Alex Ooley (00:00)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Forge of Freedom podcast. We're with our third guest for the day We're with Marty Hayes from the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network and today we're going to talk about ⁓

the Arms Citizens Legal Defense Network, what's behind the network, how it got started, how it's evolved over the years, what it has to offer to its members, and how it is a little bit different than maybe some of its competitors. So with that being said, Marty, thanks for joining the Forge of Freedom. Thank you. Appreciate it having me on. So Marty, know this organization has been in existence now for well over a decade. If you would get into how it started, what your motivation was for starting the network, and how it's evolved.

over the years? Well, I first started my work, my working life as a law enforcement officer and I did that for about a dozen years and then I felt like I wanted to do something more. I was really constrained by all the bureaucracies and other rules and regulations and so I went ahead and quit law enforcement and decided to become a trainer. I started the Firearms Academy of Seattle back in 1987.

And we bought a piece of land, built the business, turned it into one of the most successful shooting schools in the country. And then about 2000, I guess it was 2004, I had this hair brained idea that I wanted to become a lawyer. And so I took the LSATs, applied to law school and got accepted. And so from 2004 to 2000.

Seven, I did law school. I still ran the academy, but the law school that I went to was Concord Law School, which is an internet-based law school out of California. They have an interesting program in California where you don't have to go to a bricks and mortar law school to become certified as an attorney. You can do an internet-based law school. Concord was the most successful one out there, had the highest ratings.

And so I said, well, I'll do that. And so I was able to do law school basically sitting in my bedroom. And a lot of times I take the exams in the morning in my bathrobe and attend class and even drinking rum and coke. sounds like a much better version of law school than the one that I did. And you want to know the cool thing is? I graduated debt free. that's even better. Basically, was all pay as you go for me.

Yeah, so that I assume allowed you to continue to run the Firearms Academy of Seattle while you were doing the law school. It did. an ⁓ interesting thing happened though during my law school tenure, the four years I went, is I hit upon the idea that instead of becoming an attorney at a late age, why don't we see if we could do an organization for our students, for the armed citizens.

and the armed citizen who takes us seriously, the people who go to training and stuff. And so I started asking my students, hey, if I put together this idea where you could join and pay a little bit of money every year, but have an attorney available to you, or have the money to hire your own attorney, would you be interested in that? And pretty much they all said yes. And so by the time I graduated, 2000.

2007, we ⁓ had fully formed the concept of the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network. The only thing available in this industry at the time was an insurance policy written by Lockdown Risk, who was associated with the NRA. That was only to reimburse you if you were acquitted. And so that's not what people need, you know? What people need is the money up front to fight the...

hike the acquisitions and so we put together the idea of the network where eventually we would have enough money set aside to be able to

to assist our members. And you mentioned the locked on insurance policy. The Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network is not offering insurance, right? No. And it's different from lot of other offerings that are in existence today for that reason. How does the membership with the ACLDN work?

person joins the network and in the beginning we would take 25 % of their network dues shuffle it off into a legal defense fund and that's how we grew that legal defense fund. When that fund reached four million dollars and we saw that we weren't having to spend that much every year to help our members out that we just went ahead and quit funding the legal defense fund and set aside for operating expenses.

And as part of your operating expenses, you do a lot more than just provide the post defense assistance. You also have an incredible number of educational offerings. Can you talk about those a little bit? Yeah. I know as a trainer, from being a trainer, that the key to

successfully defending yourself in court is to be able to explain the reasons why you felt your life was in danger and why you needed to use that level of force to that a reasonable reasonable and prudent person would use to defend yourself and so we have put all kinds of resources into our educational component much more than the other companies that came on later.

know if they can understand the value of that education. For example, we've had close to 40 instances where members use force and self-defense. think there's three killings, three shootings. None of our people have ever been prosecuted for that. That's amazing. Yeah. And that's because they have this big lump of educational material that they can plop on the prosecutor's desk.

