a superb instructor. The 30th Annual Reasonable Use of Force Seminar - covering all the NLETC topics - will run July 11 - July 16, 2011, at the Kansas City MO Police Academy. The National Trainers will be there and it's a week full of relevant training. It's a great group of which to be a part. You owe it to yourself, your agency and your family to get this training. For more information, and to sign up, call 816-531-2447 or go to the website at http://www.nletc.com.