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June 1, 2025 111 mins
Primary & Secondary ModCast

The panel discusses the common trend of using information that doesn't apply to critical decisions. We discussed misconceptions, ammo selection, mindsets, and training. This episode ties together many of our previous discussions.

Host: Matt Landfair

Panel:
Chris Baker
Chris Cypert

Episode sponsors:
Lucky Gunner - https://www.luckygunner.com/
Overwatch Precision - https://www.overwatchprecision.com
Phlster - https://www.phlsterholsters.com/​
Primary Arms - https://www.primaryarms.com/
Walther Arms - https://www.waltherarms.com/

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
And supposedly it's live. Supposedly everyone matt Land failure with
primary and secondary Welcome to moodcast. The topic, the topic
is confusing. The topic is confusing. I just got to say,
because so many people talk about this whole finding your
mission and go and mission drives the gear. But what

(00:24):
is your mission? Are you setting yourself up for failure?
Are you setting yourself up for a mission that doesn't
necessarily apply to you? So I thought, you know what,
Chris and I, we get to talk to some cool people,
We get to see some cool stuff, we get to
see some data sets. I thought this would be kind
of fun to talk about. We might have a couple
of people jumping in a little later. My background's in

(00:48):
law enforcement. My background in law enforcement has something to
do with this as well. But this is actually topic
I've been wanting to have, I wanted to discuss for
a while. I'll get a little bit more into the
background as to why and all that kind of stuff.
But Chris background clearly a table or a desk, And yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
My background has nothing to do with this. Look, this
is this is my other life. This is all my
art crap. Like this is I and we legos over here,
like I'm not. I'm not this like self defense dude.
That came later in life, and I just kind of
tacked it onto the other stuff. So yea, For those

(01:34):
who don't know, I'm Chris Baker and I work for
Lucky Gunner dot com and we do we'd an amo
retailer and I do the content for Lucky Gunner. Most
that's on YouTube. You can also find it on our website.
But yeah, I got into this kind of I kind
of fell into it, man, Like. It wasn't It wasn't

(01:55):
something I ever set out to do. I was kind
of in between jobs and I was doing some gun
stuff on the side, and I was I had kind
of dived in head first and had started like teaching
concealed carry classes back in North Carolina where I lived
at the time, and I was doing I had found

(02:16):
Todd Green's blog, and by the grace of God, I
found Todd Green's blog. Like that that more than anything,
saved me a lot of trouble, and that kind of
got me into the sort of interested in the kind
of performance handgun and and more like serious defense side

(02:37):
of it. I started doing some training with some really
good people starting with like some that Todd was recommending
on his blog at the time, and that kind of
one thing led to another, and next thing, I know,
I'm doing these videos for Lucky Gunner for like promoting
specific Ammo products. And then they gave me a full

(02:58):
time position. And that was right at the beginning of
let's see, right after Sandy Hook, so no one needed
to try to sell Ammo at that time. There wasn't
any and so that was right when I started full time,
so they didn't need me to make videos about Ammo.
And so I'm like, well, I've got to do something

(03:20):
to justify having a job. So I started a blog
and everyone was like, oh, yeah, that's actually good. I
why don't you go ahead and do that? And that
spun off into the to the YouTube stuff and I said, well, guys,
if I'm going to be talking about this stuff, I
need to know what I'm talking about, So will you
let me do some training? And they were totally behind that.
So I've done you know, upwards of eight nine hundred

(03:44):
hours of professional fire arms training since then, and basically
just kind of take nuggets here and there, share them
on the channel. And also, you know, we do a
lot of gear stuff that's just kind of fun. And
you know, lately last years, I've kind of got more
into the just sort of recreational fun shooting side of things.

(04:05):
That's kind of what turns me on right now. But
there's still plenty of the ballistic gel testing and looking
at empirical data and trying to figure out like these
these like pithy sayings that we throw around, like do
they really mean what we think they mean? And in
that I've been influenced hugely. I have to give credit

(04:25):
right up front to Claude Warner because he's not afraid
to just like say, the Emperor has no clothes, and yeah,
I think he's been influential on a lot of a
lot of people in our sphere.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Very very now, you said, and the slight tangent bringing
up something that you said earlier. What you have behind you,
not the legos but the art part.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah. So I am an art school dropout. Essentially. I
started college as an art major and that's what I
did growing up, was I just drawing constantly, like I
was convinced that was going to be my thing. And
then I get to college where someone is making me
do it and it's like I hated it, like it
just I saw the ugly side of it when you

(05:13):
have to do the thing you love and you don't
really want to. That's why I'm doing. Like you know,
I've kind of taken some weird turns with the content
because you know, I know what happens when your passion
becomes your job, and so I'm like, Okay, I have
to do what needs to be done to make this
fun for me still, because you know, it can get

(05:33):
kind of to be kind of a slug sometimes if
you're doing just the same stuff over and over. So
that's what happened with the art thing. And then I
didn't do any for like twenty years, and then I
kind of picked it back up a few years ago.
So I've been doing some drawing and I've kind of
tried to get Instagram thing going, but I'm not very
good at it. So maybe maybe check it out and

(05:54):
a year from now and he'll be some cool stuff
on there.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah. Yeah. One of the things also that stuck out
with me with what you said was how you fell
into this. A lot of my interactions with people on
the internet when it comes to defensive things, and I
don't mean, I don't mean the prominent instructors, not the
Chuck Haggard's or the Pat Max or anyone like that,
but the end users. There's so much of their personality

(06:19):
and so much of their identity that's tied into this
whole thing. I was thinking the other day about, oh,
five ten years ago, how many people had so much
of their identity tied to a Holster or a brand
of Holster. And I think that's I think a lot
of the community's kind of gone away with that or
gotten away from it to a point. But what you

(06:41):
said about how you fell into it made me think
about how so many people are seeking it and this
is this is this is their priority, and this is
my identity where I've never gotten that vibe or that
whatever from you. Where this is a job. It's important
to know things, it's important to be nowible and things.
But this is not this is this is not my entirety,

(07:04):
this is not my existence. Yeah, and it's and I
and I think that's I think that's something that's really
good to pay attention to. If we look at those
those those instructors that we respect a lot of them,
most of them, they don't have this is not there.
They don't have a persona. They're just who they are.
And Karen, a gun isn't their life. It's just a
facinat of it, right.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
And and even if even if all of your your
hobbies and interests are somehow tied to this stuff, like
that's okay, Like you can still be you know, like
Ian McCollum is not thinking about the best hollow point
to carry all the time like he is. He's a historian,

(07:46):
you know, he like he he likes guns. That might
be his only thing. I don't know Ian personally, but
he clearly has a broad interest within the firearms world,
and that has kind of taken him down different paths.
And I think if you're only if you're focused only
on the just defense, how can I survive kind of thing?

(08:08):
Like it's it's exhausting, man, Like it gets it gets
really old, and I think you got to either have
some other stuff going on or just broaden your horizons
within within the shooting. And you know, like I love
looking at like the historical stuff in terms of I'm

(08:29):
really interested in, like the guns that we have now,
where did they come from? Why do we have them?
I'm really interested in like twentieth century police culture and
how that impacted the guns that were carried and became
pervasive in culture, Like does that have anything to do
with self defense kind of? And there's things we can
learn there, but that's not why I'm interested. I just

(08:50):
like it, Like I mean, I think there's there should
be more of just like just being okay with like
we're doing this because we like it, not just because
it's Like, if we're solely focused on the life saving
aspect of it would probably look a lot different. We
probably taking a lot more medical classes, yes, a.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
Lot of it should probably been a lot better shape,
and communication classes exactly.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Exactly the whole well rounded thing. But like it's okay
to just take a carving class because you like it,
Like it's not don't have to convince yourself I'm doing
this because it's what's going to keep me alive, because's
probably not what's going to keep you alive. It's okay
to do it just because it's fun, it's enjoyable. It
may have some side, It might save your life someday,
but it's probably not going to be the thing it does.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
So most of the guns I have behind me right now,
I just enjoy them. That's why I have them. There
are a couple that I've no, actually, there's nothing behind
me right now. That's an issued gun that's in the
other room. But no, it's I enjoy these.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
And just like, what is that one right right above
your head? The tiny one.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
It's a not the North American Arms, it's the other guy.
It's the Sea Camp Sea Camp. Yeah. And thirty two nice. Yeah,
it is way too small for my hands.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
As a matter of fact, of all the guns, if
I were to sell one, that probably would be the
first one I'm going to sell. But that's beside the point. Yeah,
enjoying them, and then and having historic things and getting
to know and understanding better, like and I have a
and for some reason the Webley gets brought up all
the time, a cool piece of history. But I remember

(10:29):
having a conversation with barg Freeborn a bunch of years ago,
and we were talking about the importance of knowing what
our roles are and me as I'm a parent, I'm
a husband, and these these are more important than a
lot of other things. And unfortunately, with many the prioritization
is with these tangible things or the status which it

(10:51):
really isn't status. It might be status in your head,
but in the grand scheme of things, because I'm guilty
of it, not putting family first when I should have. Absolutely,
I'm absolutely guilty of that, and I'm sure others can
look back and see the same. But to stay grounded in, Okay,
what's real and when we start doing that assessment. Okay,

(11:16):
we have that phrase, mission drives the gear, mission drives.
Mission is the thing that's driving all of us. What
exactly is our mission? So before we started, I brought
up an example as a police officer, I am in uniform,
I have body armor on, I have a firearm, all
kinds of additional things tasers, baton, I have a radio

(11:40):
vehicle that's marked. I have backup if I need it.
The role that I play as a police officer is
very different than the role that I play when I'm
off duty. The expectation, the missions are so different. So
to me, that would make me think so that my
mission is it's not one set universal thing. My mission varies.

(12:04):
My mission varies as to okay, what is my exact
role right now? So right now my mission is I'm
going to have this discussion. We're going to discuss this
in twelve hours. My mission is I'm getting up, getting
ready for work, and going to work, and then I'm
going to go respond to incidents when I'm off. My
mission is okay, I'm a parent looking over kids, making
sure they eat all that kind of stuff. Unfortunately, though

(12:27):
I've seen there are a lot of people that determine
what their mission is and their mission is not quite right.
And I thought it would be nice to discuss how
do we determine what that mission is because I'm sure
we can think of people that think that their mission
is they're on track with the Navy Seals? Well is
that accurate? And it's kind of a down or to

(12:48):
bring stuff up, stuff like this up. But in reality,
me as as the parent, I am also a bodyguard
for my family. I need to look out for their
well being. If we go into if we go to
everyone's favorite place Walmart, and I run into someone or
I see someone that I know that person is a problem.
Am I going to all of a sudden go and

(13:09):
confront that person or do I strategically retreat and tell
people I'm with we probably want to go to a
different store, or depending on my relationship with a person.
Keep it in the back of my mind. I'm not
worried about this. So what are your thoughts? How how
have you determined what your mission is and how have
you equipped yourself with that mission?

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah? Uh, those are good questions. It's I think it
changes for private citizen just like it does for law enforcement.
It changes with what you're doing, who you're within, to
a huge degree, what phase of life you're in. Yeah,

(13:53):
and I don't just mean the obvious stuff like parent
versus not parent, single versus married, whatever. I view the
world differently now than when I was in my twenties.
I do things, I engage in different activity activities like

(14:14):
I don't. I mean, my kids are a little older now,
they're younger, teenage, teenage years, but I still don't. I mean,
we don't go anywhere after dark, like hardly ever. Like
it's just it occurred to me while I was thinking
about night sights and stuff like that. I was like, Okay, Manue,
when was the last time I went somewhere after dark?

