Matter of Facts: Why Gun?

Welcome back to the Matter 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 mofpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravele. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to Matter Facts Podcast. It's... kind of Thursday, but it's kind of not Thursday. And that is going to screw the two of us up at least once this show, because due to the miracles of the internet and the miracles of timing, Nick and I are having to record this a few days early because I have agreed on behalf of his wife to give him his normal, give him Thursday off. Yes, it was not a negotiation. I am being held hostage. It's fine. But to be perfectly fair, I'm not willing to take that up with your hostage taker. Like, she has first rights to you. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're going on a little hiking adventure. It'll be a lot of fun. We're taking the dog. Excellent. That is the only person allowed to come on this type of a trip. Mm-hmm. Yes. Okay, so it's Monday for us. It's going to be Thursday for everyone else. If you're in the chat right now while we're live, you're a patron and you've been given a little bit of a sneak peek behind the curtain, you're welcome to chat. We'll talk back with y'all. If it's Thursday for you, on the other hand, you can say whatever you want in the chat and no one's really here to babysit you, so misbehave to your heart's content. But I have to acknowledge everyone who's in the chat and that we're going to do admin work and that we're going to talk. about the topic. I see a proud Texan who's a complete troublemaker. I see Mark, and I see Raggle, and I see Mrs. Emrickson. Good, good. Not my wife. She's probably tired of listening to me already. She's had me all afternoon. Well, it is Monday. It is Monday. All right. Admin work. If you'd like to promote bad decisions by becoming a patron, that link is in the show description. The patrons are the only ones in the chat tonight, and they are usually the ones that promote my bad decisions. I think right now they're in negotiations for what kind of a hat they can talk my wife into for me. Currently, it's a debate between a Daniel Boone, uh, raccoon skin topper for your helmet. And I'm, I'm pushing for a, um, Like a 1920s long brim fedora. Personally, I think it would look good. You're going to have an uphill fight. Convince my wife to put a fedora on my melon. Good luck with that. The AI Photoshop looked pretty darn good. The top hat looked very ridiculous. I was not a fan of the top hat. What was it? The tinfoil hat. That was cute. That was right. The Australian Stetson, not bad. I'm kind of surprised no one took Stuart up on putting AI in a turban on top of my head. They've done that before, though. They have done that. Let's just say that within the patron chat, there have been several attempts to use AI for evil and not good, and they usually result in me being dressed up like a warlord. Yeah, general Taliban-ing of any photo of you, yeah. Me as a woman, that's been a good one. That's very, very uncomfortable. Hey, look. I looked great in that dress. That's all I'm going to say. No offense. You are not a pretty woman. No. Not even a little bit. All right. If you'd like to buy merch for Vibes for the Southern Gals, that link is also in the show description. And if you'd rather prevent war crimes with Disaster Coffee, code MOF. Disaster's in my cup. Disaster should be in your cup. Mm-hmm. One of the patrons right before we went live said that he had to crack open a bag of Costco because his disaster coffee had just, just showed up. Oh, no. I mean, Costco does lots of things okay, but somehow I have a hard time imagining, like, Costco coffee and disaster coffee in the same household. Oh, Christ. The There is misbehaving going on. Mark, no, I don't get a harem. Mrs. Ravely is not going to play that game at all. Traditionally, as a warlord, you get RPGs and then a JDAM at Velocity, so.... Yes, but if I try to introduce a harem into this household, Mrs. Ravely will strike me across the face like a JDAM. Yes. Yes. As is appropriate. As would be appropriate. Oh, your wife also agrees I need a hat for my picture. Do a classy, like a nice rabbit skin felted hat. Honestly, I think it would look good. I'll let y'all argue that out. Whatever y'all can talk Gillian into. But please, the coonskin helmet cover is cute. It really is. But like Nick and I were talking about before this show started, like I barely wear that helmet as is. I don't need a coonskin cover for it. I really don't. I think what you need to do is introduce more midnight training in your helmet so you can have an excuse to wear the hat. Midnight training. Is that what you called it? Yeah. Night snacking. So like make yourself a sandwich. I don't know. Cook up some, cook up some soup. You do understand that at night I'm sleeping, right? Yeah. But like, I don't know. You've got night vision goggles. You should do stuff at night. I mean, that's like half the point of having them. She's like, I don't know. Go out and water your lawn in the middle of the night. Weird out your neighbors. My neighbors are already sufficiently weirded out, and they're usually out after dark, and I don't really want to see them. They won't see you, though, because you're wearing night vision goggles. You may have a point. Say? Just saying. Okay. Mow your yard under nods. It's hotter than hell out down there during the daytime. You might as well mow at night under nods. I live in the suburbs, man. I'm not. No. Mrs. Rabbley will kick my behind if I'm mowing the lawn in the middle of the night. You're missing out on key training opportunities here. That's really where it's at. Yeah. I think Raggle is on to you. Nick is still young at Hartville. Nick is also... a handful of years younger than me, we've commented a few times about Nick will just casually drop some little factoid related to his age. And I immediately can feel my bones hurting. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, I'm pretty sure I was watching SpongeBob SquarePants while Phil was experiencing 9-11 at AIT. Oh, dude, that's not even the wildest part of it. I have a coworker who just started with us within the last several months. He was originally a college intern with my with my department. We were on on September 11th. We were talking about 9-11 and I just made the comment. I'm like, you know, like this day always sneaks up on me because like I don't think about, oh, you know, 9-11 in three days, 9-11 in two days. But I realize it when I look at a calendar or I write it out or something. I see September 11th and it hits me. It's like, oh, shit, today's 9-11 again. And I made that comment to him and he was like, I wasn't even alive when 9-11 happened. We share a cubicle wall. I stood up and looked down at him and I said, in the least rude way possible, what the hell year were you born in? I don't remember what he said, but I literally looked at him and I'm like, I was a young man, 18 years old, at AIT, at Fort Eustis, when 9-11 happened and this child was negative five. Yeah, that's when I texted Nick and I said, I feel my bones hurting. Gives that kind of experience. Yeah. Raggle. Me and Raggle are about the same age. Why the hell are you watching Spongebob? I had the flu and the TV was just on. And what are you going to do? I was laying on the couch trying to sleep off the flu. That's why I was home anyway. What about on a school day? Yeah, Stuart's saying I do that to him. It's never on purpose, though. Like, you can tell... No, no, no. Hang on a second. Stuart knows there are moments in time where I'm absolutely messing with him about his age. When I make some comment about riding dinosaurs to school, or how he had to chisel his first set of tires out of a chunk of stone, or, like, Or like how his engagement present to his wife was like the chunk of amber with the mosquito inside of it from Jurassic Park. Oh, that's a good one. All those kinds of jokes are well within bounds for me and Stuart. I lay it on real thick with him. But then every now and then I just say something totally innocently and he's like, shit, I'm old. Hey, man, I think that's a rite of passage. I mean, heck, gosh, we've got an intern here. at work who is legitimately half my age. He is 18. Just graduated high school. And some of the stuff he says, I'm like, I don't think you really understood that reference you made, bud, because I was there when that came out. And that was a long ass time ago. Is that like where I pull out the line, the witch in the wardrobe line on you? And I say, don't, don't quote the old match, which I was there when it was written. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great one. I forget what YouTube series he quoted. And I quoted the next line to him, and he didn't get it. I think it was from Red vs. Blue. He's like, what was that? And I was like, well, that was the next line in the show. He said, it's not a show, it's a meme. I'm like, oh, buddy, have I got a show for you? I have to admit, it was not on my bucket list to watch my daughter's friends walking around in band shirts that were popular when I was in junior high. That was not on my to-do list. I was not expecting to wind up in this timeline. It's fun to watch, though. Although I have to say, the 15-year-olds running around town in JNCOs, never thought I would live to see that trend come back. I really wish I hadn't. I mean, there are worse parts of our culture to emulate. And besides, if you had big enough JNCOs, your pants could double as a survival shelter for a small family. They really could. I mean, my God. My buddy in high school had those that were just absolutely atrocious. And this was well after those were a thing. Oh, yes. I watched him get his pants caught in a sliding door because he didn't move fast enough for his pants to keep up with the door shutting. They were so billowy. That's a bit of an occupational hazard. Dude, it was hilarious. Of that I have no doubt. We have a topic. We do. We've been BSing for 12 whole minutes. We have a topic. It's okay. It's Monday. The topic is why gun? Because last time I tried to put a second person in my pants in public, people got upset. The cop in the can't carry a cop around. Oh. Yep. You're not allowed to do that. Apparently you can't just kidnap police officers, strap them to your hip, and wander around with them. That sounds like a very inconvenient bit of legalese to have to abide by. It is. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess, we cannot kidnap police officers and use them as self-defense tools. Yeah. That seems reasonable, though. Because forcing someone else into an act of servitude on your behalf and transporting them against their will, that reminds me of a thing that we're not supposed to do anymore. You mean taxes? Well, I was referring to slavery, but, you know. Sure, yeah, slavery with extra steps. Got it, yeah. Yes. Anyway, but no, why gun? Because, so I, in the name of full disclosure, I've been... trying to, like, you know, shake the idea box a little bit, and I've been asking AI questions. And it's been instructive. One of the things I asked was, like, I forget exactly the prompt, but it was something to the tune of, like, what are all the reasons why a person who doesn't own firearms would ask, like, why do you need a gun, or something along those lines. And it literally came up with this list, like, All these different things that someone might respond to that prompt with. And I added a couple, I took a few away, but I thought this would be an interesting discussion to talk about like from the gun owners to the non-gun owners. These are all the reasons we may respond with when you ask, why gun? Because Nick, I can't speak for you, but I've certainly been asked by like coworkers and people in the past. Like, why on earth do you have guns? Why do you have so many guns? Why do you carry a gun? I've been asked some version. Of that multiple times. I will say I can be pretty bad about that because I will cater my response to that based on how much good faith I think the person is asking in. If I don't think they're asking in good faith... I will probably make up something like I think reptilians are putting drugs in our pastries just because I know that they're not going to listen no matter what I say. So I try to make it so ridiculous that it sticks out in their head that they've asked a retarded question. And see, I go about it completely the opposite direction because like I, you know, like you and I've talked about in the past, like I, I have a certain set of beliefs when it comes to not, not the second amendment, even though that's a colloquial term, but like, the armament of the civilian population. I think that independent of a constitutional right, independent of law, independent of everything, like I draw direct comparisons back to if there were no government, if there were no laws, if we were just like hairless apes running around in loincloths, what rights would you have? Sure. You have the right as just a creature in nature to attempt to defend yourself and extend your lifespan. Every creature has that without a Second Amendment. Every creature has that without a constitutional right to have firearms or to have tools or to have weapons. Every creature, if cornered and threatened, will fight to preserve itself. And therefore, we as human beings, the large, talkative, hairless apes, have the same right. Well, we absolutely do, and I think that's very valid, but I think the point I was getting to... perhaps I communicated poorly was that there are people that, you know, when they talk to you, that regardless of what you say, they are just waiting for you to finish what you're saying for them to repeat their CNN talking point. I understand. I understand that. But I'm actually who the, the, you know, the pink haired lady with a nose ring, like you, you might as well and get some enjoyment out of messing with them because that's the most productive part of the conversation. Let me offer an alternative to that. Mm-hmm. I'm not talking to that person, even if they're the one asking the question. Well, that's a fair way to think about it. I'm talking to everyone else in attendance, because I've been through this discussion literally like around the water cooler before. Mm-hmm. And it come up, and I'm not talking to the person who cannot be convinced, the person who's, you know, they're sticking their fingers in the air saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't care. They're already a lost cause. Oh, yeah. But I operate off of this idea that there's 20% of the population on one side of an issue, 20% on the other, and there's usually about 60% in the middle that aren't convinced yet. Sure. I am fighting a war for that 60% in the middle because this 20% over here, I'm never going to convince. And that 20% over there, I don't have to. But the 60% in the middle, I might be able to sway my way with reasonable, thoughtful discourse. And there's a possibility that snarky, sarcastic comeuppance might push in the other direction. That's possible. I mean, you're probably a more responsible adult than me in that case. Oh, Nick, I wish you wouldn't put that on me. That makes me sound old. Hey, man, look, I can't help but antagonize certain groups of people. I just can't. I have to do it. It's like an impulse control issue for me. And you know what I've noticed is The more life experience I get, the older I get. Those kind of sassy backchat comments are appreciated by everyone except for the exact right people. I mean, and that's fair. I think that using the snark and sarcasm like an