Your First Call After You Shoot Someone

Although self-defense-insurance companies market primarily to gun enthusiasts, they are agnostic about a client’s means of self-protection. “Anytime you ever have to defend yourself with any legal weapon—dog, gun, baseball bat, car, doesn’t make any difference,” a U.S. Law Shield representative said at a recent presentation to potential customers. “We represented a lady one time, somebody broke into her house while she was cooking. She threw hot grease on him and hit him with a frying pan. That’s a legal weapon.” One client told me that he had added his young daughter to his plan, “in case my kid beats up your kid on the playground and you get sue-happy.”

Detractors have called the product “murder insurance.” But industry representatives argue that their customers are exercising their legal rights. The companies reserve the right to deny coverage if they determine that a shooting was not in self-defense, or if the shooter was engaged in criminal activity at the time of the incident. “We’re not signing up people who say, ‘Oh, goody, now I get to go use my gun,’ ” Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia, said in 2014, when he launched the company Virginia Self Defense Law, whose legal-retainer program cost as little as $8.33 a month. “This community is more law-abiding than the average citizen. These are better Americans than the average American. That’s my clientele.”

U.S. Law Shield’s founding was inspired by a high-profile shooting. On the afternoon of November 14, 2007, a retiree named Joe Horn called 911 to report that two men were robbing his neighbor’s home in Pasadena, Texas. “I’ve got a shotgun—you want me to stop him?” Horn asked the dispatcher.

“Nope, don’t do that,” the dispatcher replied. “Ain’t no property worth shooting somebody over, O.K.?”

In the several minutes that followed, Horn grew increasingly agitated as the dispatcher repeatedly cautioned him against intervening. “O.K., but I have a right to protect myself, too, sir. . . . The laws have been changed in this country since September the first, and you know it and I know it,” Horn said. “Here it goes, buddy. You hear the shotgun clicking and I’m going.” Then he stepped outside and killed both men. Self-defense law in the U.S. is largely based on the English common-law principle of castle doctrine: essentially, your home is your castle, and you may use deadly force against an intruder. But, as the Republican legislator who wrote Texas’s then recently passed Stand Your Ground law—the one that Horn invoked during his 911 call—pointed out at the time, “This wasn’t his castle.”

The case caught the attention of Darren Rice, an attorney in Houston. “Darren is a lawyer by trade, but he’s also a gun guy,” Evans said, and in Horn’s case Rice saw a sign of things to come. Stand Your Ground laws, which are now in place throughout much of the country, were expanding the scope of lethal self-defense outside the home. In Texas, a person who “reasonably” fears imminent death or injury could now use deadly force to defend themselves or others, which created all sorts of legal complexities. What type of fear counted as “reasonable”? How imminent did a threat need to be? “There were a lot of gun-law myths that people had in their head that were just completely wrong, but that just spread among the culture, on the internet and at gun shows,” Evans said. Gun owners needed two things, Rice concluded: better legal guidance about when they were justified in using deadly force, and better legal defense when they did so.

(Horn became a right-wing hero after it was revealed that the men he’d killed were undocumented immigrants. Seven months after the shooting, after listening to two weeks of testimony, a grand jury declined to indict him.)

The idea that gun owners might need to use a weapon to protect themselves or their loved ones is a cornerstone of contemporary gun culture, and central to the sales pitches of self-defense-insurance companies. Such situations are uncommon, although they are less rare than they used to be: the number of justifiable homicides in the U.S. has increased by more than twenty per cent since 2007, the year Texas passed its Stand Your Ground law, to around eight hundred per year; since 2019, the majority of them have been committed not by law-enforcement officers but by armed civilians. (Just because a shooting was ruled justifiable does not mean, of course, that it was necessary.)

Many more incidents are categorized as defensive gun uses—in which a firearm is deployed, or brandished, in order to deter a crime. According to the Department of Justice, there are around seventy thousand defensive gun uses per year; gun-rights groups often cite figures ten times as high. (It is notoriously difficult to get accurate statistics around firearm use, both because the research is heavily partisan and because Republican legislators have prohibited certain forms of gun-violence research.)

But even defensive gun uses that are ultimately ruled to be justifiable often result in legal consequences—investigations, charges, grand-jury proceedings, and sometimes trials. “A lot of people are shocked, because they’re feeling, like, Hey, I just saved my life,” Larry Bloomquist, a San Antonio-based lawyer who works with U.S. Law Shield, said. Evans told me that the company receives some three hundred “true emergency” calls per month, and regularly dispatches lawyers to crime scenes and police departments in the middle of the night. The clients of self-defense-insurance companies whom I spoke to seemed to value their attorneys for their emotional support as much as their legal expertise. “Have you ever been in a self-defense situation? It’s, like, ten-out-of-ten crazy. I’m in freakout mode,” Matt McAdams, who shot and killed a man who attempted to rob the liquor store where he was working, said. “Larry came and he held my hand the whole way.”