and said, is what my client knows. Go through it, and if you want to prosecute us, we're gonna drag this lump of education into court. We're gonna educate the jury in the same way that my client was educated. And they realized that this is a no-win situation for them. And there's this ⁓ relationship, right? You mentioned you wanna...

your inspiration for this was to help out the informed citizen, the trained citizen who might nevertheless be involved with the legal system ⁓ based on their use of force and self-defense. Because the reality is even if your actions were completely justified, you may nevertheless be investigated and prosecuted for your actions. And so the educational component is a way of

augmenting or enhancing the training that your members already have to hopefully equip them with the knowledge that they need to avoid the situation altogether so that they never have to utilize the membership or ⁓ if they are involved and have to use force so that they can successfully navigate the process that follows. And so ⁓ you've got this defense fund set aside.

And so it's, like I said earlier, it's not really an insurance product. It's more or less a cooperative of members, Like-minded people who want to support each other. What I patterned this after is the homeschool network. There was an association I came on years ago where homeschoolers were being harassed by their local departments of education. So they lumped together to fight that.

and that's what I want to do. Is that type of network. We weren't homeschooling, but I this would work okay. I'm familiar with this sort of model for churches as well, apparently. There are some church organizations that provide this sort of legal defense for church networks of churches. I love that sort of model. So not only is it not insurance, in what other ways is the network different from many of its

editors.

We don't have much of an outreach. this is about as great of an outreach as we ever do. Going on a podcast now and then. So we don't spend a million dollars a year on advertising, marketing, giving giveaways. There's one part of the industry that has to be giving you something in order to entice you to become a member.

Never had a dual wave. So you build your membership organically, more organically than most other product offerings. But there are also differences. Some products won't help with bonds. Some won't let you choose your attorney. Some want reimbursement if you're convicted at trial. Some won't help with appeal. Can you talk through some of those issues and what the network provides?

Many of the companies out there have underwriters, insurance underwriters. And so those underwriters, in an attempt to reduce their financial liability, make all kinds of provisions in the contracts, this is what we will do, this is what we will do. We won't do this, we won't do this, we won't do this. And so, ⁓ didn't want to get involved with that at all. And I'm pretty plain spoken. We don't even have a contract for people to sign.

We just explained, listen, we will pay for your legal defense, assuming it was a reasonable use of force and self-defense. That's our contract. You know, don't have a bunch of crap to go through and there's no exclusions. That's what it'd be. But you do have a process, right? And you have a bunch of information on your website, which we'll get to here in a little bit. But if a member is involved in a self-defense incident, what does the process look like for them? Okay, let's say...

You remember you got involved in a software incident and he says, hell, I better call the police and I'm waiting for the police to show up. Maybe I should call ACLDN. So you call ACLDN and this phone right here will ring. I've got it on me 24 seven 365, even Christmas day. And we'll pick it up. If I'm not available, if I'm out on the lake fishing, maybe ⁓ then my wife will pick it up.

and we'll start your legal defense going. We'll find out a little bit about the case, ⁓ whether active self-defense, yeah, okay, well don't tell me all the details, because that's discoverable information, but as long as it wasn't, as long as you didn't start the issue, you weren't the initial aggressor right now, this happened in my home, you know, so okay, fine, well just sit tight, and ⁓ do you have an attorney to call? Yes or no, if not, then I will strike.

get to work finding you a good local attorney. And we do that. Typically, we'll have an attorney and a member hooked up within about eight hours, maybe a lot less. One of our members' situation happened in Austin, Texas, where we had the attorney on his front lawn giving an interview to the press.

half an hour of the incident. wow. police is shown inside investigating. So we just happened to have a good local attorney. We called it up. Yeah, I'm free right now. Here's the address. Go, you know. So we had legal representation immediately and you have a network of affiliate attorneys. I'm one of the affiliate attorneys. My father Mike is also an affiliate, but you have that network nationwide, right? And one thing that you do that's unique is you also have.

an attorney question of month that you do where your affiliate attorneys answer questions that members have about self-defense related issues. in addition, we were talking about educational resources earlier. ⁓ That's another excellent resource. ⁓ these are not, the affiliate attorneys are not exclusive. The members don't have to choose from an affiliate, correct? They can choose their own lawyer if they'd like and the network won't prohibit that.

