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never take legal advice from law enforcement, its not their job to interpret the law just enforce it....
Boom. I'm a huge fan of our LEOs, best man at my wedding is a career man, thank God we have them. However, we don't send lawyers to make felony arrests, and as a general rule it's not prudent to seek legal advice from law enforcement officers solely on the basis that they are law enforcement officers.
I would also caution that simply because someone is an attorney doesn't mean they know anything at all about a particular area of the law, and this is particularly true of use-of-force law. In my three years of law school we didn't spend three minutes on self-defense. After being admitted to the bar, unless a lawyer is doing criminal defense work he has no professional need to know any more about self-defense law than does a dentist. Even if he DOES practice criminal defense, 99% of a criminal defense attorney's clients are criminals, and their narratives of self-defense tend to differ substantially from claims of self-defense by non-criminals.
Of course there ARE law enforcement officers who DO know use-of-force law very well, as there ARE some attorneys who know this area of the law well, and there ARE firearms instructors who possess a similar high level of understanding of this area of the law. But in ALL those cases it's because those individuals MADE A DELIBERATE AND EXCEPTIONAL EFFORT to correctly understand use-of-force law in their jurisdiction. They didn't merely magically acquire this expertise simply because they became an LEO, a lawyer, or a firearms instructor.
Incidentally, the original post of this thread by Hal Jordan is an EXCELLENT example of the kind of effort that leads to a high level of solid expertise in use-of-force law. Hal didn't merely rely on someone's opinion of the law, he went and LOOKED AT THE ACTUAL LAW. Good show.
It's for exactly that reason that all our state-specific Self Defense Law Seminars are heavily illustrated with the relevant statutes, jury instructions, and case law of the jurisdiction we're covering--so that our students know the law is as we say it is NOT MERELY because WE'RE saying it, but because we're showing them the ACTUAL LAW.