(14:36):
And I had to really think about it. And it's
not that it ever happens. It's just that like it happened,
like you know, twenty years ago, that was my life.
My life happened at night in the dark. I was
grown up with friends constantly, and now it's just like nighttime.
I'm tired, man, I don't want to go anywhere at night.
And it's not that I'm not prepared for that. I'm

(15:00):
working on a video right now, and I mentioned something
in there about laser grips and how much I like
laser grips. The reason I like laser grips is because
of an incident when I was hiking, and I was
hiking at night, and I came across some wild hogs,
and I was really glad at the time that I
had laser on my revolver. But it wouldn't occur to
me to need it elsewhere because I just don't go

(15:22):
anywhere after dark most of the time. And like someone
in their twenties would look at that and say, like,
what is wrong with you? Like that's when we do things,
But it's you know, different stages of life. You know,
like if you're one of the people my parents age
and you eat dinner at like five o'clock, you're still
probably not going out after dark, even if you are
going out, So you know, like stuff like that and

(15:45):
then you know stuff that William April talked about with
victim selection, that's influenced my thinking on the mission hugely,
and especially in terms of you know, predators are looking
for the weakest, the weakest gazelle in the pack whatever,

(16:06):
So someone who is feeble or just looks weak or
is giving off victim vibes, which is something I think
everyone has to know about themselves, Like some people just
give off vibes like pick me and you just I
don't know how much you can necessarily change it. I
think you can change it, but it's it's easier to

(16:27):
just know it than to actually change it. And if
you know it, I think that can that can go
a long way into performing your decisions.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Yeah, making more more informed decisions absolutely, But also depending
on how desperate the attackers are, they could go after
a loan person that looks like they might be able
to handle themselves.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
Absolutely, and they might. And sometimes you know, and it
gets into like the some of the male bravado dynamics
and and sometimes the biggest guy is the target because
somebody wants to prove something. So that's the thing too. Yeah,
So I think that for me personally, I've thought about.

(17:08):
I've started looking at like crime statistics in terms of
my like where I spend most of my time. So
if I move somewhere, if on my office moves or whatever,
that's one of the first things I look at. It's like,
it's not necessarily the driving factor in where I live
and spend time, but I look at those things like

(17:29):
where do I where do I go the most, to
my friend's houses, to work, to church, And I look
at the crime statistics for all of those places, and like,
for me, the places I'm going don't really justify me
carrying more than bare minimum most of the time. Anything,
if anything is slightly inconvenient in terms of my like

(17:51):
if it's if I don't like carrying it because it's
you know, poking me, or just the weight of whatever
I don't bother with it. It's just like, you know
that the odds are so in my favor because of
where I'm at, what I'm doing, who I'm with. You know, uh,
middle class, able bodied white male is probably the least

(18:12):
likely person to get be the victim of random crime anyway.
And then you narrow it down further. I said, well,
how much random crime is there in these places is
very low and it's not zero, which is why I
carry a gun.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
But you're also not going out at night, so that eliminates.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
A lot exactly. There's another factor. So you know, you
start whittling out factors, you know. And so I was
talking to one guy about this one time. You know,
Well he's like, well, you know, I'm a gunsmith. I've
you know, I've got thousands of dollars of firearms with
me most of the time and access to this store.
So he carries you know that that drives his carry decision.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
Yeah, and he's a high.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
Big target. He's carrying a lot more gun than I am.
Put it that way, and you know, and it's not
just a matter of what gun we're caring but things
like you know, where am I going to take my
kids to a certain place? Like am I going to
go to that place when my kids? I don't know
if I if I'm gonna take them there? Should I
go there? I don't know, Like just questions you have
to ask you. I don't think there's any right or

(19:15):
wrong answer. It's just I think we get stuck in this.
You know, what's the minimum capacity, what's the minimum caliber?
What's the what's the minimum capability? Because those are easy
questions to answer. It's quantifiable stuff. Is the stuff that
we whatever can get measured gets measured, and then we
focus our our attention on that. It's just it's like

(19:37):
the ballistics thing, like you know, and I kind of
feel bad about it because like we put all this
information out there, but I feel like you misused constantly, Like, yeah,
twelve to eighteen inches in ballistic jail, that's nice, Honestly,
It's not everything, Like, there's other stuff to look at.
The AMMO choice is probably not the most important choice.

(20:00):
We don't want people to buy AMO based on what
the manufacturers say and have to rely on their claims.
That's kind of why we did that, is to give
people something to go on. But you know, if if
you're three to eighty, you're carrying only penetrates eleven and
a quarter inches and this one over here penetrates twelve

(20:22):
and a half inches, sometimes like is that going to
make a difference. Probably not, Like, but it's easy to
get hung up on because it's a number and I
can say past fail. And so that's where we focus
our attention.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
And it's also something that we can we can purchase it.
I'm going to buy it. Then you know what? Have
the solution?

Speaker 3 (20:40):
I have?

Speaker 1 (20:41):
Here are all the solutions right here. I have everything's covered.
I don't need to worry about anything.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, And I can get wrapped up in it just
as much as anybody, because I like numbers, and I
like to look at spreadsheets, and I like to pick
things apart. And then I have to ask myself, wait
a minute, like is the use worth the squeeze? And
it's fine to do that, but is it really solving
the problem.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
I think it's solving so and this is probably going
to be unpopular with some what I'm about to say.
You just said juice? Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Why I brought that up as three fifty seven as
a defensive caliber for normal Earth people, typical three fifty
seven the magnum. The magnum means you're going to have

(21:26):
more velocity, So that means once it's past the body,
once it's passed whatever you're shooting at, all that all
that additional energy, all that velocity, all that additional range,
not just hazard for people behind you. So why go
for something that's going to go far beyond what your

(21:46):
immediate needs are and just talking about the juice worth
the squeeze. Okay, you have the additional blast either the
report it's loud, the recoil. Why not go with a
thirty eight? Oh well that's you have weak wrists. Yeah,
man's gone three.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
It's hard to it's hard to pick up a nine
millimeter and shoot it and then pick up a three
fifty seven and shoot that. And then someone tells you
there's no difference because when you're shooting him, there.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Is clearly clearly Oh yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
When you measure them, you look at velocity and bullet weight,
there is clearly a difference. You shoot him in ballistic
gel sometimes there's a difference.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
Yeah, Sometimes there's a question market with with what you're saying.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah, and you know there's a case to be made.
Darryl Bolke's talked about it some. I think muzzle flash
having a psychological impact.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
Well, he's had some cool input on that and that.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
Could be a thing. But you know, for the average
guy carrying a two inch snub, is that you like,
is the flash bang effect really worth?

Speaker 1 (22:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (23:00):
What you're giving up in terms of controlling the gun
and my thing is always just And it's honestly not
so much about controlling the gun in the moment. It's
if you are determined to shoot magnums through that, how
often are you actually shooting that gun? And how you know,
maybe you're practicing with wadcutters and the stuff and magnums

(23:21):
in it, but then it's basically like two different guns,
you know, like you're not evenly shooting the gun that
you've been practicing with if you're putting that much more
power in it. Yeah, so I yeah, it's uh, it's
hard for us, I think as humans too, to overlook
some of the real obvious stuff, like it's so much louder,

(23:44):
it's a bigger boom, how could that not be more effective?

Speaker 1 (23:47):
So so, something I was thinking about in the last
couple of weeks also is the term powerful, and people
use that, and then my question is how are you
defining powerful?

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Absolutely?

Speaker 1 (23:57):
What is powerful? Because yeah, three seven is more powerful,
but comparing that to some other projectiles that are of
similar velocity, similar weight, similar construction, looking at some pretty
damn similar results, Yeah, it's more powerful, but how and

(24:17):
does it does it matter?

Speaker 2 (24:19):
Yeah? I mean, and we can look back at the FBI.
We can look back at the whole fiasco after Miami
and and look at what they did with AMO testing
and how obsessed they got with trying to pick something
that would solve this problem. And we can laugh at
that as like they're barking up the wrong tree. They're

(24:40):
they're fixing the wrong problem. Ten millimeters was not the
solution they were looking for. Yeah, they made mistakes, but like,
these are not idiots, Like these guys were not dumb. Yeah,
and they spent a lot of time thinking about this,
They spent a lot of time testing, and they still

(25:01):
like made some like drew some wrong conclusions from the
evidence they were getting. You know, So like I say
this with with all the grace I can, because any
of us can fall into these traps like they they
didn't have the right set of information to look at
the right context to see how like, you know, how

(25:23):
do we actually look at this ballistic gellets and stuff
and what does it actually do for us? Because having
the numbers is one thing, and knowing what to do
with them is a totally different thing. So it's hard
to look at your firearms program and say, like, well,
maybe we're not training these guys to shoot well enough,
or maybe we're not focusing on tactics, or maybe they

(25:46):
should have waited for the SWAT guys to show like
all these other maybees are a lot harder to us
all than let's look at the equipment problem. Like this
entire institution's falling into that trap. We as individuals fall
into that trap. So it's not like I think I'm
smarter than everybody else by ignoring it. Like it's something
I fall into all the time as well. Uh you know,

(26:09):
even if I look at it from a perspective of like, well,
to me, the easiest way to solve the problems of
potential deadly violence is to carry a gun, Like that's
still the first thing I think of. Even though I know,
you know, I've taken Craig Douglas's classes, I know that
there's wonderful I still haven't gone to take any any

(26:29):
jiu jitsu or whatever, you know, the other stuff that
would make me well more well rounded. I know, I
know there's more to it. I still think, well, the
gun is, you know, that's the easiest thing, because it
truly is. So you know, I'm not immunes from it
at all. I'm just saying that like we should maybe
have a little more humility as a community and instead

(26:52):
of say well let me let me throw this back
at you, Matt, what do you think of? What do
you think of the phrase concealed carry lifestyle? I think,
what does that mean?

Speaker 1 (27:02):
Just silly?

Speaker 2 (27:03):
What does it mean?

