Matter of Facts: How Hard Could It Be?

[00:00:06] Welcome back to the Matter of Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFPodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravelet, Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic and here's your show.

[00:00:30] Welcome back to Matter of Facts Podcast. I am setting a challenge for the you, me and Andrew this freaking summer on that patron trip to get some pictures and some video of the three of us so we can redo this intro and all three of the hosts be represented in it for a chance for a change. We can do that. Yeah, well, I'll also appoint my wife the photographer videographer because I universally suck at taking pictures and all that when I'm like trying to live in the moment and yeah.

[00:00:59] I don't know. Women's brains multitask better than men's and any man that wants to fight me on that that assertion, you're welcome to but my sample size of to be me and my wife has proven in my mind my wife multitask better than I do. Absolutely. Anyway, let's do the admin work super super quick patrons. Thank you for supporting the show. You keep the show running. You keep it from being a financial burden upon me, which allows me to do without getting killed by my wife and I appreciate that greatly. And also if you're a patron and you're not

[00:01:29] in the signal chat and you don't check Patreon very often, you might have likely missed the announcement that the matter of fact summer camp is going to be going on this summer, June 20. The week of the 23rd. I think it's the week of the 23rd.

[00:01:47] 23rd through the 26th. We're we're we already have a reservation made from June 23rd leaving June 27 to come to start heading out of there. So it's going to be up in Michigan. Lake carp, which is like right right a bridge ride across from the UP on the south side of Michigan. If you are if you're in the Michigan area or you don't mind making a trip, we'd love to invite you out there. It's patrons only. So if you're not a patron, you should be.

[00:02:17] I'm not mad at you. I'm just a little disappointed. But anyway, so you can if you're in the signal chat, you should already be aware of this. If you're not, you can send me a message through Patreon or you can just check the post because I'm 99% sure I posted information there. And if you're not on Patreon, those links show in the show description. I think it got emailed out to the patrons as well through the Patreon.

[00:02:39] Yeah, that's why I try to make those announcements through Patreon just because, you know, it it's so much nicer than me trying to manage like an email mailing list, which list, which I am guaranteed to screw up completely. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So merch there are T-shirts. There are koozies. There are, I believe, coffee cups. Yes, not. And that's on me.

[00:03:05] The links in the show description. Southern Gals Crafts is managing all of our merch. If you'd like to support the show and support a small business, you can check that. And Cypress Survivalist. My wife and I's nonprofit has officially announced that our first event will be March 8th in Mandeville, Louisiana, southeast Louisiana. The Instagram and the Facebook, those links are in the show description. That's probably the best way to stay apprised of news.

[00:03:30] If you're interested in coming out and getting to meet me and my wife and sitting around for like six to eight hours with some like minded people and learn some stuff you might find interesting, you should check that out. And if you're brand new to the idea of preparedness or readiness, I highly encourage you to come out because I'm going to do my best to get you to drink from a fire hose for about eight hours.

[00:03:55] Just to try to get you some information and get you to start thinking about this wide, wonderful world of not letting the world screw you over at the drop of a hat. Okay. Okay. Four minutes, 30 seconds. At a bare minimum, I'll probably trip over my words, make a complete jerk on myself at least once. So there's going to be at least comedic if nothing else. Sounds like a good time. Okay.

[00:04:24] Less than five minutes admin work is done. We've got a couple little topics and then we're going to get into, I would say the big topic being the big topic isn't a big topic, but you know, California is on fire right now, which seems to happen. Yeah. This seems to happen with somewhat regularity every year or two. Yeah.

[00:04:47] There's so much being said right now in social media land about like the causes for this fire or what precipitated it. I don't even want to dig into all that. What I really want to focus on is like, I have opinions. Oh, I have plenty of opinions too. Would you like to get into the opinions? No, we can save that. We can save that. That will get us on a tangent of all tangents. Yes.

[00:05:15] But I did want to just talk about like, you know, kind of like our end of this, which is like, how do you deal with this kind of situation? Because like we down here in Southeast Louisiana had some issues with a marsh fire a couple of years ago, which was ripping through a bayou not far from where I live. And, you know, there's this is a podcast that largely centered around the idea of preparedness. So like, how do you deal with to me? How you deal with a fire is a lot the same. How you deal with like a flood.

[00:05:42] There is no there is no preparedness you are going to conduct to survive a wildfire or flood. There's nothing you're going to do. Well, there are. Go ahead. What I'm saying is that in the in the sense that most people think about this, they think about like to get ready for this. I need to buy this. I need to learn this. I need to do this ahead of time.

[00:06:07] None of that matters for a wildfire or a flood because your your your shelter is now not feasible. If it's a wildfire and it burns your house down, there's nothing you're going to do to make your house not burned down. Well, there are ways you can mitigate the risk for sure.

[00:06:25] I mean, there's you know, we talked about it when we talked about home improvement preparedness, changing the landscape around your house to minimize the burnable material near your near your dwelling or near your garage. I mean, there are things you can do. There are emergency fire suppression systems that they're putting on houses out in California, but they are in a large part cost prohibitive. Um, yeah.

[00:06:52] Landscaping is relatively cheap in that all you need is a chainsaw and a can do attitude to get rid of all the burnable things near your house. But your wife might not like you just chainsawing all of the bushes. Or if you live in a neighborhood, especially one with an HOA, that may not be feasible. That was your first mistake. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. HOAs were invented by Satan and I will die on that. They were invented by racists to keep minorities out of nice neighborhoods.

[00:07:20] That's what they were invented by and for. Like I said, Satan. Yeah, exactly. There's no redeeming qualities to an HOA in my opinion. But look, regardless of what started this fire, you're right, Phil. The only way to handle a fire of this size and this intensity is to leave, is to not be there when the fire gets to you. And to leave early enough that you don't get trapped on the road or trapped by the fire jumping a highway. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:07:50] So digging into this, like the two questions, the two things I wanted to pose to everybody. And this is not just wildfires. This is wildfires. This is floods to a degree. This is also like hurricanes. These are things you know are coming towards you. Not like a tornado that just pops up and says, yeah, A-O, and then it shows up all of a sudden. Tornadoes, you have minutes of warning. Floods, you tend to have hours. Fires and hurricanes, you tend to have hours, sometimes days. Yeah.

[00:08:17] But my first question, everybody, as always, is your position defensible? Which I mean, and what I mean by that is I was watching, I think it might've been last year, actually, Wranglestar, who's here on YouTube. And he's fairly well known in the preparedness survivalist community. He had a wildfire chewing through his area. Now, he lives way out in the middle of nowhere. He has a huge swath around his property that is clear.

[00:08:44] Unless, and I think even he went into this because he was putting out lots of content during those wildfires. But he pretty much was saying that unless a piece of hot ash blew up out of the wood line and landed on his roof, the likelihood of his house burning was minimal. And he had put things into place to include, like you said, removing combustible materials.

[00:09:07] And, you know, like preparing his home for exactly this kind of scenario that made that position, his home, a much more defensible position than if you have a tree hanging over your garage. Because if the fire gets that far, it's getting to your house. There's no way to stop it at that point. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the first question I always tell people is, is your position defensible? This is the same reason why I encourage people to look at elevation maps down here in South Louisiana when they start home buying.