icebreaker and then following it up with reasonable discourse is probably a good middle ground. Because usually the person that's not worth talking to wanders off immediately and then you can have an actual discussion. But then you have Stewart here, like, when I was asked why gun, I replied why sex. Why sex is fair. I mean, because I want to is always a perfectly good reason. But to go just a step beyond that, I want to talk about the variety of reasons why not all these will apply to me and not all these will apply to you, but I think that these are reasonable answers that we could have some discussion with. Sure. And then potentially maybe fight for that 60% that's in the middle. Worth a shot. So, first and foremost to me is always self-defense, individual protection against people who would mean to do you harm. I think that that is a good place to start in this debate because it is the one thing that is like the most personal. It's the least esoteric. You can make a really good discussion point out of like, Hey, if someone is attempting to harm you or your family in your home. Yeah. Do you want to just like call 911 and hope that they get there before they get finished kicking your door in? Or do you want to have something to protect yourself? Like it's a, It's taking these big ideas and taking them down into a microcosm where you can insert a person into a situation and say, in this situation, the police are five minutes away, and that thin cork door is the only thing between you and somebody trying to hurt your family. Yeah, even if you want to say, well, I have a high security door. All right, I can tell you this much. I I have been involved in a number of occasions where a family member or friend has locked himself out of a house. I have not once found a house that I could not enter within three to five minutes of pulling up on the property, just knowing, Hey, I'm locked out of the house. Most of the time, um, You can flip a window latch. You can kick the door in. You reach through a mail slot and trip something. I mean, one of my buddies locked himself out of his house so often. He got so good at unlocking his door with random sticks that he had quite a collection inside his door of the sticks he used to the point where it was concerning his mother with all the wood in the house. Let's take it back one step. Go really low tech. You armor up your house. however you want to, in an attempt to keep your above-average, enthusiastic home burglar out. Do you think for one second that I couldn't take my pickup truck, whip it around in your front yard, point the friggin' tailgate at a wall, and blow right through the outside wall? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So, now that is an extreme... That is an extreme situation, but the point remains that if somebody wants into your home badly enough to get to you, to get your family, to get your stuff, there is absolutely no chance short of living in a concrete bunker, you're going to keep them out 100%. Everything you do is buying time. It is making you less likely to be a victim because your home is more aggravation to break into. None of this, by the way. It's like the argument about gun safes that we've had over and over and over. Gun safes? do not make it so people cannot steal your guns. It makes it a bigger pain in the ass. Yep. It makes it so that it takes power tools and noise, but it still is not like much more than a five minute job to cut open most gun saves. If you know there's stuff inside, you really. Want, I largely consider gun saves a method to keep drunk friends and children away from firearms. Yeah. And that's, that's that case. It's really all that job. Wonderfully. Yeah. Because look, I'm, I'm a machinist. I have more tools than your average individual for cutting steel, okay? All you need to get into the vast majority of gun safes is an angle grinder and two cut-off discs. Most gun vaults, like the proper good quality gun vaults that are double-layered steel, usually with either plaster or some kind of ceramic or cement in between the layers of steel, those take longer. Those take longer, but You're still going to have weak spots. Yeah. But all that to say, like, I think self-defense is a good place to start just because it's something that's somewhat relatable. I mean, even for the person who is the most ardent, I live in a safe neighborhood, it's a gated community, blah, blah, blah, blah. Even they have to acknowledge. Because I find, I've gone down this road with one person and had them throw that up as, you know, the fact shield to prevent them from having to admit that I might have a point. And I was like, well, I'm excited that you live in a very safe neighborhood where there's no chance of anyone ever breaking into your house, but are you aware that there are other people that live, like, on the wrong side of town, in low-income housing areas, where the crime rate is five times what it is by you, and those people happen to live in a place where the police response time is four times what it is by you because they don't pay as much in taxes and Police have figured out that I don't like going to that place because I get shot at all the time. Don't you think that person, that