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Because it's not a lifestyle. It's my lifestyle. It's a
concealed carry is an add on to my lifestyle, but
it is not my lifestyle. I have my lifestyle, concealed
carry fits onto it. I'm not dressing around the gun.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
I'm yeah, so yeah, I mean and and I kind
of get it because there's a I think it comes
from seeing people who are merely gun owners or gun
carriers and you know, haven't spent any of the time

(27:40):
training or or looking at how do I actually carry
this gun effectively? How do I carry as what can access?
So I get it. Like maybe maybe conceal carry lifestyle
is when you actually embrace all of the elements and
you're like, Okay, now I know how to carry the gun,
conceal it comfortably, conceal it effectively, draw it, put rounds

(28:00):
on target like that whole package. Maybe that's the concealed
carry lifestyle, but I don't know, like it seems like
it's become a marketing term.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
Now I think it is marketing. Yeah, yeah, So I'm
going to hit that pause for a second. We're going
to run some ads. We will be right back. Refill
those drinks, hit the bathroom. You have one minute and
thirty seconds. Good luck, May the Force be with you.
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Speaker 1 (30:04):
And that's how it's done, all right. So you brought
up the FBI, and you brought up the Miami shooting,
and I firmly believe, I I believe because of all
of that, we've definitely gotten. We we are where we

(30:25):
are now, and that's a good thing. We're not stuck
with one choice for AMMO. We have multiple calibers that
are all viable. Speaking of similar I just recently purchased
and received the Uh, well, what book is it? It's Vincent, Yes,
the Gunshot Wound. Yeah, Yeah, just bought that. I'm excited

(30:49):
to crack that open. Clearly after looking yes and just
looking through it, I see why it can't be an audiobook.
Lots of pictures, lots of pictures. But I really think
because we have because those types of things happen, because

(31:10):
Miami occurred, ten millimeter was created, forty was created, and
now we're back to the to the basic nine. But
we also have forty we have we have uh, we
have forty forty five nine. They all can work. It
might my I have them all behind me. I will
carry them all at some point.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
I have.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
But I think it's it's been to our benefit that
those that the that that research was done, and sure
they may have maken they may have made some bad
decisions or bad turns. Ultimately we benefited and we have some.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
Yeah, awesome. I think it would be hard to argue
that we would have the bullet technology we have today
if they had not. Yeah, maybe gotten too preoccupied with
that question for a while.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
So I understand. There's a part of this book where
basically the doctor is saying something along the lines of
incapacitation has less to do with expansion as much as
it does with just the mere disruption. And I can't
wait to get to that part because so many people
are so hyper focused on the expansion aspect and not

(32:19):
so much the penetration. Not accuracy and penetration are a
number one. And then we have a yeah, it's nice
if we have the expansion, but not necessarily mandatory.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yeah, well that kicked off the whole The whole rabbit
trail with the FBI was the autopsies after the shooting.
Is I can't remember which guy is either Plat or Mattix,
the one who they had to shoot so many times.
Jerry Dove, one of the agents who was killed. He

(32:56):
fired one of the first shots and actually hit the
guy and it went like threw his armbone into the
chest cavity and stopped just shy of his heart. And
that's where we get the whole minimum penetration standard, like
it came from that bullet, and they had before this

(33:17):
basically emphasized expansion and penetration was hardly anyone looked at penetration.
It wasn't even really a metric they they focused on.
And that's where we got stuff like the the what
they called the treasury load. It was like a thirty
eight plus p plus like a one hundred and ten
grain bullets something like that. And when we shot that

(33:40):
one in jail, I mean it did like nine inches
and that's in clear jael so in like organic jail
probably less less, yeah, And I mean it opened up
like a quarter, but it it's all that drag. It
just had no penetration at all. Yeah, But they thought,
you knowlocity for one thing, because it's something we can measure,

(34:03):
and expansion another thing we can really easily measure. All
you got to do is shooting into a bucket of
water and you can see that it's expanding. They hadn't
really figured out that. And then they had gel but
there was no standard, so like you can put you know,
you can have some jell o over your your facility
and I'm going to make some over here, but there's
not any kind of one to one comparison, it's it's

(34:25):
very unscientific. So anything they were doing was based on
expansion at that time, and if you go far enough back,
you know they're they're looking at how many pine boards
can the bullets shoot through and stuff like that. So
there's always been some kind of metrics something we can measure,
but it's not what we use today to measure.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
And so what puzzles me is what you the way
you just described it as we have these metrics, we
have these hard numbers, but you know, energy transfer, that's
what's doing the wounding. Where does this come from?

Speaker 2 (35:00):
Yeah, and there's a uh, this is a dangerous territory
because I have not I have not looked into this
in a while. Yeah. Yeah, there is a guy who
I don't know if he came up with this theory
or if he just kind of has developed it. He's
still around. He Actually I stumbled up on one of

(35:20):
his papers because I was searching for something and I
found my name mentioned in a paper he wrote. Uh
it wasn't like his main work. It was you know,
he's one of these guys just constantly is putting stuff out.

Speaker 3 (35:34):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
He wrote a paper a few years ago and cited
our ballistic test as like bogus because but he just
doesn't like the whole ballistic testing thing period.

Speaker 3 (35:44):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
He's into the theory of energy transfer and like shockwave effect,
and I think this was really in vogue in the
nineties for a while maybe. But the theory is that, like,
you know, you could shoot someone with something like a
rifle bullet and there's enough shockwave to like give him
brain damage essentially, And it's hard to deny that, Like

(36:07):
some weird things happen when people get shot, Like there's
some really inexplicable odd stuff. There's also stuff like who
was it Chuck Haggard I think was telling me one
time about a guy he I think he knew the
guy and Vietnam was like took a direct hit with
a fifty cow and kept fighting like it just glanced

(36:30):
off of him to some weird angle. Or you know,
weird stuff happens with bullets. You've got a round thing
hitting other round stuff in the body with monk, and
weird things happen, and so yeah, like something like this
shockwave effect might be observed sometimes. And I think, you know,
people shoot animals and they observe things and don't know

(36:53):
what's happened. But they're like, well, there's bleeding over here,
but I shot it over here, So clearly some thing
is happening. And someone a lot more well versed in
those in the field could to explain that. I'm sure,
but they come up with we come up with theories.
We want an explanation, So some wave theory it sounds good. Sure,

(37:14):
Let's say that the energy radiator radiates out from the
bullet and when you when you look at it on
high speed camera and you shoot it into jail, you
can see this like shock wave coming out. So surely
that's got to do something. But I mean, you see
the same thing as somebody if you take high speed
footage of a boxer punching a guy in the face,
either face looks like it turns into rubber, but does

(37:36):
it knock them out. It doesn't even knock them out
like a good punch. It takes a lot of those
to knock somebody out, usually like if they're a professional fighter.
So what we're seeing again, it's like something that we
our brain wants to go to, Like we can see
this like you know, the face like warps all like

(37:57):
it looks bad. The same thing with a gel think
it must be doing something.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
So we look at the jail jump.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
Yeah, it jumps the jail jump and yeah, you know
I'm doing gel testing and the gel block jumps off
the table. I'm like, well I carry that over this
other thing that's right, like jiggled a little bit, so
you know, it's easy.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
Another one that I hear is, well, when we're shooting steel,
forty five knocks it over nine do oh? Yeah, yeah,
we're shooting steel people, what yeah?

Speaker 2 (38:26):
Or or bowling pin matches back when that was the thing.
You know, if you're not carrying enough gun to the match,
you're not going to knock the pins over. And so
I think that reinforced big bullets for a lot of
people because you need something from a mass that's going
to knock those things out.

Speaker 1 (38:42):
It's manly, it's manly.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:44):
Well, and and when we're when we look at those
those hard numbers, if I recall correctly, Factler established twenty
two hundred feet per second was a velocity that could
create additional leading to immediate incapacitation beyond the immediate bullet path.

(39:05):
That being said, shotgun slugs at a certain velocity that
don't even reach that also can do that. So we
can't have these we can't live by these these these
numbers because yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
Well you know, if you, if you, the twenty two
hundred thing is a rule of thumb, but it's not
an absolute because there's and that's what we ran into
when we tested five seven last year, is you know,
and I wasn't expecting anything a whole lot more, but
there were some surprises in there, like twenty two hundred
feet per second in a teeny tiny bullet doesn't really

(39:43):
do what Factler was talking about, Like he was not
saying it has to do this at twenty two hundred.
He was saying it can happen starting at twenty two hundred. Yeah,
so you know, you take something like a forty grain
five seven bullet just disintegrate like twenty five hundred feet
per second, and it looks a whole lot like a

(40:06):
hole from a twenty two long rifle. You know, like
it might go a little deeper, but you know, you're
getting a little bit of a wound channel. It looks
like the woond channel from a nine millimeters holowpoint. It's
it's not doing anything that's in organic gel because we
knew if if there was anything happening here beyond normal
pistol stuff, we would need organic gel to see it.

(40:28):
So we use organic gel and it didn't happen like
it's it's not an absolute, but people like that twenty
two hundred number like, oh, maybe that's my thing now.
And yeah, And we tested a couple of slugs to
see what happened to and it was pretty cool, like
the slugs will tear it up, and that's I've been
using some Fiochi low recoil slugs. They shoot really well

(40:54):
in my thirteen oh one and they are they're really
soft shooting. You don't have to have a super deep penetruy.
I mean, if you want to shoot through cars, sure,
but like if you just want something that's gonna be
a disrupt tissue, like the Fiochi turns into a doughnut basically,
and it got like a center that's really thin and

(41:15):
it kind of blows it out and it balloons up
and I don't, you know, I wouldn't expect that to
be ideal, but what it did to the gel was ideal.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Sounds awesome. Yeah, what was the penetration depth?

Speaker 2 (41:31):
I think it was right at sixteen like it went
right to the end of a block, and that's it something.
It's like eleven hundred feet per second. It's not a lot.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
So did it just poop out or did it retain
in the gel?

Speaker 2 (41:46):
You know, I don't remember. It's something that we've got
a video with it in there. I can't remember which
video it is. It may be the one I did
on rifle versus Pistol ballistics, which was just a general
introduction to what we were just talking about and the
fact that there's some gray area in between, and the

(42:07):
fact that you don't necessarily need a really fast projectile
if you have a really heavy projectile. So, uh, that's
I think it's in that video. We've we've got some
high speed footage out of it. That's pretty cool. It was.
It was It didn't go out to the end of
the block, uh literally, but it was. It was a
fourteen sixteen inches something like that, right right towards the end.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
That was one of the coolest things to see. Uh.
With our test jail testing a few years ago, shooting
gold dots, shooting shooting hsts, shooting some some good quality stuff,
and it would go all the way through the block
and just boop out. It wouldn't it wouldn't even dent
the retail, the retainer at the end that we set

(42:49):
up to catch the bullets. And holy crap, the technology
and the way they have that is just it's awesome.
It is just awesome.

Speaker 2 (42:59):
Yeah. And I've been told by Ballotle who pull bullets
out of bodies or get to see it happen, that
that's usually what with pistol caliber bullets you very rarely
see with a modern hall of Point, you very rarely
rarely see a through and through like it'll kind of
it might if it comes out of the end. It's
got the closed energy left, it's in the close where
it falls down.

Speaker 1 (43:20):
Yeah, And that is just absolutely amazing. And so that's
a good thing to be aware of. And I like
what you said about with the UH with the shotgun
slugs because for me, for my mission, that sounds like
the perfect balance because it sounds shootable, but it also
sounds like it's doing what I wanted to do without

(43:41):
endangering people outside my immediate vicinity. And I don't know
how many people take things like that consideration when they're
seeking out their own mission. And that goes back to
what I was saying about three fifty seven. I really
like what Daryl Bulky says about Well, he doesn't. He
doesn't carry full three fifty seven regularly anymore. It's more

(44:01):
thirty eight because that fits what his needs are. Well,
I'm kind of in the same boat. And so I
have this Smith three twenty seven performance center the what
is it like a quarter of an inch barrel? It's tiny,
it's it's a quarter of an inch, Yeah, not really.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
But that it's like relative to the frame size.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
Yeah, so it's an end frame eight shot three fifty seven.
I'm not going to shoot three fifty sevens out of that,
that's silly. What it is for me is it's a
thirty eighth white cutter gun, right, But yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
You know, and I don't think there's necessarily no merit
to something like a Magnum. Oh, there's definitely a role, yeah,
particularly with dangerous animals. Completely when you want penetration, of course,
you know, if you this is not popular to say,
if you want penetration, you can get a lot from

(44:56):
a forty.