[00:09:35] I want to know how, what elevation your house is at and what's the elevation of everything around you? Because my house is 21 feet above sea level, which sounds hilarious to everybody until you realize that's three feet from the highest point on this side of town. So I'm on high ground. I have a much lower likelihood of flooding where I'm at. Not impossible, less likely. So I'm willing to roll the dice in a lot of situations where if you live in a low lying area that's flooded a lot, you probably should not risk it and say,

[00:10:05] no, we're not sticking around for this. High chance of flooding. Let's go ahead and pack up and move to an elevated position. That makes sense. And the other question is, what's your red line? Because in a situation where your options are bug in, bug out, you always have to have preconceived what your red line is. At what point is this no longer worth trying to ride this out where we're at? And I don't feel like that's something you decide in the moment.

[00:10:31] That's not something you think about, like, in the middle of the emergency. You should kind of, like, pre-plan this and be like, like, for hurricanes, my wife and I have said in the past, if it's a cat three, we're probably not staying here. It's not that we couldn't ride it out. Just why? Why be here to deal with it? When we could leave, we could come back and pick up the pieces afterwards. Right. The damage to your house is going to be the damage to your house, whether you're there or not. Yeah.

[00:10:57] But, like, a cat one, is it really worth it for what is going to amount to a really seriously histrionic thunderstorm? I mean, we deal with those. Honestly, we get straight line winds that aren't much less than a tropical storm down here. It just happens. Yeah. Right. Very regularly. Yeah. But you have to decide what's your red line. Like, if the fire gets within how many miles of my home, at what point do I say, we're pulling the plug, we need to have our bags packed, we need to load up the car, and we need to leave.

[00:11:25] Because what I was seeing today on social media was lines and lines and lines of people lined up at gas stations, lined up at electric charging stations. Yeah. Everyone trying to fuel up and charge up their vehicles to get out of the area when, like, you can see the smoke in the distance.

[00:11:46] And that is terrifying to me to think that, like, you're going to be stuck on the road in a vehicle with no shelter, and that is coming at you. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you bring up the elevation where you're at, and I just had to look mine up because I've never actually really looked at this house. It's 932 feet above sea level.

[00:12:10] Now, that said, there is a creek running through my yard, and the hill that my neighborhood is on is a water-bearing hill. So when we get rain, I get flooding. Now, granted, where the creek is in my yard is about 30, yeah, between 25 and 30 feet below, like, the entry level of my house, and therefore about 20 feet below the basement of my house.

[00:12:38] But being that it's a water-bearing hill, and that water level can come up or down quite dramatically in those – I basically live on a big glacial deposit. So all the gravel and sand, water can move through that pretty easy pretty quickly. Well, you can have it come up, you know, sometimes five, six feet on a good rainstorm in, like, the groundwater table.

[00:13:00] So knowing that and keeping an eye on those flood stages in places around me, I know when I need to be more diligent about checking my basement just to prevent damage to the house, but also when I need to be more proactive about debris clearing in the creek line so that we don't get a backup and a natural dam forming and flooding out most of my property.

[00:13:28] Yeah, which reminds me, like, that's something that my neighborhood specifically deals with because we very obviously have a culvert that is plugged because the very front of the neighborhood, like, probably about 150 yards that direction, that street floods if you spit on the sidewalk. Right. And those ditches retain water on – just on one side of the road, retain water for sometimes four or five days after a good rain. Interesting.

[00:13:53] Now, my side of the neighborhood, we, like, a block away, we drain into the main ditch, and the water moves through here just fine. It's only at that end of the neighborhood where it's lower, where it's older. One of the culverts is very obviously collapsed. Sure. I told my wife on more than one occasion, if it was me living down there and my house was at risk of getting flooded out every time it rained, I don't think I'd be waiting around for the parish to deal with it. I'd have got some friends together. We'd have figured something out by now. Yeah. But neither here nor there.

[00:14:23] Yeah. I mean, if you've got collapsed culverts, there's not really much you can do, especially if they're under the road. I mean, this one runs parallel to the road, so it just runs underneath somebody's driveway. Oh, well, that's their responsibility to fix, and that's why they haven't. Yeah. Well, regardless, you know, court exists for a reason. It does. And when that inevitably causes property damage to your neighbors, the neighbors are going to come after the city and the city's going to say, oh, that's this guy.

[00:14:52] And then the insurance companies are going to chase that guy. Mm-hmm. But those are the two things I look at. I think about when I start talking, we start talking about wildfire season. Like, it's not to me. It is. There are things you can do to your property. You're right. But I think that a lot more to focus. To minimize the damage. But yeah, you'll never prevent it entirely because some of these fires are so hot that they're burning the alluvial soil off. Yeah. So, I mean, you can't do anything about that.

[00:15:20] If the dirt is so hot it's catching on fire and burning through the ground, okay, great. You have dirt next to your house. You're not going to remove that. Yeah. But that's also why I think the conversation has to shift to what's a situation where it's safe to stay and what's a situation where we're being freaking morons we need to pack up and leave. I mean, a good place to start, I suppose, is talking to your local emergency management office.

[00:15:49] They have all that stuff pre-figured out. They know how long it is going to take people in any given area to exit. And then take their data. Because you paid for that data. You might as well ask for it. It's not state secrets. It's publicly available. A lot of times it's even on their websites. Take that data. Come to your own conclusions. And then add a buffer time. Because the traffic is always going to make it harder.

[00:16:17] And on top of that, I would also say, like, get really accustomed to finding different intelligence sources. Because in a situation like this, like, where I was getting a lot of my news from when we had marsh fires in this area, was social media. Which sounds stupid, but you would be shocked the amount of human intelligence you can get off social media when you've got, like, a hundred people talking about the hot topic in your area. Just listening within your friend group.

[00:16:47] Or, in my case, my wife's friend group. Because I don't have a lot of friends. But anyway. Especially in this local area. But seriously, like, just keeping your eyes and ears open. Listening on the radio. Listening on local AM, FM. Watching social media. Like, you'll get intelligence from the weirdest places. Oh, absolutely. And you can start to piece together where the fire is, how aggressively it's moving, what direction.

[00:17:14] And like you said, like a lot of emergency management organizations, that information's out there. And why wouldn't it be? Because it's taxpayer funded. It's ours anyway. Yeah, it is. And it may take you a little bit of digging to find out who to actually talk to. I know when I first, you know, was looking into all this and trying to contact the local emergency management people. A lot of times they don't want to take your call because they're not sure what you're trying to do.

[00:17:43] Stop by the office in person. You're like, hey, I live over in XYZ neighborhood. You know, I know there's a fire risk or a flood risk or yada, yada, yada. I'm looking for recommendations. I'm looking for assistance. Do it at a time like when there isn't currently an active emergency. And hell, most of them are bored sitting at their desk anyway. Like, yeah, I don't know about down by you, but in the off season, when you don't have hurricanes,

[00:18:11] I can't imagine the emergency management people have a whole lot to do other than training. That's kind of hard to say because when you're outside of hurricane season, you're still in flood season. Winter weather season, which everybody thinks winter weather is like hilarious in southeast Louisiana. But like it's kind of funny. Well, but like you and I talked about before, you know, if the roads down here ice, there's nothing to deal with it.

[00:18:40] Well, not just that, but you can't. It's not the roads icing. That's our bigger worry. It's the elevated roadways. And you there's so many lakes and rivers and streams in this area. I don't think I can get to a town west, east or north of me without going over a bridge. That's fair. So and those bridges are going to ice for everything else does. And you guys don't have salt trucks, so there's no way for the state to manage it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:09] So it's just one of those things where it's like there's there's some kind of a season going on all the time, even if it's not hurricane season. Mm hmm. I agree. So I do think your red line needs to be established well ahead of time. Yeah. So I put all this together because there's been a lot of weird stuff going on in the political arena with DJT about to take office. I've heard apparently Lauren Boebert actually like filed a bill to abolish the ATF.

