Good News in Sacramento? Self-Defense Bill Gains Ground

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]A little bit of good news from the California legislature this year as Assembly Bill 2584 looks to place some safeguards in the California legislature's other side attempting to remove our rights to self-defense. Let's talk about it.

[00:00:17]>> [music] [music] >> Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel today. This of course is CRPA TV where we talk about litigation, legislation, and Second Amendment programs all across the state of California. And today we are hitting the legislation again, and it's a good piece of legislation.

[00:00:39]Uh if you weren't aware, we kind of have an equal amount of good and bad legislation in Sacramento this year for the Second Amendment community.

[00:00:47]Definitely something to be proud about that change has been made. Hopefully we can keep it going forward as opposed to years past with so many more bad pieces of legislation than good. But this one, uh Assembly Bill 2584, uh to walk us through that today, we have brought back the legislative director for CRPA. He's also host of the Firing Line Radio. You can catch him on AM 590 The Answer every Saturday at 1:00 p.m. That is Rick Travis. Rick, thanks for being on with us today.

[00:01:13]>> Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So let's just dive right on into this.

[00:01:16]Jacob, if you can pull it up on the screen, let's take a look at the legislative digest and read about this bill. It reads like this. This bill, the Preemptive Self-Defense Act of 2026, would clarify that a party who reasonably perceives an imminent threat of bodily harm may make lawful resistance to the commission of a public offense, and that the resistance authorized is required to be proportional to the reasonably perceivable threat, and this and to cease when the threat is no longer present. The bill would prohibit a party's background, training, and professional fighting skills from being taken into account when determining whether a party has taken reasonable defensive action. So, uh Rick, I guess the first thing that comes to my mind, which I I think would be a good idea for you to explain, is Assembly Bill 1333 from last year. Uh I guess the the loaded question is uh what was Assembly 13 Assembly Bill 1333 from last year? And I mean, do do we see this legislation as kind of a safeguard?

[00:02:15]I know that we beat back 1333 from last year. Does this end up getting created as a safeguard to potentially another bill like that in the future? Yes and no. Um a little bit about 1333, but before I even go into 1333, the debate here in California, and it's not unique to California, Kevin. This is going on in many states, both blue and red, across the country. It has to do with um members of both parties, too. It's it's it's kind of interesting have had almost an uh I don't know what you want to call it, an adverse reaction to some strong examples where people used self-defense, be hands, knives, firearms, etc. Um and other people have been like, oh, maybe that's too much, maybe it's not enough.

[00:03:01]It's also there've been several major cases where you know, people took in, oh, you went and took this class or that class, and uh as a result, you are more aggressive because you took those classes. And so, uh what happened with Assembly Bill 1333 put up by Rick Zbur early in the 2025 uh set part of the session, was designed to roll us back to the point of and I'll just use me as an example, now, someone comes to to beat up my grandson who's all of five, and I was supposed to under his bill, run.

[00:03:38]Not defend my grandson, because doing so was like I I was being overly aggressive. And I think if you just look at the common sense of anybody in any neighborhood watching a grandfather capable of saving their grandchild not saving a grandchild, there would be some serious social interactions after the event. Um it's just that's just expected to be able to do so. So that was going way, way too far. We had great national outcries over this bill pushed back. At the same time, um we had Heath Flora, Assembly member here in California, who had put up a bill that never really populated or moved forward last session.

[00:04:18]And this is that bill now being reintroduced, and that is the Self-Defense Act. And here's why this is this Preemptive Self-Defense Act is so important. Uh Kevin, you can you know, I can just use myself. I took martial arts training when I was like a kid. Okay, so maybe there's muscle memory in that comes in. That doesn't mean I took that to ever hurt anybody. I took that to learn how to defend myself in elementary school and junior high school. You know, I was in the military decades ago.

[00:04:48]I have muscle memory. Maybe some of that training comes back in a critical thing.

[00:04:52]That shouldn't be held against me.

[00:04:53]That's just stuff I picked up. There's other people and this this clarifies none of that can be used against you in a court of law. It can't be used to paint you into being the criminal or the aggressor. We've got to realize this is preemptive self-defense, meaning there's an outside actor who's attacking you.

[00:05:13]And this is designed to say, you don't get to in a courtroom try to turn the victim into the aggressor. The aggressor, being the criminal, stays the criminal, and the victim stays the victim. And this is incredibly important because a lot of times people forget in California, we have a two-tier justice system. We have a tier that's called the criminal tier. And so, yeah, I find that 99% of the cases, um depending on the county you're in, some counties that that number falls much lower, um primarily blue ones, where, you know, DAs are like, no, we're not going to prosecute this. But then there's the civil side, Kevin. And civil side, we've seen some crazy cases develop where people are like, yeah, but, you know, he did this and he did that, or he wore a T-shirt that said this or that, and here's a picture of him 3 years ago. He was looking to hurt my my belly or my whoever.

[00:06:08]This eliminates that. Well, I I definitely want to get into the courtroom side of this. But uh Rick, where's your self-control, man? You you have this training, and and that's fine.

[00:06:18]Uh it seems it seems okay that you don't want it to be used against you. But where exactly is your self-control? We see it in the movies all the time. Shoot the guy in the leg. Shoot the pistol out of his hand. It seems like the entire idea around uh this legislation is proportional force. Can you tell me why that's not exactly applicable in the moment when you're in a self-defense situation?

[00:06:42]>> Unfortunately, I have responded multiple times um when I was working in in emergency management to cases where analysis paralysis had impacted the victim and often cost them their lives. You know, times where people were in their kitchen and they're looking around at stuff going, can I use that? Can I not? Well, you know what? The person that came in in the afternoon, in the middle of the night, early in the morning, um they're already most of the time jacked up on drugs, caffeine, energy drinks, whatever. They have a plan. They are moving. They are thinking. You've been completely caught off guard. You are hoping your muscle memory comes into play to defend yourself and those around you. And if you all of a sudden have to stop and go, well, shoot, can I do that? Or am I going to lose my home? Or am I going to game over. You're done.