Speaker 1 (44:57):
I was gonna say nine.

Speaker 2 (44:58):
But yeah, well if with the right bullets selection. That
was the thing we discovered when we did our initial
gel test. It's like, yeah, nine, it's great. There's some
really good loads. If you look at forty, pretty much
all of them are pretty good. Like, I don't necessarily
think forty is worth what it does to the shooter

(45:20):
or the guns in terms of recoil and just shooting ability.
It's not, you know, but for a special purpose if
you need penetration, yeah, like the forty, a lot of
the forties will go clear through two blocks of gel,
and you know, you can find other calibers that'll do

(45:40):
Some nines might do that, some forty fives might do that,
but forties, like across the board did what they were
supposed to do exactly, Like the Holow points all expanded
and had really uniform penetration and expansion. The nines did
that with the really good hollow points like the hsts,
the gold dots, but the forties you were getting that

(46:01):
with some of the cheaper stuff. Like it's it's a
good round for what it is. But if you know,
if I if I wanted something that I knew was
going to penetrate a bunch of tissue and into a
hog or a bear or a wild cat or whatever. Uh,
forty wouldn't be bad, Like, I don't think you necessarily

(46:21):
need a ten, like there's some really good forties. Of course,
you know, nothing says bear gun like Magnum, so.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
Yes, that's it's Magnum country.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Yeah, but you know a hard cast Magnum will absolutely
do it.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
Oh unbelievably.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
And when we did. I did a video on on
bear attacks last year because you know, I don't, I
don't have any special knowledge and that that's not my thing.
But uh amma. Land dot com has been collecting stats
from specifically from handguns used against bears, and they've got

(47:05):
I don't I can't remember how many it is now,
it's more than two hundred incidents. It's enough to have
I don't even know if you'd necessarily call it data,
but it's it's enough to have a really attractive spreadsheet
that's got some real numbers in it. And pretty much
everything works against bears. They don't like to get shot

(47:28):
kind of like people exactly, but just so many people
carry forty fours, like I think something like half of
the incidents were with forty fours. So the forty four
looks like it's really effective, and it is effective, but
is it any more effective than three fifty seven? Not really,
Like in terms of like the three fifty sevens all

(47:49):
made the bears do what they want them to do
as well, like they made the bears run away, and
a lot of them, a lot of the stories. I
was surprised how many stories bears were dropping after one
shot from a three fifty seven. You know, would I
rather have six forty four's or eight three fifty sevens.
I think I'd go with a three seven, you know.

(48:11):
And it's probably not gonna break my wrist either, if
it's one of those like your three twenty seven, like
those lightweight guys. So yeah, I mean, like if you
wanted something that'll penetrate a lot, it'll it'll there's a
case to be made for it, but it may. Again,
it's not it's the thing we can measure. It's not
the thing that matters the most. It's it's avoiding bears.

(48:33):
It's it's like knowing a little bit about bear behavior
that goes so much farther and thing. And that's what
I brought up in the videos, Like you know, you're
if you look at the statistics from the National Park
Service on people who die in parks. Now in the video,
I just narrowed it down to like nature related velts.

(48:54):
It's actually it's well, by far, the most was drowning,
so I think people are playing in the water without
life jackets and dying that way. But yeah, then it's falls,
it's exposure, it's like random branches falling on you.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
Shark attack.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Shark attacks probably in there somewhere, but like bear attacks,
it's like one of the least. I think something like
seven people had been killed in national parks from animals
within a ten year period, and it's like three or
four bears, about a couple of snakes and one mountain goat. Oh,

(49:33):
and I would love to read that story. I don't
moose was not on the list. I don't know what
poor soul was killed by a mountain goat, but I
would love to read.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
Well, it was a mountain goat and fall.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yeah, I kind of wanted a mountain goat just knocked
them off off the side of the mountain.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
But that and that goes back to setting up for
the wrong mission. If you know these are the parameters
that you're going to potentially encounter, right, why.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Am black bears versus brown bears? And yeah, there's a
lot of Yeah, polar bears, you're just dead. I don't
even no, But I mean there's there was one of
the attacks in that data set came from uh, you know,
there's some like some island in uh, Scandinavia. And it's

(50:20):
probably not the case anymore because that these stories went back.
They were pulling them from like the nineteen forties if
they found something that seemed relatively credible. But there was
some island in Scandinavia where like you weren't even allowed
to go camp there or stay there unless you brought
it gun with you. Like they weren't. I guess they
didn't want to have to come clean you up, so
they wanted you to have it. But because the polar

(50:42):
bears that are so aggressive, Yeah, polar bears are bad. Hmm.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
Now, did you recently do an article or a video
that was addressing three three three?

Speaker 2 (50:58):
Yeah, a couple of years ago I did. I wasn't
necessarily going after that particular myth.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
Was the history.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
It was more just like what is the let's see
what was the name of the video? Is something like
what is the typical distance of a gunfight? Like, what
is the real distance? And it's surprisingly difficult to nail
that down.

Speaker 1 (51:24):
I can imagine because isn't three three three based on
police interactions in the seventies?

Speaker 2 (51:31):
Yes? Uh, three three yeah? And right that that's the
typical encounters three rs, three rounds, three seconds or the average.
Typical and average are not the same thing, but they're
they're used interchangeably. Uh I Claude Warner would be able
to tell exactly where this comes from. I'm sure I
think it came from law enforcement data. It may have

(51:53):
come from, uh, the the FBI, what do they call it?
The officers killed in the line of duty thing. A
bunch of stats get pulled from that without recognizing, like,
these are the guys that were killed, not like it's
it's already you're selecting for the people who lost. So

(52:14):
it's I mean, we can learn things from it, but
it's not a not a typical engagement distance. That's well.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
And not only that, but they're what was their mission? Wait,
it's a police officer. How is that different from Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
Exactly, if you've got to go put those hands on somebody,
you get close.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
Do those data sets actually right?

Speaker 2 (52:34):
Yeah, arm citizens behave differently than cops and criminals behave
differently when their opponent is a cop versus an armed citizen.
It's it's a matter of, uh, if if my my
prey suddenly pulls a gun, I probably am going to
change my objective. Versus a cop, the objective doesn't change.

(52:54):
It's too it's to stay free, stay on this side
of bars. So unless it's you know, unless it's a
predatory thing and they're actually trying to actively kill cops,
and then it's more like a predatory thing. But generally
those those encounters are based around I am trying to
get away, and I will do anything it takes to

(53:15):
get away. The behavior is different than if you've got
a person you thought was going to be the prey
and now it's been flipped around. It's like, well, abort mission,
let's not do this. But you know, if you've got
someone that you know is going to try and put
hands on you, that it's a different behavior. And so

(53:37):
if you're looking at statistics for engagement distance, it's going
to be a lot closer with law enforcements. So how
do you narrow it down to just get civilian engagement distance? Well,
you can't. No one collects that data.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
Exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Like even if it's written down in a police report,
which there's no guarantee it will be m it's it
doesn't end up in a database anywhere.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
There's no database for it.

Speaker 2 (54:04):
And there's a difference between like the spot the guy dropped,
the spot the guy was found, the guy ran away.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
Engagement got shot.

Speaker 2 (54:17):
Yeah, well, who are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Wasn't Eli Dicken? His engagement started at forty yards and
he closed the distance?

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Which one was that in the mall? Oh the mall thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'm not as similiar with that one, but yeah, yeah, right,
there's there's dynamics of you know, especially if somebody gets
shot more than once. Where were the various engagements Like
it's it's hard to put a single number on it anyway,
and no one is compiling that database. So when people

(54:46):
say averages or whatever, like a lot of people are
under the impression that there is a number somewhere that
people like you and I can go find and then report.
But that's not the case. That there's the numbers just
not there. So we have to just we have to
extrapolate from what little information we have.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
And there's also bias our own bias is going to adjust.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
This absolutely, Yeah, and so I you know, I've relied
a lot on the information from Tom Gibbons because he
has collected that information his students. He collects information for
all of his students who are involved in shootings, and
since he was teaching for years and years in Memphis,
a lot of his students were getting involved in shootings.

(55:30):
I think the I think the rate of his students
getting in these encounters has kind of slowed down since
he moved out of Memphis, but yeah, they for a
while he was collecting I think he's got sixty something
like high sixties at this point. And so that's the
data set we can use. Even that is skewed because

(55:52):
it's selecting for people who were Tom Givens students, who
have all received really good training and are probably behaved
differently than people who haven't. Completely, So we really don't know. Yeah,
but we don't have any reason to believe that three
yards is definitively where everything's happening. A lot of stuff

(56:16):
happens closer and some stuff happens like there. We don't
have a lot of good evidence supporting very many confrontations
beyond seven yards. I think once you get past seven,
that's an extreme outlier, whether it's law enforcement or civilians,
Like you just don't have a whole lot of those

(56:37):
incidents recorded, period, because when they are, they're noteworthy, and
that's why we talk about them, because exactly we talk
about the ones that are exceptional. So I you know,
and the thing is like the three three three thing. Honestly,
it's not a bad rule of thumb because a lot

(56:59):
of stuff does happen and within three yards, three rounds,
three seconds that that is, you know, probably does account
for a large portion of them. The question is like
how likely are you to have Like you're you're not
likely to be the guy who has to take a
shot at twenty five yards, You're not likely to be

(57:19):
the guy who has to mag dump twenty rounds. You're
not likely to have to be the person who's you know,
needs the biggest caliber or whatever other thing. But like
when you whittle it all down, like how likely are
you that one of these things is going to be
an outlier? You're also not likely to be right in

(57:41):
the middle of everything. There's some story and I'm going
to totally butcher this, but there's like there's some story
about like how they were designing aircraft in World War Two.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
I know exactly what you're talking about, yes.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
For they were for the average guy. Yeah, and like
everything was based online the average dimensions of a you know,
twenty five year old male or whatever, and it ended
up being uncomfortable for everybody because nobody was average. So, like,
whatever your gunfight is is gonna be exceptional in some

(58:16):
respect because of where it is, when it is, you know,
the conditions of the person attacking you, all these things,
Like there's there is not an average encounter. There might
be some that are you know, pretty pretty much in
the meat of the bell curve in most things, but

(58:36):
the chances that you encounter something that's outside of that
in some respect are you know, pretty reasonable, which is
why I carry a gun even though my chances of
being attacked are extremely extremely hellow, so are.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
You saying that you don't carry a scoped rifle with
you at all times?

Speaker 2 (58:56):
Not this year?

Speaker 1 (58:57):
No, you're not engaging from seven hundred yards.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
Maybe during COVID when things were a little well.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
You had to make existences during COVID.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Hmm, yeah, so I the three three th thing is,
you know, I don't like it, and I will call
it out, but it also is not It's not a
bad starting point. Yeah, it's just not a good mantra
or or rule of life free entirely because there's you know,
you can't say you'll never need sights under a gun

(59:29):
because three three three, like it's it's bad when it's
used to excuse bad behavior.

Speaker 1 (59:35):
Laziness.

Speaker 2 (59:36):
Yeah, yeah, laziness and subpal equipment.