[00:19:38] There's been a lot of calls for it recently, especially with what was the guy? It's about that time. I'm ready for the disappointment. Yeah, I know. Me too. But let me have my moment. ATF apparently is in hot water again for flash banging a family and some kids for random reasons with a sealed warrant that was justified with a confidential informant, which is police speak for we pulled this warrant out of our butts and a judge signed off on it because he's a friggin tool.

[00:20:06] Is that the is that the school teacher who was a two way advocate that got flash banged at three or at five o'clock in the morning?

[00:20:42] Yeah. He's squeaky clean because the average Bubba that lives in the woods probably got an illegal firearm. He doesn't realize is illegal. Mm hmm. So this guy was going above me on the call to keep everything above board and didn't blast an ATF agent in the front doorstep, which would have got him killed immediately. I think the thing here was is they were up having coffee extra early and they saw the agents out on the front lawn. Thank Christ.

[00:21:10] Because look, three o'clock in the morning. No knock. My door gets kicked in. I'm probably going to respond in a bit of an aggressive fashion. I'm going to charge into the living. I'm going to charge out of my bedroom wearing colorful underwear and a very unhappy look on my face. Right. I mean, it's let's just leave it there. It's not going to be a friendly interaction because, you know, who comes into your house at three o'clock in the morning?

[00:21:40] People, people without a regard for their own lives. Exactly. It's never good. It's never. Oh, it's my neighbor down the street popping by to return a casserole dish. It's a crackhead looking for your wallet. Yeah. Bootheel hits the door at 3 a.m. Like I've heard every argument for why police officers still insist on no knock raids for high value targets. And I continue to say over and over and over.

[00:22:07] I'm like, there's nothing that says we absolutely do not know how to spell de-escalation like kicking a person's door off the hinges at three in the morning. I can understand it in a military context in a hostile nation. Are we a hostile nation to our government? I mean, do you want me to answer that honestly? I really think the answer is yes. From our government's perspective, I think the answer is yes. They consider us a hostile force.

[00:22:37] I mean, yeah, I hate to say that, but I look at things in terms of when I kick. OK, I have tried many, many times over the years to abide and live by this idea that like never ascribe to malice. What incompetence will explain? Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

[00:22:56] However, the evidence based on their actions is mounding up to the point where it's getting harder and harder and harder to give these agencies the benefit of doubt because the way they're behaving is exactly like me and guys I knew behaved in Iraq. And we were fighting a hostile force. We were surrounded by people that want to kill us. Walks like a duck. Looks like a duck. Acts like a duck.

[00:23:26] Yeah. Definitely a horse. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely a horse full of horseshit. You know, I realize that these guys are attempting to do jobs. A lot of them are probably got into these agencies wanting to do good. My my future sister in law is a law enforcement professional. He wants to do good. I think she's actually a good person from from how much I've interacted with her.

[00:23:53] I mean, I don't see her a few times a year, sometimes a few times a month, depending on how often we get together for game nights. But. I don't think that she's getting into law enforcement to stand on the necks of the of the people, but I think that departmental policy. And policy coming down from above departmental policy kind of forces them to behave that way. Mm hmm. And peer pressure. Mm hmm.

[00:24:23] Call it what it is. You don't. It's an uncomfortable position to be the one in the department who says, hey, guys, maybe we're being a little bit heavy handed here. Right. All all I ever tell people is. Like, I'm getting a text. While. OK, it's not my wife or daughter. Anyway, when I get. Family is important. Well, but when I get. We will interrupt the show for family. While podcasting. I immediately wonder, like, is that my wife or daughter? Mm hmm.

[00:24:52] But anyway. But it's just one of the situations, man, where, like, I have friends and family that are in law enforcement. And I am always very quick to preface my comments by saying that, like, I try not to generalize whole groups of people. I try my best. I fail sometimes, but I try my best. But my frustration is always that I expect law enforcement officers to be held to a higher standard of behavior.

[00:25:19] Not because a polyester uniform and a badge makes them supermen and superwomen. But because we as a we as a society have given them the literal power of life and death. We've given them authorization to use, you know, lethal force against us. Yes. And protections from being charged for most normal crimes in the process. And broad legal shielding from prosecution.

[00:25:48] And because of all that, I expect them to behave. I expect them to tread as lightly as humanly possible and to err on the side of protecting the people. And when they don't do that, I want to see their badge fed to them and them thrown out ahead of their jobs. Period. Period. End discussion. And until we get there, we're going to continue to have more of this behavior from the ATF. I don't think we can actually get to that point with the ATF.

[00:26:13] I don't think federal agencies can get to the point of soft touch because they are so disconnected from the population. Because you don't have like in my hometown, all the cops lived in our hometown. We knew all of them. Heck, I still know almost all of them. They kind of had a baked in incentive not to be too heavy handed because, you know, they live.

[00:26:40] And so in the name of full disclosure, like my brother-in-law is a sheriff's deputy around here. And, you know, he was very pointed to tell me one time, like, I have to I even have to like keep my eyes open when I go to the grocery store in case I bump into somebody I arrested. Absolutely. Because he said 99% of them understand. I'm just doing my job. You did something dumb. Like, that's why we were in that situation. But it's that 1% hold a grudge.

[00:27:08] And I have I have to watch. I have to watch myself. You do. Which made total sense to me. But like you said, when you live hundreds of miles away outside of that community that you are kicking doors in, or if you're allowed to conceal your identity and wear like, you know, a mask or something. You have no incentive left to exercise good behavior, except if your department mandates it, which this one does not. No, they don't. Clearly, they don't.

[00:27:38] I mean, Waco, Ruby Ridge. Oh, yeah, that's right. The ATF director that was standing on the ashes of children smiling for a photo op. Yeah. But anyway, so a bill to abolish the ATF has been filed. There's a lot of discussions about Nashville concealed carry rest prostitutes, which I'm pretty sure we've talked about before.

[00:28:02] But the title here is, is this like a new era or is this about to be a whole lot more empty promises? Because I so I can remember when eight years ago now we swore up and down Hillary Clinton was about to become the president and do people were selling kidneys for boxes, not millimeter. I mean, it was I made a killing on 30 round max, but it was it was nuts.

[00:28:32] Right. And then Trump won and we went into the Trump slump in the gun community. Nobody was buying guns. Nobody was buying ammo. Some of us kept buying guns and ammo because we were getting a discounted prices. Oh, yeah. But there was this feeling at the time like, woohoo, the Second Amendment is safe, even though bump stock ban and take the guns first and, you know, do process later. I'm not going to go down that road again. But even though all had happened, the perception was our guys in office, we don't have to worry.

[00:29:02] And then when Biden won, everybody started running around like chicken with their head cut off. Well, I mean, it was covid. There were riots or a lot of weird stuff going on. So a lot of people run around buying guns and ammo and the price started shooting up. I blame covid for that much more than Biden. There would have been a there would have been a boom just because a Democrat was getting elected into the presidency. But I do. I the boom in prices started well before the election cycle.

[00:29:29] It started as soon as covid started hitting the U.S. shores. I mean, there were lines down the block out of gun stores. They were selling out of everything. And I do mean everything. My the FFL that I deal with, he doesn't have a storefront, but he sold every single piece of inventory that he had. And so part of it was. The wacky part of it was during covid, it was the weird esoteric shit you can never get ammo for that.