I set this up for what I wanted in a program. I want to be able to use my own attorney. I don't want to be forced with any attorney. I want the ability to choose my own. And that's worked out very well for our members. A lot of times we'll recommend an attorney, but you don't have to use them. And ⁓ we'll recommend one, or if you've got your own favorite attorney, or if you don't like your attorney, begin with.

We change. We had one member that changed. I'm just like, along with this guy. Okay, let's find a new one. And we're in a chair. There you go. So they call the police if they're involved in the incident. And then at some point they call you and you get them looked up with an attorney. And then there may be a need for experts. There may be a need for depositions. There may be a need for various discovery.

tools, ⁓ bail, those sorts of things. Does the network help assist with that process? Yeah, but there's one step in between there. Okay. That's a review of the facts of the incident to make sure that we're not ⁓ defending really bad guys. And who does that review? I start out the process. I'll review the material that I know and if I have questions about it, then I'll bring in any number of our advisory board members.

to look at the evidence too. We did that in one case where they gave me their input and it was different than what I thought. Oh, interesting. And so we hadn't funded that legal defense. But I want to have that checks and balances to make sure that the review was good, honest, and we're going to always err on the side of the member though.

And this advisory board is not just a board composed of just general people from the population, What sorts of people are on the board? One of the things that I was fortunate is that in my other days as a trainer, I was able to work with, become friends with many of the top trainers in the country. Masadi Uub is the number one name. John Farnham is right there. Tom Givens is there. These guys that...

that are really the top trainers around. And I asked them, hey, told them about the system, told them about what I was trying to accomplish. Would you like to come on the advisory board and give me a hand? me your, lend me your credibility, if you say, you know, because these people are known throughout the country. And they of course recommend us to their students. And we get that very well trained students, not necessarily the students that will fill out a.

membership card with the hopes of giving a free case of ammo. Well, speaking of, they recommend the network to their students. That's how I learned about the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network. I received this brochure, this booklet, ⁓ back in 2011 or 2012. It looked different at that time, but it's called What Every Gun Owner Needs to Know About Self-Defense Law. And this is a great digest of

the fundamental principles of self-defense. And I received this booklet actually from Tiger McKee, who was the instructor at Shoot Right Firearms Academy in Alabama. And he's unfortunately since passed, but he was at the time hosting Masada You for his MAG-20 course. And I wasn't at the MAG-20 course. I was actually just at a handgun course with Tiger McKee, but he passed these out in every one of his classes.

And so that's how I learned about the network. suspect that's how many people initially learned about the network. know, it's an interesting booklet because I wrote that without being an attorney. I did have my adjudged doctor by then, but I wrote it basically in layman's terms through in a few legal phrases so the attorneys weren't totally disgusted that it didn't have that in it. But we've had a lot of attorneys say, listen, I give this book that to all of our

all my clients, anybody that has a question about gun stuff, I give them this. And we've supplied this booklet to instructors, to gun shops. We've got over a half a million of them out there in circulation. wow. And nobody's ever came back and says, I disagree with page 43 of this book. That's pretty cool. Yeah, we hand them out, we're instructors as well, we hand them out in all of our classes.

We've been doing that for over a decade now, I don't know how many of our students have joined, I know a fair number have, and I've never heard a single complaint about the network. Yeah, we got all the attorneys that use the book, and that's where I figured I would get some pushback, because, Marty, you're wrong at this point. You're wrong at this point, but I guess my...

law school education did me okay. Yeah, exactly. Well, there are very few people with your background who have the significant experience as a law enforcement officer and then also have the legal education through law school. I haven't met very many people like you in that regard. So let me ask you, in your law school, how much time did you spend on self-defense law? We probably read one case about it in criminal law. So almost none.