Speaker 1 (59:40):
And three three three that that can be a great drill.
I also happen to like five five five and then
ten ten ten, and yeah, you know, the sky's sky's
a limit on how we can adjust this, and it
can be it can be a helpful metric, but don't
make that your starting and ending point. Always be striving
to go beyond that. But as we speak, I'm carrying

(01:00:01):
a thirty two h and R mag six shot revolver.
Am I going to be engaging that seven hundred yard thing?

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
Now?

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
I'm in my house. I have other things around that
I can use if necessary. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
With home carry home carry? Yeah, that's interesting. It's not
something I thought about or did for a while, and
then I started doing it religiously and now I don't
really do it anymore so much. And I'll tell you
that the thing is dogs. I have dogs.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
Oh okay, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
They are an excellent early warning system because and I
don't know everyone else's dogs. My dogs kind of lost
it during COVID. I don't know what it was about.
I think they got used to us being at home.
I've heard of an other dog when we're talking about this,
but like they got so just like on edge anytime,

(01:01:04):
Like they used to be excited when someone would come
to the door. Starting around COVID, like any anytime someone
walked close to the outside fence, they would just lose it.
And I think it's because they weren't used to seeing
people as much and they just have never gotten out
of that mode. And so now, like you know, we've
got a long driveway. You can't see our house from

(01:01:26):
the road. If someone comes to within where they can
even see our house, the dogs are already on top
of it. They're making lots of noise. There's very little
reason for me to need to have a gun that close. Yeah,
so I you know I'm always alerted. Is that one
hundred percent? No, of course not, but it's it's enough

(01:01:48):
you know, for me to not you know, I sometimes
just don't want to have a gun on me. It's
as comfortable as a twelve ounce jframe with an enigma
is It's not as comfortable as not having anything. Yeah,
So you know, with the dogs, I don't really think
about it anymore. It's like if if they're freaking out,
I'm paying attention, I'm going to see what it is.

(01:02:10):
And I've got I've got some time, and that's all
I need is a good ten seconds and I can.
I can arm myself pretty easily.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Yeah, along similar lines, there's a potential that someone's camera
system would do similar if you're going to get that
alarm alarm, your phone's going to let you know someone
just pulled up to the driveway. Yeah. And for me
with that, it's I get up, get dressed. If I'm
not going to work wearing normal clothes, I throw the

(01:02:41):
gun on and I forget that I even have it.
I know it's there, but it's not like Yeah, and
then like if I, like today worked through on somewhat
normal clothes and yeah, just throw the gun on. I
have it, no, no, no problem. That being said, though,
what do you call it the revolver grips with hooks

(01:03:03):
on them. Where something are doing that with without the
uh without a holster right now?

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
Hemorged something? Memory Forge has some Yeah, I haven't tried
him yet.

Speaker 1 (01:03:13):
Oh his grips are fantastic. But I I at this
moment in my life, I do not want to do
the the hooks without a holster because I have a
four year old that likes to climb on me. And yeah, yeah,
so guns stay in holsters when I when I no
longer have kids climbing on me, then I then then
I'll start considering that. But right now I'm not really

(01:03:36):
comfortable with that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
Have you Have you had any of your kids uh
smack their noggin into your gun? Oh yeah, oh yeah,
they learn pretty fast, but.

Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
Yes they do. Whether it's pocket carry appendix, Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
Yeah, yeah, yeah that's fun, uh yeah, and other things.
Speaking of dad stuff, the other thing that probably has
changed my my house carry habits is just, you know,
I'm in my forties now. Dad gut is a real thing,
and I'm no, by no means a portly gentleman. But

(01:04:12):
there's more going on down there than there used to be,
and it's just not as comfortable that my my trousers
do not have as much excess room as they did,
and so for me to carry anything in there at
this point, it's a little a little less comfortable than
it used to be. And it's just as well. You know,
the dogs got it. It's fine, And you know, I

(01:04:34):
don't begrudge anyone for making a different decision. That's just
that's where I'm at with it. It's and I think
it's fine. Like it's not I'm not saying that I'm
safe because of any any one thing. I absolutely am
aware of the potential for me to be an outlier

(01:04:55):
in some respect. But you know, it's a it's a
calculated risk, and that's completely I'm okay with taking it.
I think that's another thing is like, uh, it's okay
to say you've taken a calculator risk. Like a lot
of a lot of us would would say that, like
nowhere we're as uh vigilant and as safe as we
can be all the time. But like that's that doesn't

(01:05:17):
hold up to any kind of scrutiny because if that
were the case, we would all be trying to figure
out how to shove shock waves down our trousers. So
we could have a twelve gage on us at all times,
and everybody's got a line or they're like, eh, five
mags is probably too many mags. I'm only going to
carry four.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
And that also was a recent well not recent actually,
it's probably been several years, but that also was a
fantastic discussion talking about Okay, at what point is too much?
How do we find what that balance is? And for me,
it's okay, when does it start to hinder my life? Okay,
I'm going to take it back two steps from there.

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
Right, Yeah, So everybody's got a line and it's okay
to admit that, Like, yeah, I'm I'm going to be
as prepared as I think I need to be for
the lifestyle that I live and for the stuff that
I want to do, and as soon as it starts
to get in the way of that, I'm going to
cut back on the equipment I'm carrying or you know

(01:06:15):
what conditioned yellow I'm in that day, or whatever the
case is. Like, we're all making decisions based on that
balance of preparedness and comfort or whatever you if comfort
sounds like too soft a word, and practicality, how.

Speaker 1 (01:06:36):
About that or both? Because it's possible to be practical
and comfortable.

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (01:06:43):
Yeah, And this goes back to that discussion with arg
and others talking about well as a parent, as a husband,
as a family member. I missed out on stuff because Okay,
I'm not going to say I was too vigilant, but
I might have been carrying too much crap that Why
did I do that? Did I need to be carrying
two mags and and and a full size gun with

(01:07:05):
a weapon light and this and that and the other.
I might as well have just been carrying my duty
built and.

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
Yeah, especially where you have to bend over to engage
with them. Yeah, you can bend over with it, appendix
holdstraw on. It's not as comfortable when it's a full
size gun and you've got other stuff on your waistband.

Speaker 1 (01:07:29):
I think what you said I I like the most,
and I agree with so much that the whole three
three three thing. Yes, it's a it's a good starting point,
and it's a it's a it's a frame of reference.
Don't let that stop you. But as long as you're
as long as you are calculating these risks, I think

(01:07:49):
that's where the success comes, as opposed to being laidy
in just going well, yeah, I'll be fine with with
this and not look up or not train or not maintain,
not train, not not practice, and constantly be a perpetual student.
I think you'll be way better off. But unfortunately we
do have those people that, well, this firearm right here,
this is my entire personality and this is all I

(01:08:12):
need to survive.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
Yeah, And I think I've seen that kind of change
since I started doing this, Like, and it may just
be my perception, it may not have changed. I don't know,
it's all it's all kind of relative. But when I
first started making content, which is twelve plus years ago,

(01:08:37):
like the stuff I was reading Todd Green, that kind
of stuff, like really looking at evidence based what happens
in gun fights? How can we be carrying a gun
that we can actually shoot really well? What does shoot
being well look like? Taking a lot of this stuff

(01:08:58):
from the competition world, integrating it into concealed carry all
that kind of stuff that was not mainstream information at
the time, Like I don't think getting killed right like
that was not being talked about, Like it was very esoteric,

(01:09:20):
you know, Uh, instructors were not allowing appendix to carry
in their classes. I mean some still don't, but like
it was a lot more common then. There was not
a whole lot of people buying shot timers outside of
the competition world. Instructors who were teaching this stuff were not.
I mean, how many instructors that you've been to in

(01:09:44):
the last several years were teaching this stuff fifteen years ago?
There were There were some, but not nearly as many.
And that nothing against the guys who who've started since then.
Some of the best instructors are the ones who have
started recently. There's some excellent instruction, but they just weren't.
They weren't there. And there were guys that were my age,
that are my age, and they weren't. They were still

(01:10:06):
kind of just picking on this up on this stuff
at that time too, So, uh, that information wasn't out there.
And so like the guy who just buys a gun
and checks a box and it's my it's my like
security blanket. Now, that was kind of the norm ye
offline and offline, that was how it was at the

(01:10:29):
gun counter, that's how it was in the gun forums.
That was the dominant mentality in kind of the shooting
hobby world. And then we kind of slowly started to
see more of the performance shooting become mainstream stuff like

(01:10:50):
Recoil magazine made it look sexy and you know, brought
kind of that uh uh like MTV for lack of
a better term, just kind of like making it a
cool thing essentially. Yeah, And and now it's like that
part of the shooting world. I don't know, I would

(01:11:13):
wouldn't say it's dominant, but it's it's a very loud voice.
Like once you uh get past the initial like I'm
just gonna grab a gun and sticking on pants kind
of thing, if you dig into the uh, into the
the area of the internet, that's that's gonna show you,

(01:11:33):
like the truth about concealed carry. They're gonna get you
squared away really quick. They're gonna tell you're not carrying
enough gun. You need to be carrying uh this holster
that's got, you know, this sidecar so you can carry
an extra mag? What carry an extra mag? Why would
I do that?

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:11:50):
Let me tell you. And like that stuff has become
a very easy to come come by, whether it's like
the the old school stuff is still there. Yeah, there's
still the people saying three three three, Hey, little lady,
let me get you this purple jframe like that. That

(01:12:10):
stuff didn't go away, but I feel like it's more
relegated to the brick and mortar store experience. It's more
relegated to if you do go to one of the
old fashioned gun forums online as opposed to social media.
So there's been kind of this flip. But then I've

(01:12:31):
also seen the pendulum swing back where more people are
embracing like, actually it's okay revolvers to carry, a revolver
to carry, you know, a glock forty two, a small
three eighty something like, as long as you can shoot it.

(01:12:52):
So I think it's we overcorrected and we're kind of
coming back, like, Okay, it wasn't so much about you
weren't carrying enough gun. It was more about you didn't
know how to shoot that gun. And it's hard to
learn how to shoot these little guns. So let's get
you a big gun. Now you know how to shoot.
Now you don't have to carry that gun. You can
go back and carry the little gun. It's a you know,

(01:13:13):
it's a very expensive journey if you do it that way.
And I think more people are trying to figure out, Okay,
how do we how do we help somebody who wants
to carry not have to do that and say, Okay,
this is the gun you want to this is how
much gun you want to carry, this is how much,
this is what you wear. Okay, let's get you squared away.

(01:13:33):
Let's get you something that's going to work within those
parameters and get you proficient with that thing. You want
to carry, a revolver. Okay, don't carry the thirty eight.
That's going to be really hard. Let's carry Try the
twenty two. Try the thirty two. Try instead of the LCP,
try the glock forty two, try the try the three eighty.

(01:13:53):
That's a little bigger, like that kind of thing. I
think is a more happy meeting. And you know, and
I got to throw a plug to filter for this,
because the enigma has helped that for a lot of people.
The enigma has freed people from having to go with
the gun belt thing, and it's it's given people a
lot more options for making it fit what they already

(01:14:16):
wear and how they already like the stuff they do.
They don't have to stop doing because they can.