[00:29:57] All of a sudden you could get was the only thing you could get ammo for. Like if you had a 458 wind mag or if you had a 450 Bushmaster or you had a 500 Smith Weston Magnum, you could go find ammo. So I was doing it was not drills with 32 auto in a 1907 Savage because that's what I could get the most ammo for. Dude, I at one point I was looking for 22 and I managed to find some 22 LR.

[00:30:21] But of all the weird nonsense, I found 22 short, which I'm not sure. Did they still make it? I mean, I found some sources for it, but the point remains. 22 short and 22 long. I was finding it. Couldn't find 22 long. 22 long rifle was getting thin on the ground. Fortunately, a friend of mine owns a gun store. So he was he slipped me a box back.

[00:30:47] Well, at that at that time, because ammo was getting in such short supply, he had a policy that he would only sell ammo with a firearm. Yeah. So like if you came in and you purchased a nine mil pistol, he'd sell you all the nine mil you wanted. Right. Wanted to make sure that if you bought a gun, you had you had ammo to go with it. Right. Yes. In my case, he made an exception because, you know, me and my daughter walked in and I was like, I just went to the range and burned up some 22 long rifle. So I'd need to buy some more. Like I've got some.

[00:31:17] I just want to replenish. And you're a regular customer. So, you know, you weren't the guy coming in to buy everything and dip. Well, I mean, we did we did deploy to Iraq together. So we have some history. There you go. So what do you think, man? Is this like new era of gun rights? Is the tide turned or is this about to be four years of disappointment and blue gun culture, blue balls? The culture is shifting.

[00:31:42] Like I've said before, I don't think the culture will tolerate as much shenanigans and chicanery as they used to. Chicanery. I need to work that word in my life. It's a great word. It's a fantastic. It's such a fun word to say. I usually use jackassery more often, but chicanery is a good chicanery is good. You can use chicanery and sentences around five year olds. And then when they use it at school, you get props instead of getting yelled at.

[00:32:11] But personally, I will never. Count on the Republicans to not screw up a super majority when they could do something their constituents actually want. They have proven time and time again that they will throw away whatever power we give them and just hand it back over in four years. Or in this case, at the midterms, probably just like last time. So I think we're going to see some things done. I would like to think we'll see national reciprocity.

[00:32:41] I don't see any good arguments against it. But I do believe there is still a pretty big section of the Republican establishment that does not, number one, care about Second Amendment rights. Does not really care what its constituents think, feel or want. And that's been proven out time and time again with various studies of what legislation passes.

[00:33:09] You can predict, guaranteed, which legislation will pass based on which lobbyists names have signed on to it. But you can't even if 95% of the U.S. wants it done. Well, but call it what it is. How many people do you think? So the statistics say, like, what is it like? There's 100 million gun owners in this country, about 400 million firearms. Do you count?

[00:33:39] Yeah. That we admit to having, theoretically, allegedly. But anyway, stick with me on this. So that's approximately four firearms for every one person. I know that I am. I and lots of people are skewing those statistics a little bit. But like, let me have fun with the numbers for a second. It's more than four. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:01] But so what percentage of that 100 million people would you consider to be part of the gun community? Because you and I both know that there's a hell of a lot of them that they own like a single Smith & Wesson J frame stays in their sock drawer just in case crackhead kicks the door in. They're not Second Amendment advocates. They're not regular shooters. They don't train. They don't purchase ammo. They have like a gun and one box of ammo and that's it. There's a proportion of those.

[00:34:28] So how much of that 100 million do you think are part of the gun community or the gun culture? Are you including hunters in that? Fair point. Hunters regularly use their firearms. Obviously, they train with them because they have to... I don't know. I don't know. I don't know about regularly use their firearms. Regularly save once, twice a year. Okay. All right. So at least once, twice a year, they sight in the rifle and they use it for whatever purpose. Yeah.

[00:34:56] If we're including hunters, if we're including hunters, I would be shocked if it broke 40%. Okay. So you're already being much more brutal than I was going to be. Let's say, well, let's go that way. I'm just going through my head of everybody I know that owns a gun and then ticking them off the list if they don't go to the range at least once a year. Okay.

[00:35:23] And out of 17 to 19 people that I regularly associate with that I know own firearms, I know for a fact about 50% to 60% of those have not been to the range in the last three years. You know, they inherited a gun from dad. They've got dad's old hunting shotgun or grandma's got the shotgun from her dead husband kind of deal.

[00:35:50] So 40% you would count as being in the gun community. Yeah, maybe. Just a guess. Okay. So we're down. We went from 100. We went from 330 million citizens to 100 million that own firearms to 40 million that are in the gun community. We can't even get that 40 million people to agree on what the Second Amendment actually means because there's people in there. Buds, I'm looking at all of y'all and I am disappointed in y'all. Very disappointed.

[00:36:17] People who use words like assault rifles and assault weapons unironically and who say rapid fire shouldn't be allowed at ranges and black rifles are scary and all this nonsense.

[00:36:29] I kind of feel like the problem we have here is that this community that I count myself as a part of is so freaking bipolar about how do we even identify other members of it that if you can't get consensus within the gun community about what should or should not be permitted legally, then we have no leverage to lean on our politicians to enact any kind of change. The difference is it's changing.

[00:36:58] I think the big difference is unlike 20 years ago where FUDs were the majority in the active gun community. It's now tactical Timmy who wants to train in a plate carrier and maybe shoot a three gun match. I will agree with you on that.

[00:37:16] And that has been interesting to watch because you and I have talked about the fact that before I started this podcast, I mean 15 years ago, I was basically an outcast among other gun people because I was rabidly emphatic about the fact that we should be allowed to have machine guns and rocket launchers and grenades. And like, if I can afford a tank, I should be able to have a belt that machine gun for home defense. Like people were freaked out by people like me.

[00:37:46] But now that those statements are getting less and less and less eyebrow raising and you get more and more and more nods. Because the community has done this weird shift where, like you said, the guys with the NRA hats and the orange vests, and I don't know if it's that they're dying off. Oh, it is. It is absolutely that they're dying off. Well, I mean, we all know the average age of an NRA member has done nothing but rise over the last 20 years. And they've earned that. Oh, 100%.

[00:38:14] You couldn't give me an NRA membership at this point. I had to have an NRA membership to be a member of a rifle range for a while. They had an NRA representative that would show up to our yearly big meeting that we all had. All the members had to show up to and elect the board and then reinstitute the NRA being there. And the first couple of years I would belong to that range.

[00:38:42] You know, you welcome them in, handshakes, all that. A couple of years later, as it started to swing more towards the tactical shooters at that range. Yeah, the NRA was still part of the thing. But, you know, GOA and FPC, if you had one of those memberships, that was fine too. But the year before I left, I noticed something interesting. People were shunning that NRA rep. They didn't let him speak at the meeting.

[00:39:11] Nobody would talk to them. When he did try to talk to people, they laughed at him and told him, well, you haven't done anything for us. Why should we give you money? And I think that's the big attitude change. We've got the ability to organize now people like you and me over the Internet and to and to collate our efforts around people like the FPC and GOA. Or even our local gun rights clubs and find each other outside of the range.

[00:39:41] I mean, the forums, even before the big explosion of gun tubers on YouTube, the just the ability to share training tips, to find IDPA IPSC matches, to find three gun matches. When I first started getting into shooting, I didn't know where to look for that stuff. But I had the ability to just quit Google searching and go, all right, there's a pistol match here.

[00:40:08] I'm going to go find out what that is and show up. So can we agree that while the culture is changing, the political landscape is probably not. Politics is downstream from culture, but it only takes so long before the politics will change to follow culture. You know, we bring up Tim Poole on here every once in a while. He has some good one liners and a pretty funny show. But politics is downstream from culture.