single mother with three kids and three jobs, might deserve to have a handgun to protect herself if someone breaks into her house in the middle of the night trying to steal stuff to sell for drugs? And I can engineer a situation where even the most liberal, the most progressive, is going to be really hard-pressed to say, no, that woman doesn't deserve to have a gun because now I'm saying, the disenfranchised minority that you claim to be so concerned about. Now you're telling her you'd rather her to be, you'd rather her be helpless than have the means to protect herself. And that's a, that's a place a lot of people cannot jump to. It is. Let's be, let's be pretty reasonable here though. You don't even have to go that far. Everybody has to leave their home eventually. Yeah, but I find that the grocery. Store, you know, look, women get, especially women get creeped on a lot by shitty people. My wife has mentioned it to me a couple of times. She brought it up in the comments that why did people have to be so creepy? One of these days she won't have me with her. Look, if I'm with my wife, she's probably safer than anywhere else because I will do war crimes if necessary to keep my family safe. It's only a war crime the second time. Oh, it'll be the second and third time because you've picked fuck around. I have a whole lot of find out. So, you know, I feel perfectly justified in defending my family by any means necessary. And I do mean any because I can pretty well guarantee that my wife's not the one that would have started this problem. So I can sleep very well at night solving it. Now, look, I'm a big guy, Phil. You've met me. I'm over six foot tall. I'm about 225 right now. I'm a very strong guy. Taller than me as long as we're standing up. As long as we're standing up. Until we sit down. My God, you have weird proportions. I am the tallest dwarf any of you have ever met. My God. He is. Little bitty legs. Big, big torso. Yeah. But look, I can handle myself. when it comes to a physical confrontation, I have had to do that in the past. I will hopefully not have to do that in the future. It is not enjoyable. You always end up injured on the backend, but, um, I've got a leg up on your average individual strictly because of my size, my strength, and my reach. Your average individual is smaller, lighter, and weaker than me. That's just, that's just the way them breaks roll. But I guarantee you, your wife, your daughter, your sister, your mom, almost certainly weaker than your average man. So why not give them the tool to make them at the very least on an equal playing field? Yeah. I mean, if you want extreme example, like take my mother as an example, she's in her early seventies and is five foot nothing and about a buck 20. Yep. Zero, zero. 0% chance she's going to defend herself in a physical altercation against a determined attacker. However, you'd be surprised how fast a five-shot J-frame will tilt things back in her favor. Oh my gosh, yes. Anyway, so I think self-defense is a good place to start. Here's one that's going to be fun. In most circles, citing hunting as a valid reason to have guns... We'll immediately get at least a couple of head nods out of the crowd. Sure. Because, like, most people accept that, like, okay, there's a good reason to have, like, you know, a bolt-action. 308 or something along those lines. Because, obviously, hunters need guns to hunt. Sure. Up until you get the person who says, well, you shouldn't be hunting anyway because killing animals is wrong and veganism and yadda yadda yadda, yeah. You know, I. I see a lot more success in the argument of for hunting specifically because a lot of people see that as a lot of the, a lot of the people that are anti-gun see that as a thing poor people do. And a lot of them are like, Oh, let's help the poor people out. Hunting's fucking expensive. I was about to say hunting is expensive. That's like saying that camping is inexpensive just because you live like a homeless person for a weekend. That's an expensive way for middle-class people to live like they're homeless. Hunting used to be a thing that was achievable by people in poverty more than it is today. I mean, my gosh, in my state alone, I think the average lease on a 20-acre deer parcel for just deer season is like $ 5, 000 or $ 6, 000 a year now. If you don't have 20-plus acres. And very few people do. Yeah. I would also say that like you. I have met a vegan. We have one at work. He's sick twice a month. He could use the protein. I've also met several vegans that make me look like a Victoria's Secret model. I don't know how on earth that happens, by the way. I do. I know how it happens. Highly processed seed oils. Highly processed seed oils. They eat a shitload of the vegan meat substitutes, which are beans and soybean oil. Soybean oil and a lot of the other seed oils, they are correlated heavily with appetite deregulation and obesity. Did you see the thing I sent you before the show? I don't think you commented on it. it was the the 3d printed meat. Oh yeah no i did i did comment i think i replied to that at least i intended to that's why i that's why i only buy my beef from a farmer where i've gotten to look the cow in the eye and say yeah you look like a tasty bastard. No, I just said this. I sent that to Nick, and I said, wives that feed their husbands the 3D-printed plant-based meat is heresy and shall be treated as such. It is heresy. And then I showed Mrs. Rabelais, and she didn't say anything, but she had a look on her face as if I had dropped a Cleveland steamer on her chest. It was pretty foul. Yeah, Raggle, we did. Oh, yes, Raggle. 