[00:07:31]This is not the movies where time distills and you you are able to run 25 options. That makes for great movies.

[00:07:39]That doesn't happen in real life.

[00:07:41]You know, this whole concept of, oh, do I technically move here? No, I technically move there. No, because if I move there, he'll do that doesn't happen in real life. In real life, you don't even have seconds, plural. You have less than a second to make a decision.

[00:07:55]And and then execute it.

[00:07:58]And so, this is designed to to remove that. It's also designed to after the math, look, you know, nobody's fist pumping, I I beat up the the bad criminal, or I hurt the bad criminal, or in the worst-case scenarios had to take someone's life.

[00:08:12]Those people are in shock afterwards.

[00:08:15]They're they're sick at their stomachs, often vomiting, and and other things. Um there's a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder, counseling that goes on post-event. There's changes of opinion of the people that they live near. There is a lot that's placed on these. The last thing we should be doing is, oh, Kevin, did you hit him that hard because you took martial arts when you were 11?

[00:08:36]>> Right. And now you're 40?

[00:08:38]You know, or, oh, did your husband teach you to do that? Or did you learn this in a class that you went to with a bunch of women? Oh, that's kind of aggressive cuz not every woman goes to that class. That should never be part of the equation.

[00:08:50]Yeah, and it it does seem a little bit silly uh when you're talking about the entire how the entire purpose of training is to create muscle memory so that you can defend yourself. This kind of flies in the face of that by telling you the only action that you can take has to be proportional to what has been done to you, which also takes out of the equation intent. Uh do you expect me to be a mind reader? Like, so far, uh this person has only tried to hit me. Does that mean that his intent is not to kill me? That's kind of hard in in those split seconds to uh make those sorts of determinations. So, I mean, this this kind of legislation, you know, which again, this bill is safeguarding against, uh ends up being really bad because it doesn't take a lot of those things into consideration. So, uh good on this bill for trying to clarify one of those things. Really, the only other question that I have for you, Rick, is, can you kind of differentiate the real world and these self-defense situations from that of a courtroom? Because if there's one thing that I've learned working here uh at CRPA, is that courtrooms look and and the discussions that happen in court rooms look very different than everywhere else outside of a courtroom. So, when you have these self-defense situations and then you're in the aftermath and you're going through the hearings where they're talking about how your actions may or may not have been proportional, how different are those two situations?

[00:10:14]Horrifically different. And I can give you an example. Um uh a woman in her uh early 30s, when she was in college, her roommate um was unfortunately sexually assaulted and left for dead. Survived at that obviously had a trauma on the other two women that lived in that dorm with her.

[00:10:34]Um one of them being this individual.

[00:10:35]This individual um did not go to any kind of training, but then 4 years later uh another person in her life was assaulted. Um that time not sexually, but out in a parking lot during Christmas. And so, she decided she heard about a class that was there to teach women like how to identify threats, how to know what to do, and gave them some very rudimentary I mean, it was like a 4-hour class, Kevin. This was not like I went to training for months on end.

[00:11:05]Uh unfortunately for her, within 6 months of taking that class, she was involved in a sexual assault against her.

[00:11:13]She used a couple of the tactics in that. Law enforcement was like, "Thank God she's she she stopped herself from a not going terribly wrong, but she still had injuries. She still had psychological damage done because that's what happens when you're attacked that way."

[00:11:29]It ends up in a courtroom and the defendant's uh attorney went after her and tried to paint her as, "Well, isn't it true Isn't it true that the reason you took this class is because you you wanted to be this this badass and you want to be able to do this and you want to be able to do that." And try to take things that she had said on social media like, "I wouldn't put up with that." And they tried to take and make this picture of her as looking for the fight.

[00:11:55]Trying to provoke this very thing so she could None of that was true, but what it did do to her is it added a whole new layer of abuse to a person that was a victim that had every right to defend themselves. And this is the real-world sickness that goes on in courtrooms. And so, you know, and her person had not only struck her he was I think a third or fourth time offender by the time he got to her. So, I don't want this picture to be painted Well, maybe this was the first time it was a mis- No, no misunderstanding. This person had already been convicted, had done time, and was out and doing it again. And that's a separate discussion, but Kevin, [clears throat] yeah, the courtroom can be very, very brutal and very, very not in favor of the victim. In this case, if you're defending yourself, you are the victim. You shouldn't have a victim mentality. You should by all means fight to win at all times until your last breath.

[00:12:53]But I don't want people taking out they often do in courtrooms and start to say, "Well, see what Rick just said? That means he's not the victim. He's the aggressor." No, I'm saying if you're being attacked, you have to fight with everything that's left in you to win the day because otherwise, the outcome for you and your family and friends is not good. And you should not be demonized for it in a courtroom, which is why we support this legislation. It's a good piece of legislation. It's providing safeguards so that you cannot not be demonized in a courtroom if you do have to defend yourself and have some sort of uh training prior to that. Uh but Rick, I I know you're a busy guy. I want to thank you very much for coming on and walking us through this. Looking forward to the next one. Thanks for being with us. Thank you. Absolutely. And guys, as always, please be sure to like, share, and subscribe to these videos. Drop a comment down in the comment section below. These campaigns for uh for the one-click politics is up on the CRPA website. If you want to let your legislator know that you support this bill, go ahead and visit the website, send off your support letter today. It all helps, guys. Thanks again. We'll see you on the next one.