[00:40:35] Culture is everything because you cannot enforce a law that the that the public at large disagrees with. I agree with that. I'm still not holding my breath. They do allow women to skydive in Florida on Sundays, despite the fact that it is illegal. Thank you for reminding me about how stupid our legislatures are, Nick. Like, I'm sure they had a good reason for it, maybe.

[00:41:02] And since we're talking about legality being downstream from culture, meta is ditching their fact checkers. Yeah, because everybody mocks and belittles them. It's become a meme. Well, that and like I so lately I've been seeing this thing that keeps popping up called the dead Internet theory that like so much of the Internet is just overridden by like bots and automated crap.

[00:41:27] And people with like multiple ghost accounts and everything that like the proportion of people that are on social media that are real life breathing people is shrink is probably a tenth. What we suspect it is based on the traffic numbers. I've seen that. I don't. Yeah, I'm not far enough into it to like develop an opinion. I remember when that became the big thing online. And my my response was to just laugh because.

[00:41:55] Bud, you're going online to say that there's no people online. You've disproved your own hypothesis unless he was, in fact, a bot because it was one guy that kind of started the whole thing. It was it was pretty big on the forums for a while. Well, look, I get it. I get it. I mean, most people are passive observers of the Internet. But you and I, we are active content creators on the Internet. We put out these videos.

[00:42:22] We make shitty memes and to make fun of people. We yell at people on on on Instagram and tell them to go back to California. You know, I did just. But most people are scroll, scroll, scroll, like, scroll, scroll, like, scroll, scroll, heart. They don't actively put anything out there. And that's probably fine. I mean, that's not really a problem per se.

[00:42:48] But the issue is the active user base of the Internet has decided that fact checkers are to be mocked and belittled because of how incorrect they are most of the time. Especially if you can if you can post a Facebook fact check on Instagram and then their same fact checkers then fact check their fact check and you can create a recursive loop of incorrect information. It's great. Oh, it's hilarious.

[00:43:14] I actually managed to do it once and it is it's freaking hilarious. But, yeah, I mean, I I don't know if the fact that this is happening right now immediately ahead of Donald Trump getting a getting they're sucking up to Trump so that they don't get a antitrust investigation. And that's that's really what I think is going on here because that's all it is.

[00:43:41] It's it's it's talking to the administration that's in charge, just like they did to Biden, just like they'll do to everybody else. Yeah. And I guess that's kind of where I was going. Was that like, I don't I don't think this has anything to do with with Mark Zuckerberg and meta suddenly turning over a new leaf. No, I know. I think it's I think they're going to do with their user base. It makes them look stupid on the regular and the incoming administration doesn't like that. Great. They have all the excuse they need to turn it off. So they will.

[00:44:11] They'll turn it back on the second. It's convenient. I'm sure they will. Well, that being said, I'm going to even if they ditch their fact checkers, I have zero hope that they're going to stop shadow banning. Oh, yeah. Like our accounts specifically, because I actually I did this with my wife. Like I was going back through old post and I showed her the day shadow banning got enacted for like our Instagram account. Yep.

[00:44:40] Because you can you can see it plain as day, like, you know, 1500, 1500, 2000, 2000, 2500. Seven. Yep. You can see the day it happened. Mm hmm. And the really annoying part was I had a I had a reel that actually like didn't go viral or anything like that, but like it got out of the starting blocks. Even with the shadow banning, it picked up a few thousand views within a couple of hours. And then all of a sudden and then you can just watch the attraction fall off a cliff all of a sudden.

[00:45:09] I was like, oh, the party's over. Yeah. That's all right. We don't need them anyway. I don't care that much, but it's just one of those things where it's like, you know, like me being the libertarian at heart, all I have ever wanted is an even playing field. If my memes are stupid, let me let me be stupid in front of people. And, you know, let the let the let the landscape decide who wins and loses rather than people putting their finger on the scales. Because it's not whether the finger benefits or harms me that aggravates me.

[00:45:39] It's that the finger is there in the first place. Yeah, it's corrupting the market. It's corrupting the market. And that's and then that is why I think that the political ideologies have shifted, have seen such a drastic shift that they did with this election. Because. They were inflating their numbers and they couldn't double down hard enough on Trump being Hitler to scare people more than they already were scared of him.

[00:46:09] You can only call a guy ultra mega turbo Hitler so many different ways before people are like. Bored. Bored. I will say that it has been very fun to be a lurker on Reddit recently. The co-penseed is real. Oh, no, no, no. Even better than the co-penseed. It's the people who are watching, like watching his confirmation and they're about to watch him take office.

[00:46:36] And every step of the way, they're freaking out louder and louder every day. Like, why are the Democrats fighting? Why are they being so nice to him? Why are they allowing this? Why are they acting like this is business as usual? Because it is. And it's like, y'all are so close to the light bulb turning on. You're so close to the light bulb turning on to realize that you've been lied to. But you just haven't quite got that far yet. And by the way, Republicans, we're going to have this exact same conversation in a couple of weeks or a couple of months.

[00:47:05] Believe me, you meet. You're so close. You're so close to figuring it out, but not quite there yet. They're all friends in the background. Yes. But this is also why I go into I intentionally insert myself into spaces where I am not welcome. And I just I just I sit back there with my hands folded over my chest and just watch. Oh, I don't. I actively antagonize them. Oh, because as long as I quietly lurk, then I don't get banned and I can continue to be a quiet lurker.

[00:47:33] I have quite the ban list going on both Reddit and Facebook. Yeah. But for me, they're intelligence gathering apparatuses. So not getting banned. Dude, that's what also for. Come on now. I don't have the patience to manage all that. That's fair. But anyway. OK, so. Twelve minutes left till we hit an hour. Yeah. We can go an extra 15. My euro shouldn't be here until 615 to 620. Yeah. I smell dinner cooking.

[00:48:03] So hopefully that's my wife and not somebody that broke into my house. It's fine. Randomly. I mean, as long as there's a meal prepared, I won't get too upset with whoever it was. Right. You broke in and made a five course meal. I'm upset and curious. More curious than upset. Right. So we were talking about like different things within the within like shooting tactics, the firearms community where like some of these are like eternal debates and some of them are just means at a certain point. Yeah.

[00:48:33] But I thought but I thought it'd make for an interesting conversation like your thoughts on my thoughts on them. And at some point, one of us is probably going to flip a table and say to hell with all this. So we'll see. Sounds good. But let's start with weaver stance versus isosceles. This is a stupid debate. It is a stupid debate. But listen to me. I know I've met people who will defend the weaver stance like it was invented by their grandmother.

[00:49:01] They will not come off of it no matter what. And I've met people that likewise defend the isosceles stance. For anybody that doesn't know, isosceles is like, you know, left foot in front, right foot about shorter width apart. Weaver stances, the old FUD like feet, feet side by side about double shoulder width and you're leaning over your gun. I don't know. Like there are appropriate use cases for both and neither. For both. Yes. Yeah.

[00:49:30] And there are biomechanical reasons why for some people they cannot use one stance or the other. True. Yeah. Me and Phil are actually having this discussion in just some DMs here about reloading shotguns. I have messed up my hands and wrists to the point where I don't have full rotation in this wrist anymore. I cannot underside load a shotgun. Can't do it. I've tried. Every time I do, Phil falls on the floor.

[00:49:56] No matter how slow I go, I cannot keep my fingers in the correct position to roll under or to roll a shell up and under and then trip the action. Yeah. So. Injuries, however you grew, whatever, whatever's comfortable and consistent for you is probably more important than which form factor you choose. So long as your biomechanics on your grip are correct. Yeah.