I had 90 minutes. We had one class on self-defense, 90 minutes, but half of that was wrong. The professor didn't even understand all the concepts. And so maybe that's why I've gotten away with it, because the attorneys really don't understand self-defense law unless they do their studying. I can totally relate. My professor was ⁓ competent, did not get anything wrong, but did not capture...

all of the nuance that's involved in a self-defense case. I mean, we read one case and, you know, it was not, did not capture all of the information, not even close to all of the information that's in this booklet, which you can see is not a huge booklet, but contains a lot of the essential information that you need to know and that you wouldn't even learn, as you say, and not get attested to in law school. So ⁓ I want to go back. You mentioned earlier that this was inspired by

homeschooling program that you'd seen. Was it also, did you have, did you see this as a problem in your career as a law enforcement officer where innocent people got log jammed in the criminal justice system or is it just a problem that you anticipated might come up and that people might I didn't see it in my law enforcement career because frankly there's not that many people get in self-defense shootings.

Most of those are adjudicated just fine. But what really happened was I started to see him nationwide. The George Zimmerman case was a prime example. There other cases. Plus, I had a close relationship with Masada Yu by then. I started working with Mass in 1990. And I've talked with him ever since. And he would tell me about cases that he was involved with as an extra witness where a person used force.

in self-defense and I realized there's a lot more of these that go on that we don't hear about. And so out of that I said, you know, there's gotta be some way that people could protect themselves against that unmeritorious prosecution or the civil lawsuit. Well, and you're right, these are very rare, but the consequences if it does happen are massive. And that's where the network steps in because you may have, if it's a

murder charge, may have ⁓ no bail or very hot bail amount. You may have ⁓ experts that you need that cost a lot of money, attorneys that cost a lot of money. These things can really stack up and bankrupt somebody if they don't have the support of a network like the ACP. Yeah, we had one pepper spray case. It was in, I think Massachusetts. And in that case,

a guy rightfully is pepper sprayed an attacker, but he was prosecuted. And we hired, in my opinion, one of the best experts in the country, Manny Capelson, who was also on our advisory board. And he charged like $25,000 to do a full, complete workup on the legalities of use of pepper spray. And Manny's the kind of guy, he took the can of pepper spray.

the type that was used and he put on camera him getting pepper sprayed so he could talk to what he's feeling talk to how that is working explain that this is not a dangerous weapon because that's what he was our guy was being prosecuted for was a a use of a dangerous weapon well this isn't dangerous it's effective but it wasn't dangerous weapon yeah it causes some pain but no long-term health consequences right right so ⁓

Yeah. And that's addressing that extra witness concept. Typically, an extra witness case in a shooting will probably run 10 to 20,000, if not a lot more. So just that expense alone can be devastating to many people, right? So I want to get back to the process a little bit. You mentioned there's the review.

you conduct the review, if you're uncertain, you may engage with the advisory board to assist with that review. Once you've made that review and you've determined we believe this was a lawful act of self-defense, then the network steps in and assists the member. Yeah, typically we step in really at the first phone call. Yeah. You know, I need to get an attorney on board who has the ability to get into the police records and find out what actually happened.

And so we'll go ahead and hire an attorney so they can get a hold of the police reports. If need to, they can send out an investigator immediately. And that gives us the information for the review. But you're going to get assistance a heck of a lot sooner than that. Okay. Okay. But then, so when you make the review, that's when you are basically committing to proceed with further assistance in the case? Okay. Yeah.

And then at that point... We never stopped anybody halfway between. Right. We never said no, you know, after further review. Yeah. Or after you've made the, the review later in the case said, like you say, backed out for some reason. No, we've never done that. Yeah. So, will the network also assist with appeal if that becomes an issue in the case? Yeah. But there's a caveat there. There's got to be a reasonable chance of the appeal being successful.