3D-printed meat. Campbell's has been using it in their soups, apparently, for the last couple years. Lab-grown meat and 3D-printed meat. Yeah, the 3D-printed meat, it's... What was it? It was soybean. Soybean to simulate the meat. Yeah. And then they were using. Glues and binders to hold it all together and a little bit of rendered vegetable fat for the fats. The thing I saw wasn't even using... I don't recall now. Anyway, Raggle, if you remind me later, I will put that in the patron chat for y'all to vomit your mouth over. But yes, the explanation for how they make plant-based 3D printed meat, that thoroughly convinced me that we are well past. We've had our fun. It is time for exterminatus. Do you remember? I will green light it. Like five or ten years ago, when all the health experts were saying, avoid highly processed foods. They're bad for you. They're too high in sodium. They're too high in fat. They're too high in sugar. Don't eat super highly processed foods. Now where are we at? Before they started saying cow farts are bad for the ozone layer. Super highly processed meat products to replace unprocessed meat products. That's a great idea. Let's do that some more. I literally told Gillian, I'm like, I don't understand this fascination with making plant-based meat when we have these magical creatures just walking around And through the miracles of their bodies, they convert grass into steak. We already have a meat 3D printer. It's called a cow. Turns out when you leave them alone in a field long enough, you just get more cows. And when you harvest them responsibly, you get steak. Anyway. So yeah, I mean, I feel like hunting works, but I feel like you have to like, other than leaning on the idea that like, It helps out poor people, even though we both know that's a fallacy. I find that sometimes you can win people over by pointing out to them the majority of conservation efforts that are aimed directly at wildlife and nature. It all comes from ammunition sales. Those are funded on the backs of hunting. I can't speak for the rest of. Hunting and fishing revenues are actually a very small component of that. The vast majority of it is firearms and ammunition sales, almost exclusively. Yeah. Pittman-Robertson... Conservation tax, I believe it is, is like, I want to say it was in the upper 70s. Let me find out exactly how much that percentage is. But yeah, there's a non-inconsequential amount of excise tax that's tacked on every round of ammunition and every firearm you purchase that goes directly into the coffers of local wildlife and fisheries. I was wrong. It's 55% of total wildlife conservation funding. So well more than half. At least here in Louisiana, I can tell you from having spent some time with the folks that run those programs, they legitimately spend that money appropriately to try to revitalize failing populations, try to improve the... Oh, God, what's the word I'm looking for here? Where the hell animals live? Habitat. Thank you, Nick. You're welcome. Yeah. Look, recreational shooters, of the Pittman-Robertson dollars, recreational shooters are the vast majority of it. Yep, and that's actually my next thing, is sport recreation target shooting. And I'm making a big umbrella here to go everywhere from your F-Class guys, to your muscle-loading champions like Eddie, to your SAS guys, to your guys that are just going to the range like mag-dumping into a trash pile, like If you shoot for sport, recreation, leisure, target shooting, you fall in this big, broad category. And even though there are, again, people like a bear in mind who our target audience is, we're trying to convince people there's a legitimate reason to have guns. And the vast majority of people out there, like I feel like hunting is not the vast majority of gun owners anymore. And even though I feel like a majority of gunners probably would cite self-defense as a reason, there's a huge group of people out there that are literally just sport recreation target shooters, whether it's a formal discipline or whether it's just shooting for fun and leisure on the weekends. Phil, do you know what IDPA stands for? IPA? IDPA. Oh, sorry. You roboted for a second. I thought we were talking about beer for a second. Nope. No, IDPA, International Defensive Pistol Association. Funny thing about that, I used to shoot IDPA, and there were a not inconsiderable number of people that would come out to that event and would say at that event, well, I could never use a gun in self-defense. Sir, you belong to the International Defensive Pistol Association. This is designed to help you train for defensive pistol shooting. But for some people, it's no different than going golf. No, they do. They see it as golf. They see it as golf. They see it as bags. They see it as darts. They see it as a game they are playing and