[00:50:26] And the thing I used to go to whenever I hear these, these. Whenever I hear all or nothing debates. This way is always right. This way is never right. Those kinds of things. I always like to be dealt with advocate and throw the monkey wrench into the argument because I can probably find when you say things like always and never, it doesn't take much to peel that argument. Try to shoot from a weaver stance moving. Try to shoot from a weaver stance if you're shooting anything but a frigging handgun, like try to shoot from a weaver.

[00:50:55] Now, here's the other thing. Isosceles stance a lot of not all, but a lot of people tend to blade their bodies, right? That is frowned upon in the military when you're using body armor because you want a plate facing the person and not the hole where your armpit and squishy stuff is. Put the big square plate in the way. Yeah. There's a thousand reasons to choose one stance over the other. And to have no stance at all. Because if you're standing still shooting, you're probably doing it wrong.

[00:51:25] Like in the world we live in now where dynamic shooting and three gun and these kinds of competitions and just the realities of urban combat with our military are the way they are. If you're not shooting, you should be reloading. And if you're not, and if you're, if you're, and you should probably be moving while doing both of those. And given the number of people that train shooting at static targets, I'm going to be moving a hell of a lot because most people can't hit a moving target for shit. But it is tricky to be perfectly fair. It is.

[00:51:55] It is. It's something you have to train on. And you can get some benefits of that training by moving while you're shooting at a static target because you're changing your point of aim and such. But yeah, but one thing I'm very quick to point out to people a lot is like, I had this debate with somebody one time and their, their assertion was like, you should practice reloading your gun until you can get it down to this time. Because like, you know, speed reloading is a tactical skill. And I was like, I'll be honest with you.

[00:52:24] The number of times that we ever practiced speed reloading in the army was zero, zero. The army does not give the DOD as a whole does not care if it takes you three seconds to reload your weapon. Do you know why? You should be doing it from behind cover. And the Puritans tend to be working in teams of people and ideally not all out of ammo at the same time. But this is also why they teach us in a team environment to holler.

[00:52:51] I'm out reload and commands that let your buddies know, hey, I need to cover down on this guy. And a person hiding behind a guy who's laying down a wall of gunfire is almost as good as hiding behind cover. But the point remains the idea that, well, if I can't speed reload in half a second, it's too slow is just stupid. You should be doing it from behind cover concealment if cover is not present, but you should not be doing it standing in. You should not be doing it like you're at an IPSC match. Right. You were not.

[00:53:20] We're not standing still doing this nonsense. That's not the way this game is played. Yep. Well, that's one of the reasons why I advocate. And actually, Joe brought up a really good fact. A lot of ranges won't let you move and shoot. This is why I advocate for a lot of people to get private instruction, because the rules of the range are very different when you're in a private class than when you're standing in the booth shooting at your target. That's great for working on form.

[00:53:46] But the other thing I advocate everybody do is a lot of dry fire training that AR that's behind me that you might notice has a red bolt in it. That's a man of sex black beard. Mm hmm. So I can auto I can literally run drills around the house with that thing if I want. I can. I mean, between that and the man is X10 and just like, you know, snap caps for my frigging shotgun snap caps for every farm in this entire house.

[00:54:13] I can run dry fire drills and I can run them in what is likely to be my primary defensive position, my home. Yep. And there's no one around. Tell me you can't do that except for my wife, which who I do have to listen to. You do. But that's also why I usually run drills when I'm here by myself so that my daughter and wife aren't in the living room looking at me like I'm a complete maniac. Why would they be just hanging out in the living room? Do you not run team drills?

[00:54:38] Uh, getting my wife and daughter run team drills with me is not going to happen. Bribes. I hear tacos are effective. You might have a point. I'm telling you. Can we, can we agree that center axis relock is a gimmick? It is. And just move past it. It's, it's, it is a gimmick. It is.

[00:55:03] For anybody that doesn't know what center axis relock or the CAR method is like Google that it's, it's interesting. It's a lot of interesting theory. I don't think it actually works in real life. I could see in some competition competitions, it being valuable. Perhaps. I don't know that I want that training scar.

[00:55:27] I think to me, there are some parts of firearms training that are kind of timeless. Most of the things Jeff Cooper taught in his day. Yes. Most of the things you'll learn from like track or his guys at MDFI. Most of the things you'd learn from like Clint Smith, the Thunder Ranch. Like these, these firearms trainers who are prolific, they don't teach a lot of weird esoteric special systems or gimmicks.

[00:55:56] They teach good old fashioned violence, quick action, and excellent marksmanship. And efficiency of movement. Yes. Efficiency of movement. Once you have your basic form down and you, and you are, you're reliable with your muscle memory for how you get on your firearm, get behind the sights and acquire a target.

[00:56:19] Then you need to start working on efficiency because if, if you shoot second, it doesn't, it might not matter. Because if the other guy misses, but you don't, that's what wins. So you need to be accurate first and fast second.

[00:56:40] But we both agree that like when you, when you find a firearms, say a firearms instructor that's trying to teach you like the special sauce that he just figured out that is like the new hotness. And it's so revolutionary. Just, just be suspicious. Just speed is good. Accuracy is final. I don't know why it are. Joe's right. I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to tell you honestly that like my perspective on the whole speed versus accuracy thing is that the two are trade-offs. They are.

[00:57:09] I, I can be more accurate, slower. Absolutely. Yes. And, and here's the thing of it. Anyone would be like, that's the dirty little secret because a lot of people, a lot of people want to assert that like, well, that person's such good. They can move at like Jerry Mitchell speed, but have, you know, grandmaster silhouette shooter accuracy. And I say that's BS. There's no one on earth that can cheat the laws of physics.

[00:57:38] And the faster you move, the less accurately you're going to move. That's biomechanics 101. It does. So the question, so to me, and this is like, this is a debate my father and I have had, by the way, talking about defensive shooting. My point of view has always been whatever amount of accuracy is required to make the hit. Yep. I'm going to move as fast as that amount of accuracy allows me. Yes, absolutely.

[00:58:02] So, so if I'm shooting at, if I'm shooting it inside the house distances, seven to 10 yards, I'm not even going to look at the sights. It's yeah, that's going to be, I'm going to line up, I'm a lineup over the top of the barrel, double tap the trigger. And I'm probably going to make a hit on a man size target. I am so not even concerned with the amount of reps you have. I'm not even going to take the time to look through the red, the red dot. I don't care. It's not necessary. With the amount of reps you have, you can be confident at that speed, at that range with that target size. But that's why the reps are important.

[00:58:32] Now, on the other hand, if I'm shooting at 50 to 100 yards, damn sure I'm going to take the time to line up a shot. Unless it's a rifle, then it's probably, you can snap shoot that pretty easy. If you have a lot of reps. If you have a lot of reps. And if, and the thing of it is, is that, that, that trade-off, that, that, this swinging needle in this gauge, which is like accuracy and speed. Indeed, your gauge and my gauge are different. Oh, every single person takes a little bit more time to get better accuracy.

[00:59:00] You might be the son of Jerry Michalik and be lightning fast and crazy accurate. Cool. Kudos to you. But there is no cheating in the laws of biomechanics. You're going to have to give up a little bit of one to get more of the other. But I always say that, like, there is that argument that no matter how fast you shoot, if you miss, it's a miss. Yep. But there's also the argument of no matter how accurate you are, if the other guy gets his shot off first, your shot doesn't matter anymore. Assuming he hits. Assuming he hits. Right.