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
Just come, Yeah, it's concealment, fitting into the lifestyle, not
the concealment lifestyle, right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:29):
So I hope that that it becomes more of I hope,
you know, somebody really smart comes up with some other
weird options we haven't treamed up yet that are just
as good as the Enigma. But like, you know what,
if we want to carry not on the waistband, Like
if we don't want to carry on a waistband at all,
our options are pretty limited. They're still like I haven't

(01:14:50):
seen a like what's the Enigma version of a shoulder holster,
you know what I mean? Like, and maybe that'll ever happen,
But like, just there are smart people out there coming
up with new stuff, and somebody's gonna on something, and
I hope that it kind of brings more people in
without feeling like they have to go like full tactical
to get proficient.

Speaker 1 (01:15:12):
Well it feels and sure enough, Chris Seiberts here now,
it feels it feels like we've had kind of in
the last ten years and an enlightenment or renaissance of
the whole package of the firearm itself, of the means
of carrying, of the training, of the mindset and everything

(01:15:32):
coming together for making a better well rounded person.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
Yeah, for sure, and it's it's still hard to run
a weekend long thousand round class, yeah, with a jframe.
So like getting a lot of rounds if you want
to do a deep dive, it's hard to get a
lot of rounds downrange with one of these you know,
practical everyday kind of options. So I think if you

(01:16:01):
go the if you want to be a hobbyist, you're
still going you're gonna get a little bit of the
the tactical side, the competition side, like that's going to
be baked into it. And I think that's okay. But
you know, looking at how to make this more accessible
for instead of the person just grabbing the gun and
throw it in their purse, how do you make this
successful so they feel okay with the equipment that worked

(01:16:25):
for them, but they can still get a good amount
of training and get to a good place skill wise.

Speaker 1 (01:16:32):
Yeah, yeah, I remember.

Speaker 2 (01:16:35):
Chrissie might have some experience with that. I don't know,
maybe just guessing Chris. Uh, Well, hey guys, what's up?

Speaker 3 (01:16:46):
Oh? You know, staying busy? What I miss?

Speaker 1 (01:16:51):
Nothing? We haven't started yet.

Speaker 3 (01:16:56):
Are you serious?

Speaker 1 (01:16:57):
No?

Speaker 3 (01:16:58):
No? Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:17:00):
So a lot of what we've discussed so far is
talking about what led to some trends. Uh, where we
are now with mindsets talked about like the FBI development
of certain ammunition which has gotten us to where we
are now. The whole three through three thing and how
it can be it can do. It can be a
good starting point, but it shouldn't be the finishing point.

Speaker 3 (01:17:25):
Yeah, So there's there's a it's interesting. I actually just
I've been writing a series of articles for UH for
Shooting Illustrated, UH that that's kind of a look all right,
all right, you've got your you've got a firearm, you've
got your license to carry, you know, how to handle
a gun safely? Like where do I go from here?
And and how do I achieve uh, you know, kind

(01:17:47):
of a baseline degree of competence. And and it's funny
because a lot a lot of people will balk at
that idea specifically because like, to give you an example,
I was I was teaching a church safety class to
a church in North Texas and and I was doing
the presentation part of it, and I was talking about,

(01:18:08):
you know, if you have a safety team and you
have armed safety team members. I was talking about developing
standards and you know, provided my recommendation for for standards
of like, hey, if you're going to carry a gun
and a very very crowded auditorium full of people, uh,
you know, we need to have some standards. And you know,
I was discussing different, uh different possibility, like, hey, look

(01:18:29):
you I think the FBI call is you know, achievable.
It's a pretty good, pretty good call.

Speaker 1 (01:18:34):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:18:35):
But but basically I had a couple of couple of
gentlemen almost get up and walk out because they had
their they had their Texas license to carry. That was
good enough. And of course, you know, if I, if
I recall correctly, mister Baker here passed the Texas license
to carry call, they blindfold on uh along with uh

(01:18:55):
you know my uh my homide JJ. So the the
problem is is articulating to the general public simultaneous truths
that seem to be in conflict, and there's nuance, and
a lot of people have a real hard time grasping

(01:19:16):
that I got actually got on primary and secondary. A
couple of years ago, I had a dude straight up
tell me and I was making the point I was
I was basically like advocating. I was like, look, man,
competition's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
It's great.

Speaker 3 (01:19:28):
I don't think it's essential or you're going to die, right,
I don't think it's I don't think it's essential to
save your life at at a gas pump when somebody's
trying to murder you. And and this this gentleman on
Primary and Secondary literally was like, well, sounds like you're
sounds like cop and embracing mediocre of mean and uh,
because that dude spends you know, a couple of weekends

(01:19:48):
a month shooting with guys like Tim Herron. Uh. And
so another another dude, and this dude was actually cool
and respectful. He was a former former arrangement tian guy
uh who was really cool. And he he came in
on the pro competition side and I was actually with him.
I was articulating. Again, I wasn't anti competition. I just

(01:20:09):
was like, you, like, it's not essential. Everybody doesn't have
to make shooting their hobby to be good enough to
reasonably expect themselves. And so this guy had so funny
because he's like, yeah, he was talking about my background
as a groom brain and he was like, yeah, you
know when I was in the ranger bat I very
much the time he was doing it he was like, I was,
you know, one of the better shooters in my battalion
with a pistol. And then when I started competing, I

(01:20:29):
was only I was only a B class shooter, and
and I was like, hang on, man, let's let's do
some math. You know, there's there's like, you know, seventy
million gun owners in America or whatever it is, and
and I forget the numbers, Like, you know, there's wild
guestimates at how many dudes are in USPSA, and then
how many actually compete on a regular basis, But you're

(01:20:49):
getting down to like thirty thousand and then out of
B class shooters. You know, that puts you like solidly
somewhere in kind of the middle third, you know, or
you know, maybe like I don't know this ats on
competitors and rankings, but but basically I'm like, look, man,
you are if you're only a B class shooter. You're
saying that because you're watching A class shooters and M

(01:21:10):
class shooters. But like if you would just go to
a public gun range, the indoor a gun range, you
would look like like, you know, you're ov wan Kenobi.
And and so if you want to be a grand master, shooter.
Go be a grand master shooter, and that's awesome. But
but identifying for a person who doesn't want to make
shooting their hobby, uh and basically has a finite amount

(01:21:32):
of time and money, Like, how do you how do
you articulate to them? Because on the one hand, and
I find myself being a contrarian with with both extremes,
where to the to the to the dudes who are like,
you have to be in a class every other month
and you have to be shooting you know, five hundred
live fire rounds a month, and you have to have

(01:21:53):
a you know, practice score. You know that's recently uh,
And I'm like, nah, man, that's none of that's true.
On the other hand, you know the folks that are
basically hey man, you know three three and three or
five five? You know five three? What all all that
stuff where it's like all you got to be able
to do is, you know, just have a gun and
you're good. Well, that's not true either, And so for me,

(01:22:14):
I've been writing a series of articles on like, hey,
these aren't written in stone, you know, they're written in
crayon on the on you know, the kid's menu at Denny. Yeah,
and uh, you know, it's written in crayon. But I'm like, look,
the average person who passed a Texas license to carry
quall and has developed no skill beyond that in theory,
doesn't even know how to draw out the ulster. But

(01:22:35):
that's not part of the text of license to carry
qualification to carry guns wild h and on. On the
flip side, I don't want there to be gates to
carrying a gun either, so don't misunderstand me. But just
because you you know you you you passed a state
qualification doesn't necessarily mean you're competent. But that also doesn't
mean you have to go to the other extreme and
become a grand master anything like that. And I think

(01:22:56):
it's you know, let's look at as many civilian defensive
gun uses as we can. Let's kind of identify a
picture of what typical looks like. And if you're a
normal person who doesn't want to shoot every single weekend
of your life, who doesn't want to dry fire daily,
you know, it's easy for hobbyists to be like, well,
you know, just go die in Well, no, like just

(01:23:19):
a normal person, you know, I teach private lessons, and
a ton of my private lesson students are thirties and forties, divorces,
divorced women who literally shot a gun with their granddad
when they were a teenage girl once, and now they're like, hey,
I am the primary protector of my home and my children.
I need to get I don't want I'm not into guns.

(01:23:40):
They're not fun for me. But I've recognized the utility
of I need to be able to protect my family,
and so what do you give them? And tailoring the
skill set to what the most probable requirements will be,
I think is something that everybody needs to take a
hard look at doing.

Speaker 1 (01:23:56):
Amen.

Speaker 2 (01:23:58):
Yeah, because the people who who are people who are
most likely to need a gun, and the people who
are probably using guns in defense the most among armed
citizens don't look anything like the hobbyists.

Speaker 3 (01:24:15):
No, they all looks like us. Yeah, and we and
the reality is and I think it was Tamra Keel
who very proudly said and it was like somebody was
going off on you know it. It was a gear discussion.
It's alost always a gear discussion.

Speaker 2 (01:24:32):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:24:32):
They were going off on capacity and like you know, uh,
just all the typical tropes, right, you gotta have a
glock thirty four of the Red Dot a you know
twenty round mag and force bear mags whatever and and
tamer Keel pointed out, and it was like a Facebook
gim pop discussion. She was like old missus Withers and
her her late husband's thirty eight you know cult detective
special that was manufactured nineteen thirty two has successfully defended

(01:24:56):
themselves more than like every like ve oh tactic cool
usps a competitor. Like it's not even close, uh like
in terms of just the statistical and and make But
again there here it comes the nuance. People say, well,
untrained people who just have a gun get lucky all
the time. Therefore that's good enough. It's like, well, like

(01:25:18):
there's probably a bell curve, a happy medium in there,
you know, the sweet spot where like, let's invest enough
time door, we have enough confidence and enough recent relevant
practice where we're not relying on just sheer dumb luck
and an and an uncommitted assailant. But yeah, at the
at the end of the day, like you know, the
the the deaf seventy year old woman who lives in

(01:25:38):
the bad part of town because they bought the house
in nineteen and sixty, uh you know who hears a
prowler in her house and gets gets the gun and
pulls it out. And then you know, dude, a ski
mask comes comes around a corner who's standing down the
hallway at a at a at a lady with a
snubby and says now and nopes right out of there.
And that's that is, frankly your most typical typical use
case for defensive gun uses.

Speaker 1 (01:26:00):
Yea.

Speaker 3 (01:26:00):
And like you said, Chris, the most people that are
cessily defending themselves with guns are not the dudes on
primary and secondary and and so. And what is funny
about that is that all these videos that surface of
private citizens successfully defending themselves when they get posted in

(01:26:22):
like P and S or other gun groups, so like
kind of in the in the in the gun nerd world,
you know, there's just a ton of like, well I
should have done this, should have done that, Like well right, yeah,
sure got it. But also I will say that one
of the benefits to a moderate an intermediate level of
training at least is that I think it was Jeff Cooper, Well,

(01:26:42):
they knows Jeff Cooper. He said, I believe they may
be paraphrasing here, but he said, if I'm ready, it
will never happen. And basically, like, by virtue of my preparation,
I'm just less likely to be selected to need to
shoot somebody. And I think there's a lot of truth
in that too. But yeah, there you you' all familiar
with the the eight it's like and I'm gonna butcher this,

(01:27:03):
but it's like the eighty percent rule or something like that,
where it's basically, if you get good up to the
eightieth percentile at something like, you can do that reasonably
fast and effectively, and it's that last twentieth percentile to
like true like elite excellence, that's like the nightmare. And
there's a lot of folks out there, some of those
interesting people I've ever met, that make a habit of

(01:27:24):
like mastering various skills, diverse skills, not just in the
gun world, but anything. Right, They're like, hey, I want
to play drums, and they get to where they can
play drums to kind of an eightieth percentile and they're like, okay,
good enough. Now I'm going to get into like I
want to learn to paint and h and so I
think that with private, like I'll give you a great
example of this, gave White like talking to Gab White

(01:27:47):
like guns has been the one Your guns and shooting
has been the one constant in Gabe's life. But you know,
Gabe got like you got into cars for a while
and then.