First of all, you just can't appeal because you don't like the outcome of the jury verdict. You have to have an appealable point or two in the case where the judge got the law wrong or did something that ⁓ could be overturned. And so we're going to look at the trial and say, OK, is there a good basis for an appeal here? If so, then we'll go ahead and fund that appeal too.

Or maybe I can imagine a circumstance where somebody's charged with, I don't know, attempted murder, and maybe they weren't convicted of that, but they're convicted of criminal recklessness, some lesser charge. There might nevertheless still be an appeal there that may be worthwhile depending on the specific facts. So, okay, well, so we've talked about the booklet. I wanna pull up the website. Are there any other...

resources that people should look to that are available from the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network? Over here is the journal. Share the screen. Yeah, they can't show me pointing. Yeah. But go ahead and buff up the journal there. And that goes back for 17 years. There's 17 years of articles, editorials, interviews of the best in the business in there.

And that's a fascinating read in itself. That could be probably a three volume book set now. And that's a great resource. That's a great resource. You also give new members a catalog of videos, right? Right. Now we're sending them out on thumb drive. It used to be a DVD. Now it's on a thumb drive. But also members can just access them directly to the website and download them.

And that's what goes through your legal rights and educates you as to why you may have needed to use force of self-defense. One of the most critical aspects of the use of force case is explaining why you felt that your life was in danger or why you were about to be attacked. And that goes into the pre-attack indicators, pre-assaultive cues, and...

And we've dealt heavily into that in our educational package. But you've got to know that ahead of time. You can't go up afterwards and say, well, I think you did this, I think you did this, and then have some experts say, I know that you did that. You've to know it yourself. You also have a YouTube channel, which I know you put out some excellent content there. I will say lots of organizations are putting out YouTube content with some good content. But I haven't found anything

better in terms of educational content on video than what you provide on that thumb drive or used to be DVD set in one place. It's just more comprehensive than just about anything else you can get. I really encourage people to, if you become a member, definitely watch those videos. Do you have a sense for how many of the members actually watch them? I don't, I'm not, There's no way to track that obviously. I'm old. Okay. Well, ⁓

If people have questions about how to become a member or want to know some additional information about before they become members, I pulled up the Contact Us page, which has your mailing address and the phone number. Is that the best way to get in touch with the network? Yeah, yeah, we're there 24, or not 24-7, but Monday through Friday, yeah, like eight to six. And we'll answer questions, but read through the...

Read through the website first and then make any notes on questions you have because it's pretty inefficient to just call up and say, me about the network. There's so much to it. And you've got it. It's searchable website. So if you have a specific question, chances are you can find it with a quick search on the website. But don't be disappointed when you don't have 14,000 pop-ups and it entertains you.

You know, that's right. That's right. This has got the same The same gosh, what's the word I'm looking for? Personality. Yeah, as me do they I'm not very entertaining, know, I do know if you go on YouTube You don't see me say shocking the new case right? Breaking news, right? Everything is not breaking them. Right? Yeah, so Yeah, it's pretty laid-back pretty easy to manipulate. Yeah. Yeah. Well

As you say, I don't even need my ad blocker on when I visit your website. It's clean. It's not lots of things flashing at you, but it has tons of information. Marty, I really appreciate you joining the Forge of Freedom podcast. I appreciate all the work that you do with the ACLDN and Gila as well, your wife. Would you say a little bit about what her role is at the network? She's instrumental obviously in ⁓ running the day-to-day operations there. Yeah, my wife Gila Hayes is tremendous as far as

running the day-to-day operations of the network. Without her, the network wouldn't exist. It was my idea, and I'm happy to continue to lead it, but she does the main work, and she supervises our staff and employees, and nothing more I say. She's the boss. Fantastic. I know you've got some other great team members as well, so ⁓ great people. ⁓

Like I said, I've never heard a single complaint from the people who have joined the network. thanks again, Marty. I appreciate your time. If you do, I want to know about I will let you know. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks again, Marty. You're welcome. Really appreciate it. And thanks, everybody, for tuning in.