[00:59:29] Which is, you know, but that's why I bring up economy of movement before. You can use whatever stance you want. If your biomechanics on your grip are good. If your trigger pull is good. If your sight acquisition is good. Fantastic. But there is a lot of wasted time in people's movements until they train away to have the simplest path of movements in the least number of steps to get the job done.

[00:59:59] All of my mags, I'm sure this will start a different argument, but all of my mags are loaded in my pouches in the same direction. So when I grab a mag, my index finger is on the tip of that round and I can seat that mag without ever looking at it, without any fumbling or flipping around. I do it the same way every single time. And that was just that alone took my draw stroke or my reload time down almost in half.

[01:00:27] Just memorizing that movement. Well, if somebody wants to argue with that, they'll be arguing with me too, because that's literally how I, and I mean, not only, not only just like chest rig body armor, but even if you talk about like a belt mounted holster, the orientation of that magazine is dependent upon. I grab the mag, I put my finger on the tip of the first bullet, and then I reach for the pouch. Yep. And whichever direction that mag is pointing is the way it goes in. That is the direction that mag goes. And no other.

[01:00:53] Because to me, it's all about, I'm not trying to make things where I have to fight them to make them work. That's why I brought up the whole shotgun thing, which is, we might as well just talk about this now. We can talk about it now. That's why I brought up this whole thing of shotgun reloads. Do you, do you reload at high port or at violin where you have like the buttstock up on your shoulder and the barrel pointed slightly down?

[01:01:17] Or do you reload at the ready position, which is buttstock in the, you're in the firing position, but you're reloading with your non-dominant hand. And there's all these different methods. You can go over the top of the receiver, underneath the bottom. But like you and I have already talked about for you, your issue is if you try to load from under the bottom, whether it's at high port or the ready position, your wrist doesn't let you do that. Just don't turn that way. It just doesn't turn that way.

[01:01:43] Um, now what I, what I discovered when I put this red dot on my shotgun was that now I have this, you know, inch and a half tall tumor on top of the receiver directly above the, the, the, uh, ejection port. So I can't load over the top anymore. I don't have a problem loading, loading from under the bottom, but it does mean that difference for me. Probably. Yeah. Well, and it may, it may not see for me, I've used to run into trouble loading from the top unless I could, unless what I, I used to find out.

[01:02:13] I fumble around a lot. And then I realized that if I index my palm on the very top of the receiver, my fingers would just naturally drop into the ejection port. But with the red dot up there, I lose that, that index point. You could index off the red dot. Maybe. I don't know. It's, it's definitely going to be a thing that I'm going to have to experiment with when I put a red dot on my shotgun. Big palm, short fingers. I understand. I don't have that problem. I've got normal size hands. Yeah. People hands.

[01:02:37] But it, but it's one of those things where it's like, you know, I, to me, there's, there's not usually a wrong method here. It's what works best for you. Like there may be a more efficient method. If you haven't been, if you have not had someone, a third party that's not doing the drill, watching you do the drill. Cause they'll be able to see wasted motion in you before you can see it. But even above and beyond, even above and beyond wasted motion.

[01:03:06] I think a lot of this comes down to like you individually, like me personally, I would never attempt to reload from the ready position. I've seen it done where people they'll hold the shotgun on target at all. And they'll use their non-dominant hand. I don't know why I really don't. I have the worst trouble with my non-dominant hand loading the shotgun, unless like going into the loading port, I can get into the chamber just fine.

[01:03:32] But as far as like pulling shells out of the side saddle and going for the, uh, the, the loading port, I, my left hand screws it up fairly regularly, which is why I violin load. Sure. I've got, I've got eyeballs on the, on the port. I've got the side saddle right here. My dominant hand is in play and I can just charge that firearm up very quickly doing that. I wonder if it's a reps issue. I don't know. Cause I don't have near the same trouble, like loading a pistol or a rifle. So who freaking knows?

[01:04:01] Well, but you gotta remember you're dealing with square box, square hole. And with shotgun, you're dealing with cylinder into square hole. You're trying to shove shotgun shells into a Rube Goldberg device between. The little, the little hole. And then the trap door swinging up and down. It's just, there's things going on. I would like to see how you feel.

[01:04:21] I would like to touch back on this when we get towards the fall, after you've had time to do a lot of reps, try every time you go out, even if it's just between strings of fire, relax on the range, nice and easy. Get yourself used to that motion. Try it. Try it. I'm going to keep trying to learn to load underneath because there are situations where you may need to do that.

[01:04:46] And if I can find a way to finagle around, maybe change the angle of approach on my arm or something that I can get it to work. Great. It's another tool in the toolbox. I'll train through that. Here's a thought. Do you have trouble if your, if your hand is like in this orientation, like thumb to the, thumb to the sky? Is it only if you torque it all the way over so that your palm to the sky that you have trouble? Uh, let's see. Yeah. My fingers start opening up. Okay. So here's a thought.

[01:05:15] Maybe roll the shotgun to the side, you think, and then go up and slap it. Well, I was thinking point, point the shotgun more skyward because you remember you and I were talking about this last time. I said that like my personal method for a slow changeover is to, is to actually like to come to a high port and then you hold the bolt back with my thumb and then wrap my fingers around the trigger guard.

[01:05:36] But now I've got the shotgun pointed up on almost a 60 degree angle and I don't have to work very hard at all to get, you know, because my hand doesn't have to turn. It would, it would naturally be more easy to wrap that way. That might be what I have to do to load underside. Yeah. I'm going to have to get more snap caps. And the fun part about doing it that way for me, at least, is that like my issue with ready position is that I'm, I'm holding the majority of the weight of the shotgun in one hand and I'm having a pull back against my shoulder.

[01:06:06] So I have that second point of contact, but at high port, I've got my right hand on the weapon and I've got the buttstock under my armpit. I've got my arm wrapped around it. I have, even with just one hand, I have a lot of control over the weapon. And because I'm at high port, I brought it in closer to my body to have like a slimmer profile. For me, it's just much more, I don't know. It's, it's much more comfortable to me, but that could also be a lot of a carryover from the way I was taught to handle like M4s and M16s.

[01:06:36] It could be. We do the buttstock in the shoulder and you'll hold the rifle up on target and try to monkey around. Right. We, we would pull it down. We'd pull it into kind of a high port. Yeah. Maybe what you need to try as well, when you're trying the ready position loading, don't fully dismount the shotgun and put it up fully at high port.

[01:06:56] Go to a high ready and tuck it under your armpit and use your, your pressure between your, your upper arm and your chest to retain the weight of the shotgun and then just control with your hand. Try that. Not going to a full high port, maybe like a high ready. Yeah. Ish. But in any case, like that, that might be a way for you to still be able to under the, under the receiver load. Especially if the red dot ends up in the way. If I find that it's just too inconvenient to top load. Yeah.

[01:07:26] And I mean, think about this. If you can't change the angle of your loading hand, change the angle of the firearm. Exactly. Exactly. You've got two things in motion here. Yes. But I will say that as far as plussing up the, uh, the magazine tube violin load, the damn damn thing every day of the week, twice on Sunday. Oh yeah. It's so slow though. Cause I can, once you get, once you get. Okay.

[01:07:49] The reason why I say that is because we did a ton of drills at Trek shotgun class, and I really would love to see you, how you feel about this after taking like a real good shotgun class. The speed difference that you have in being able to go from say the buttstock in your armpit and not quite a high ready or not quite a, and not a violin position where you're just plussing up through the bottom of the tube where you're still somewhat on the gun.