Speaker 2 (01:27:54):
Like got really good at you know the music. Yeah,
when yeah, music is like.

Speaker 3 (01:27:59):
Yeah, and and so like you know, basically I'm going
to dive into something, I'm gonna get pretty decent at it.
Then I'm gonna go find a new passion. And for
I think for firearms trainers and and frankly for the
P and S crowd, I would argue that like, even
if you don't consider yourself a trainer or an instructor
or an expert, if you're on P and S and
you're active, and you're and you're looking at this stuff

(01:28:20):
for the people in your life, like you are the
you are there, You're the gun guy. Yeah. And so
being able to articulate to your neighbor, to your aunt
who just went through a divorce and now like wants
to wants to get good, you know, if you take
her to the range trying to make her you know,
like you're like, hey, sign up for this for this
Jedi class is Tim Herron Class like go to no
failed pistol, Chuck Presburg like, man, you're your your aunt

(01:28:41):
the nighttib nurse probably doesn't want to go.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
To no fail tystol.

Speaker 3 (01:28:44):
Right, uh So, let's figure out a middle ground where
like they can do the really important things that matter
well enough to not hurt themselves, uh and and be
able to succeed under some stress and and help them
understand that we're practicing regular if you can get them
to do that. And when I say regularly, I'm talking
like you know, if you can get if you can
get a random person who's not interested in guns to

(01:29:06):
drive fire at once a month and go shooting at
the range a couple of times a year, that's astronomics
better than what most people are doing.

Speaker 2 (01:29:14):
Yeah, something we don't I think we don't talk about
enough is uh so in that in that like happy
medium place, if we're looking at like what's where's the
sweet spot between uh you know, the gun is a

(01:29:36):
talisman or you know I'm gonna do usps a whatever,
it seems like it'd be helpful for us to spend
more time looking at what happens when armed citizens fail
to defend themselves, whether it's one of like whether they're

(01:29:58):
actually like shot and killed or what whatever, or one
of like the the negative outcomes thing that that Craig
and Claude talk about. I don't think we talk about
those or look at them often enough part of it
except it's like, you know, when somebody loses, we don't
like to brag about that, like as gun people. It

(01:30:18):
doesn't make us, it doesn't make the case for an
armed citizenship look very good, So we kind of downplay
them a lot of times, I think. But also just
trying to find you know, there's not any statistics on it,
but even just trying to find lessons learned from those
things is not I don't think as common as it

(01:30:39):
should be. So if we're like looking at like so
like Chris, what do you prioritize when you're when you're
talking to somebody who's you know, probably not ever going
to come back to another class or you know, only
if you talk them into it. It is going like
they're not going to do the hobbyist thing like what

(01:30:59):
are the what are the skills you look at and
and do you have any any like incidents or real
life things you point to? Is like, well, this is
what happens when you don't know how to draw the gun.
This is what happens when you don't have manipulate your
safety or whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:31:15):
So and I've I want to say, I've written a
couple of different articles for a couple of different publications
on this. So there's you know, there's kind of a
there's there's a a Vin diagram of you know, with
two circles, two overlapping circles, and it is it is

(01:31:37):
your technical skill and your tactical acumen. And just for
the I realized most most of the folks, especially watching
this live, I really switched on. But in case, you know,
casuals find it on YouTube. You know, technical is how
to do something.

Speaker 2 (01:31:53):
Just.

Speaker 3 (01:31:53):
I mean I can literally give technical instructions for how
to how to go, you know, I can tell my
six year old son, I give technical instructions for going
and checking the mail, just how to do a thing,
how to draw a gun, how to apply a tourniquet, whatever.
And then tactical acumen, and tactical is a word that's
been bastardized for for a long time. I actually avoided
using the word because that it becomes so bastardized that
you know, you've got tactical tillo paper, you've got tactical sunglasses, whatever,

(01:32:15):
tactical pants. Uh. Tactics are are basically which techniques do
I need to employ? When do I need to employ
them from a timing perspective, and where spatially do I
need to employ them? Uh? So tech technique is how
tactics is. You know which technique when you know how

(01:32:35):
much and and where spatially if if it applies, and
so From a technical standpoint for me, it's very very simple.
What I what I try to dial people into is
I'm like, look from a from a pure forget about
the law decision making. Else from a pure technical standpoint.
Number one is safe handling, Like you need to know
how to observe the the four firearms rules, the four

(01:33:00):
unhandling rules both on the range and like we know
we make a big deal in our safety briefs and
in the way we practice our habits of they're not
range rules right that we articulate them in such ways
there are gun handling rules for whether they apply if
I'm in the middle of a gunfight at a you know,
truck stop in the middle of East Texas. Uh. And
so one you got to know how to handle a

(01:33:24):
gun where you don't hurt yourself and you don't hurt
anybody else unintentionally. And that's that's not negotiable. And I
think you know, nobody would disagree with that. From there,
the the biggest thing that I harp on. And it's
funny because there's there's you know, on the on the
in the gunternet, the subone second draws everybody's you know,
like some people love it, some people hate it. Uh

(01:33:47):
And and the problem is is that nuance is lost
because like, man, those people are overstating it. So I'm
going to come into the contrariy and take and I'm
going to over overstate my contrarian takes. Right, And there's
nothing magical about the one second barrier. It's very very
similar like the tooler the twenty one foot rule. Right,

(01:34:07):
We're like, no, the Tooler principle is the principle that
you need to understand. You need to understand the trade
offs of this time and how they interact. And in
the same way you know you need to have you know,
you've got to have this draw a first shot or
that draw a first shot. You need to be able
to reliably access the gun, deploy it rapidly, and if needed,

(01:34:28):
get a rapid consequential hit as quickly as possible. From
everything I can tell, particularly with civilian defensive gun uses,
which are generally purely reactive in nature, that is the
biggest discriminator between success and failure. If you can get
your gun out without fluffing your draw, without taking all day,

(01:34:50):
get it on target quickly, and put a round in
an anatomical spot which makes the guy not want to
play anymore, you're likely to win. If you get a
handful of t shirt throw your gun across the racetrack
gas station. Uh, you're a light chance of success, go
way down. Uh if you miss. If you miss now,
you may still get psychological stops because most you know,

(01:35:11):
carjackers don't wait to gun fire. But still those aren't missing.
Those are unacceptable hits, and we don't know where they're going,
so so draw. Draw. The first hit is the in
my opinion, for civilians specifically who are reactive and are
probably already under lethal well not probably if you're If
you're if you are legally and ethically using lethal force.

(01:35:34):
By the time your gun comes out of the holster,
there is either an active lethal lethal assault you know,
taking place on you, or one that is so imminent
to to his be beyond doubt. Right, guy says he's
going to kill you and then reaches into his waistband. Well,
my gun's coming out, and you know, sorry about your luck, pal.
So getting your gun out and getting an accurate hit
quickly is the most consequential civilian defensive shooting skill. Now,

(01:35:59):
most people who are not you know, gun hobbyists, aren't
going to listen that to that like five minute explanation.
So what I tell them is, look, man, if you
can get to a reliable sub two seconds, draw the
first shot. And I'm not the only one that says this.
I know John Korea of Macro Self Protection and some
other guys who've done a lot of watching the video
and so forth have concluded as well. But yeah, sub

(01:36:21):
two seconds is really achievable with deliberate quality practice for
most anybody who's able bodied, and sub two seconds puts
you in the quick category. And that's presuming also, you
know seven yards a zone or a downs road target,
eight in circle or an ipsick a zone. And if

(01:36:43):
you can do that sub two seconds reliably, meaning you
can do it every time, not do it once that
I would say that you, for a private citizen, have
a a good enough and I hate that word right
because again there's something wus to it, but that is
a decent draw a first shot that's far beyond the
capacity of a whole lot of people who have still
successfully defended themselves with guns. Beyond that, I talk about

(01:37:06):
split times and not and frankly, you don't want five
seconds split times, but I don't want jailbait splits either,
So I talk about the value of practicing roughly half
second split times, and generally, if you're not going to
practice a ton, not practicing any faster, because I want
you to be able to make a conscious decision for
every shot rather than just kind of closing your eyes

(01:37:29):
and going going cycling and then and if somebody is
still going to train. Beyond that, I don't talk about reloads.
I actually talk about malfunction drills and practicing with dummy
rounds and inducing malfunctions and incorporating that into your training
because as a lot of people, especially peace officers and
you know, people who have been in like playing close

(01:37:51):
gun fights, will tell you your micro nine functions really
well on the flat range with an optimal to hand
and grip. If you if you if you suddenly get
a compromise grip and you're on your back, crim two
cars and a dude is grounding pounding you, and you're
trying to fire one hand while you also have a
handful of your own hoodie or whatever. Uh, guns tend

(01:38:11):
to get a lot less reliable. Uh. And we've we've
all seen people on the range. Now, I was fortunate
that I had twenty years in the military, so I
got to practice malfunction drills. Crought of it because I
was using lowest bitter. I was using lowest bitter you
know weapons. But so I got practice malfunc drills cind
of because we had guns and malfunctioned a lot because
they were road hard and put up wet. But uh,

(01:38:32):
for the average person, you all get on the flat
range and watch people have malfunctions and they look at
their gun like it just sprouted wings and flew away,
like they've never seen that before. And so getting comfortable
with like, oh man, my gun stops working, what do
I do? And making tap roll rack, tap rack, you know,
whatever whatever terminology you want to use, making that second
nature would be kind of the big thing. One hand.
One hand, it would be nice. That's that's technical skill stuff,

(01:38:54):
mindset stuff. It's really just legitimately internalizing the law and
how to pick the right tool for the job. You know,
don't go for your gun when pepper spray will do.
Don't go for pepper spray when a hey man, my
bad will do. And unfortunately that if you just think
about it and basically like you know, visualize stuff and

(01:39:17):
think through scenarios, that's good, but you don't really know
what you're actually going to do until you get into
a little scenario based, reality based training, which I'm a
big fan of. And frankly, what's funny is that it
is easier to get casuals. And I don't mean that
term dismissed me. I just mean people who are not
you know, not hardcore hobbyists. It's easier to get a

(01:39:40):
lot of times to get casual folks to do force
on force because they don't have any ego investment. They're
just like, oh, this would be fun. You know, we're
basically going to play paintball. Cool. Whereas if somebody is
a say a USPSA, a class shooter who's lived the
gray man life that has a lot of ego invested
in his self image as a you know, master of

(01:40:00):
his domain, you know, a Jedi master, and then he
goes in a force on four scenario and shoots some
civilians or kills a cop or gets smoked by a
cop or whatever. Uh So, so it's funny a lot
of times, not always, certainly this is a broad generalization,
but I find that it's sometimes harder to get squared
away people, so to speak, to engage in scenario based
training because you know, like I do it as much

(01:40:22):
as I can, and I'll still, with all my experience,
I'll still shoot the wrong person, or not shoot when
I should have shot, or pull out the wrong tool.