[01:08:15] And then just up in click is so much faster than having to flip everything over. I, I just, I just think that there's so much less motion there. It saves a ton of time. And now I'm sure there are times when a violin load. Perfect. Perfect. Like if you've got somebody covering you, you can take your time to load it. You're less likely to drop shells. Fine. But I don't have a team here. It's me and my wife.

[01:08:42] Once I get some more reps in, I'm probably going to wind up doing exactly what I did for, for revolver reloads. And I'm just going to put, put myself on a shot clock. Yep. Just turn the sensitivity all the way through the ceiling. So it can hear. So the shot timer can hear just dry, dry hole and just click reload. Click. Yep. I mean, it's ultimately, it's the only way I'm ever going to know. And I, and training can improve those times too. Yeah. But the stopwatch never lies. Yeah.

[01:09:12] I've tried the violin reloading position and they did cover it in, in that shotgun. Class I took. And they said applicable sometimes, not always the best. Depends on your situation. Like anything with these techniques. But. So here's a cool little thing that I was crawling YouTube and I came across this. You've heard of quad loading, right? I have. I have seen it in practice in three gun matches.

[01:09:40] Which requires pretty much a dedicated rig. Cause you have to be able to grab like four shotgun shells at a time. And then you double, double. A very specific rig. Yeah. I saw a person who kind of came up with this and it was to, to double load off of a side saddle. Okay. So the way they were doing this was between their thumb and their forefinger, they'd pinch off the first round.

[01:10:07] They would hook their pinky around a second round and then pull that. And now you've got two shotgun shells in your fist. In line. Your thumb is on the one in back. And then you just double them down into the magazine tube. With enough training, you could probably get okay with it. Just like you can get okay with quad loads. It's like you can get okay with doubles.

[01:10:33] But my concern is that requires an awful lot of being able to consciously control one finger. Yeah. So I've tried it quite a few times. About 50% for dropping. Have you ever found a pistol shooting? A pistol shooting instructor that will tell you to run the slide release.

[01:11:03] They always tell you to grab the slide with your flipper, rack it to the back and send it forward. Rack it back and let go. And the reason for that is because one is a fine motor skill. Finding that little tiny button and pressing it. And the other one is flipper. The other one is big meat hook top of gun. Hard to miss. Hard to miss under duress. Because you damn well know where that gun is because you know where your other hand is. But you can't always find that little button.

[01:11:33] And especially under a time constraint or an adrenaline dump. And that's one of those things I get into where it's like, I don't like saying any kind of reloading style is wrong. Because competitions? Fine. Fine. Do that. But you're creating training scars for yourself, in my opinion. I think the simpler you can get your techniques and still being effective are the ones that you are going to remember under pressure.

[01:12:01] Well, not to mention, I mean, just looking at the technique, it's finicky. If you could get it super reliable, super reliable, I think it would save you a modicum amount of time. Sure. But the place I'm going to retreat back to is the same one I mentioned earlier, where it's before I'm going to spend hours and hours and hours of reps to shave milliseconds off my reload time.

[01:12:27] I'm going to spend three seconds to look at my environment and find cover. And at that point, if it takes you a little longer because you're putting your shells into the shotgun one at a time, who cares? You're behind cover where you should be to reload. If you get comfortable with emergency reloads, you can fire very, very quickly from an empty gun. We did an entire, they call it a rolling thunder drill, where we were shooting from an empty gun.

[01:12:57] Sometimes four shot strings. Takes about twice as long in between shots. Because look, it's going to take a while to get back on target with a shotgun anyway. But once you're proficient with emergency reloads, like, look, look, most home defense situations, most concealed carry self-defense situations are three rounds, three yards, three seconds or 30 seconds or something like that. Three rounds, three yards, 30 seconds. And it's done. Great.

[01:13:27] My shotgun holds five. Plus one in the chamber. Plus one on the ghost load. Problem solved. I mean, is there a situation where I may need to start topping up my shotgun? Sure. Maybe in a home defense situation. If you've got a half a dozen intruders or something like that, fine.

[01:13:49] But if you're pop, pop, got a second, throw a top off in the tube, pop, pop, top off in the tube, pop, pop, you still got those three rounds you were able to get back in the tube out of your six. You fired six and you loaded three in between your two shots.

[01:14:07] Now, I don't know a whole lot of home invader burglars that are likely to continue to aggress after you fired six rounds of 12 gauge indoors and they don't have hearing protection on. I mean, at that point, you'd better off just hand him the keys and leaving. Well, it's his house now. Let's be realistic here. Let's be entirely realistic. What happens in every one of these videos of a home break in when the homeowner starts firing?

[01:14:36] What is the first thing that happens? Run like hell. Everybody dips. Why would they not? They don't. They probably don't have great health insurance, number one. And number two, nobody wants to get shot anyway. Getting shot sucks. Everybody I know that's tried it does not recommend it. True, true. We got two things left. Can we get through these in a minute or less? Oh, yeah, probably. Okay. Do you carry appendix or on your hip? Yep.

[01:15:05] I'm not even putting small back in here because if you do, I'm going to shame you. If you do, you're asking for back pain. Strong side hip. Yep. Same. And I'll throw in. I'll throw in my ankle carry, but that's only in rare occasions where like. That's extra deep cover. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the only reason I have that Smith & Wesson J frame is when I absolutely positively cannot conceal a double stack nine millimeter, no matter what I do, short of prison pursing it.

[01:15:34] That's when I go for the J frame on the ankle. Understandable. And that goes straight to revolver reloads, speed strips or speed loaders. And the answer is both. I own zero revolvers. Nick. Nope. And you, I have had several and I just, I don't like them. I just flat don't like them.

[01:15:57] If I had a need for a large bore pistol, I would go to a 10 millimeter with monolithic copper extreme penetrators because that would be something like bears, hogs, whatever. Or I'd be up in Alaska where there are grizzly bears and I'm rolling a 12 gauge. I think we need to discuss your definition of need. Well, look, revolvers are just fun. I get it.

[01:16:23] And I've tried them and it just, I can't, I just, I just cannot enjoy them for whatever reason. Maybe I was never taught to shoot them right. Maybe I had the wrong ones, but I have none of revolvers currently in my collection. I have owned two and I got rid of both of them. One of them was a Smith and Wesson 66, four inch, all stainless 357.

[01:16:49] And the other one was a, oh God. 38 special. Also Smith and Wesson. One of the old school police thin barrel jobbers with like three and a half inch barrel. You know, we're probably going to talk about next week, right? Yeah. Me buying a revolver. You've shamed me. Now you get it back. I know if I've always said, if I do buy another revolver, it will probably be a Python just because.

[01:17:18] Oh, just because, or it'll be a 44 Magnum. Probably if I do buy a revolver, it will definitely be a 44 Magnum because at that point, yes, I will have one just to have one. That's the right answer. Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and wrap this up. It's an hour and 18 minutes into the show. Exactly zero of y'all are still watching a stream. That's probably healthy. We have to go. That's probably healthy. But Nick has to go check in with his wife before she reports him missing.

[01:17:47] And I have to go eat dinner with Mrs. Matter of facts before she gets cross. The Euros have not arrived yet. So we are still good. All right. Matter of facts podcast going out the door. Thanks for hanging out with us, guys. Thanks for all the comments. We didn't really get to a lot of them because frankly, we're trying to cram in more talks than we should have in one show. We can always overspill next time. Yeah. So yeah, if you want me, if you want to be on board for me shaming the hell out of Nick

[01:18:14] about buying a revolver, you should tune in next week and we'll see you then. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.