Speaker 2 (01:40:28):
It happens.

Speaker 3 (01:40:28):
And if you're if and if you're never making mistakes
in scenario based training, these the scenarios are too easy,
or you're gaming them.

Speaker 2 (01:40:33):
Or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:40:36):
Identity is involved, and your own self worth is in
ques if.

Speaker 2 (01:40:41):
You're supposed to know what to do, it's hard to
put yourself in a position where you can make that mistake.

Speaker 3 (01:40:47):
Yeah, funny, funny enough. A few years ago at at
range Master Tactable conference, it was my it was my
first tack on and and I'd signed up for for
Craig Douglas's experiential learning lab and and and at the
time I did not know I figured out. I was like, oh,
this is Craig intends. This for people who have never

(01:41:07):
done any kind of force on force is kind of
like their first exposure to reality based decision making. But
it's what I signed up for. And myself and uh,
and and Matt guessed, uh, who's a who's a peace officer?
Where Uh we were in line waiting because it's a
it's a single scenario everybody runs through and so you
basically don't get to see it until it's your turn.
And all of a sudden, of some some attendees came

(01:41:29):
up to myself and Matt and said, hey, you know,
I was talking to somebody and they told me about
who you were, and would y'all mind going last so
that we can all watch you go? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:41:43):
Yeah, no, and.

Speaker 3 (01:41:46):
Yeah, and well and I mean I can't. I was like,
all right, fine, But in my head, though, you know,
I I've known known Craig for many years and I
and I know that one. Yeah, it's easy to you know,
like if one is easy to make mistakes generally. I
also know that Craig is just masterful and and iabolical
in his forcing you into really tough choices. So I
knew that there was basically all these students may have
just convinced me to go last, like and watch me

(01:42:08):
to commit like multiple first screen murders and you know,
just kill kill all the civilians.

Speaker 2 (01:42:12):
A woman holding the baby, she's going down.

Speaker 3 (01:42:13):
He had that kind of stuff and h and so now,
fortunately it did work out pretty well, but I did
explain to them right then and there. I was like, yeah,
I'll absolutely go last if you think there'd be some
value in watching watching me go And and Mattles my last,
and he actually did really well as well, and we
we both did well, which was good. But I explained
to him beforehand. I was like, you do understand that,
like all everything I've done in my past, like at

(01:42:34):
this moment is irrelevant.

Speaker 1 (01:42:35):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:42:36):
I have advantages, right because I've been I've been through
a lot of this training before. But it's kind of
that like nobody cares who you used to be, right,
You're you're the star running back in high school and
you're wearing your letter jacket at the football game and
you're forty, like nobody cares. Man, So it's what can
you do on demand right now? And you can make
the right decision one hundred times, but you could turn
around tomorrow and make the wrong decision and uh. And

(01:42:56):
so that's where like thinking through and like going through
your mental contingency planning for uh, you know, various scenarios
that you're likely to encounter, kind of doing a solid
buskusessment of your life. But yeah, force on force training
and reality based training is something that unfortunately there's just
not a ton of it in the open enrollment world
available directed towards civilian specifically. And what there is out there,

(01:43:21):
I don't know how good you know some of it is.

Speaker 2 (01:43:25):
Yeah, it's hard to find for sure, Guys. I have
got to go do some dad stuff. But that happened
a good talk. I wish I could say.

Speaker 1 (01:43:35):
Before you go, yes, I'll quickly say my favorite thing.
My favorite thing to say is make sure you the
listener viewer, support those sources that you found to be beneficial.
If you like what these guys have to say, find
them on social media and give them like subscriptions when
they share something that you especially appreciate you've got to
share it. So for christ for Baker, not say we're

(01:43:58):
going to talk about him in a second, but for
Chris Baker, where are places that people can find you?
How can you be contacted?

Speaker 2 (01:44:09):
Primarily Lucky Gunner Lounge, which is our blog where we
post all of our videos. More people are using YouTube,
but they're always threatening to take us down, like they
take videos down occasionally, but all of them are on
YouTube host or sorry, on our blog hosted separately. We
use a separate hosting service, so if YouTube just shuts

(01:44:31):
us off overnight, the videos are still online, they're on
our blog. It's the Lucky Gunner Lounge or just Lucky
gun on YouTube.

Speaker 1 (01:44:39):
Good deal, great discussion, Thanks for thanks for being here, for.

Speaker 2 (01:44:44):
Thanks for having me. Matt, I appreciate it. Good to
see it.

Speaker 1 (01:44:46):
Chris, Chris, and then Chris Iiberts. Where can people find you?

Speaker 3 (01:44:54):
Well? Hi, I'm Chris so I am. I'm an instructor
for citizens Spens Research, which is a a training company,
does traveling training. So we go around the country, uh
you know, wherever people want to host us, and then
we'll teach you know, uh everything from uh you know,
uh I don't want to say. I don't say basic fundamentals,
fundamental shooting, postal shooting classes, intermediate classes. We've got some

(01:45:17):
advanced classes. We've also got uh, I've got a couple
of seminars that I that I teach, also have I
also do have a one day, one day Airsoft based
Force on Force. Funny funny enough, when I was starting
up the one day Force on Force class, Melody, the owner,
UH owner and founder of CDR, was like, you know, Chris,

(01:45:38):
we've got it in the budget to get you like
you know, UTM or SIMS guns or whatever. And I
was like, nah, based on the training objectives, I can
get done when I need to get done with with Airsoft.
And I just don't want to deal with like AMMA
resupply and you know all that. And and now given
the uh you know, given the import stuff with with
like simmunitions and UTM, I don't know where that is
right now. But I actually, like, I was like, I'm
glad I decided to go with Airsoft. But anyways, yeah,
Course on Force and yeah, and I don't have to

(01:46:01):
worry about it. I just got to make sure I've
got you know, green gas or COO two cars Smarsoft bbis.
But but you can find us on Citizenspensresearch dot com,
our website. You can find us, you know, under citizenspens
Research on Facebook on Instagram. Also, uh, if you can
look for my articles, I write it like a monthly
piece typically for Shooting Illustrated or we just google my

(01:46:22):
name Chris sit Shooting Illustrated. Uh, my articles will pop
up there. I also have a personal blog that I uh,
I've been a little more frequent this year, but uh,
and that I actually write about guns, national defense, theology
like you name. It just kind of my my ramblings
about life and that's amplified being dot com. And beyond that,
I know, I love to see you guys. Love to
see you guys in a class one of these days.

(01:46:43):
So you know, check out our website, be looking for us,
or if you're ut in hosting us for a class, uh,
then you know, reach out shoot me an email at
Chris at Citizensinsresearch dot com and you know I'll come
out and teach the classes and you know, and then
if you're in North Texas then just reach out to
me on Facebook and I do private lessons locally and
now for Worth area.

Speaker 2 (01:47:01):
So awesome to deal.

Speaker 1 (01:47:03):
Were you part of the contingent that came out to
Utah recently?

Speaker 3 (01:47:07):
Actually I did not come. I did not come out
to the first time I'd missed a Utah trip. So
I ended up I was I was gone just before that.
I was gone just after that. Uh and uh, you
know Alex, you know K K. Clark and Melie went
out there and tought some classes.

Speaker 1 (01:47:22):
Yeah, I was.

Speaker 3 (01:47:23):
Looking at going and and then like they they had
it covered, they were all over it. I basically just
would have been a mascot cheering them on. So so
I said home, which actually worked out really well because
I got called out of town unexpectedly this weekend for
for a security security gig on short notice, and for
for what it's worth, I'm glad I was able to
make it on. Uh. Yeah, I got called out of

(01:47:44):
state to go work security for for a protectee on
short notice, and like, yeah, I've had like four hours
of sleep in the last seventy two.

Speaker 1 (01:47:52):
So I well, I would.

Speaker 3 (01:47:54):
Saying I hope I was semi coherent from them because
I may, I may, I may sleep sleep twelve hours
got tomorrow and realized that I was, like, you know,
speaking in tongues. But anyway, Uh no, Yes, I didn't
make it, but I will. I will most certainly be
at the next one.

Speaker 1 (01:48:10):
Yeah, I didn't know that the host hosted, and I
don't know if those are open enrollment, but if they
ever are, I want to go, especially I understanding what
happens afterwards. Also since like a lot of fun too.

Speaker 3 (01:48:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:48:25):
Yeah, nerd Fest.

Speaker 3 (01:48:28):
Yeah, generally not my scene, but I have a pretty
good time at that. Yeah, exactly awesome, man, Well, unless
you got any more question for me, I'm happy because
I was late. I'm happy to stay on. But if
you're ready to wrap it.

Speaker 1 (01:48:38):
Up, I we're just on the cusp of two hours.
I figured, h yeah, tonight's going to be an early
night for me anyway, so I'll just wrap it up.
But thanks for thanks for showing up. Wonderful cap to
the wonderful ending to the discussion. Because other Chris and
I we talked about some of the some of the
other aspects of it. Talked about, yeah, the missions and

(01:49:01):
figuring out and and yeah, and then you're the training
aspect that you brought up fits just absolutely perfectly and yeah,
and you are completely coherent now whether you can drive
or not. That's something else that I can't tell you.

Speaker 3 (01:49:16):
Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna be I'm gonna be sleeping
hard tonight and then I got a mo tomorrow. It
won't stop. It won't stop raining in Texas, which is
the opposite problem what we normally have. But but everything
every since we had so I had uh, I've got
twenty twenty one year old boys, and so I didn't
have to mo over like ten years and it was awesome.
But once I moved out, now I'm back to the
mohen and I hate it. My six year old and
my six year old just needs to get about three

(01:49:37):
inches taller and then it's going to be on him.

Speaker 1 (01:49:39):
Yep, so exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:49:42):
All right, Well, hey, thanks thanks so much for having
me on.

Speaker 1 (01:49:44):
Thank you, and I'll just do my my wrap up spiel,
all right, good deal, thanks yep. I mean, well that
was it. That was let's see here, episode four twenty nine,
setting up for the wrong mission. Yeah, we've been There
have been some side chats about this for some time.
This is a topic that I really I enjoy and

(01:50:05):
it's nice to be able to take a step back
and look at big pictures, especially when it comes to
figuring out what exactly is your mission, because, as I
said before, my mission as a cop is very different
from my mission as a dad, as a husband, or
just being off duty. If you like what we have
to say, if you like this whole stuff, you probably
need to give us a like. I'm sorry, it's just

(01:50:27):
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Click on that and you can support the network through

(01:50:47):
that as well. We got well, clearly, we have four
hundred and twenty nine episodes. Rarely do we have an
episode that is less than an hour and a half.
This one was about two hours. Roughly we're at an
hour and fifty minute. But yeah, multiplay, we have a
thousand hours, well over a thousand hours. I can tell
you that for a fact of these types of discussions,

(01:51:09):
and I just love providing this and love getting good
people together to discuss these topics and it's just fantastic stuff.
So I think that's pretty much it. I am going
to go and see if my family returned. They went
out for a little bit and they should be back now,
so with that in mind, I will talk to you
later
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