make numbers go down in this case. Yeah, I mean, you and I had the conversation about how there's a not inconsequential number of people out there who would take the average military police sharpshooter to task with their skills. Yes. Who would never, never on God's green earth even consider under the most frightening and unrealistic of circumstances taking another human life with one of those rifles. Because this thing is for, to them it's golfing. Yeah. In the same way that you would not expect Tiger Woods to like whack somebody to death with a golf club in his front yard, you would not expect this person to use that rifle in anger against a human being because it is a thing of sport. I have actually used long-range rifle shooting as meditation. That's a damn good reason for it. Task-focused meditation. It's one of the reasons why I like shooting. 22s long-range, because I don't have to go out to a 600- or 800-yard range to get a challenge as much. Before I get into some of these comments, because we seem to have touched something off, I will say that like when I'm, when I'm doing load development, I very intentionally like turn the active hearing protection off in my cans. Sometimes I'll even double up my, my hearing protection. And it's just, it is to make the world outside of my shooting lane disappear. So I can just like get down into the flow, focus on what I'm doing. And especially now, because like, Before my load development, it was all based around making sure that I wasn't the one pulling the shots and I was really just watching group size as an indication of how flat the primers were. Now, I'm also running a chronograph and taking notes and looking through a spotting scope all while doing all this. I've turned my load development procedure into a human Rube Goldberg machine doing four things at the same time. I'm going to tell you, I screwed my data up one time because I went out there and I just forgot to turn the daggum chronograph on for a string of shots. That then meant I had to, like, make a note that the shot string I had skipped over this one load so that when I go back and, like, plug in the notes and everything, I'd remember that. It's meditation, but you have to be super focused just to do it. You have to be fairly focused for meditation, in my experience. Mm-hmm. Just generally. I guess what I'm saying is that that turns into one hand washing the other at a certain point. Whether you have to focus to meditate or the meditation enhances your focus. It's the tail wagging the dog. Yeah, both. A couple of things. Mark's saying, I always said I was a secondhand vegetarian and that is the best kind of vegetarian. The only acceptable kind. Look, I'm not a genius, but I know that when you have teeth that are flat grinders that are sharp cutters, and in between, you have the mouth of an omnivore. So we were meant to eat meat and veggies. Yes. Although I still think the fact that we have this many sharp cutters and these pronounced canines in the front, probably supposed to be eating meat as a primary source of your diet. Yeah. And if I'm wrong, then we'll see which one of us lasts longer. I'm content with my choices. Even if I die first, I'll die happy because I eat bacon all the time. Uh-huh. And if you live to be 100 as a vegetarian, you'll die sad no matter how old you are. Yeah. I swear to God, this feed is going to get nuked off of YouTube because now I'm poking fun at the vegetarians. It's fine. We don't need them anymore. Raggle says, that's what happens when you turn it into competition, though. What did you think would happen? You get six guys in a room doing the same thing. Eventually, it turns into a competition, no matter what your intention was. Yeah, I mean, I have Mark saying IDPA is not training. It's just a game. Lies. Anytime you're improving a skill, it is training, if you treat it as such. Let me agree and disagree with you. Okay. Okay. I understand where you're coming from. I don't disagree with it on principle that if you're improving the skills, it kind of counts as training. But you and I have also talked before about the fact that, like, Part of the military procedure for building soldiers psychologically involves desensitizing to violence. Oh, definitely. Spring-loading people towards action, overcoming their fight-or-flight instinct by, again, spring-loading them towards violence. And because of that, most people that spend any time in the military have the ability to make a binary decision, flip a switch and move to violence. Yeah, it's violence time, yeah. Yeah. The problem is that you can take a person who has spent 20 years in IDPA who has all the gun handling skills on earth, but the thing inside their brain that lets them turn those skills into I'm going to take this person's life isn't wired together. And there's a piece missing in the equation that IDPA could be used as a gun handling skill trainer, but without the intent to use it in that way, it doesn't accomplish that goal. That's why I mentioned the caveat of if you treat it as such. It's only ever training if you treat it as training. Otherwise, it's just messing around. Frankly, it's the same thing you could say about a person that goes to a flat range. If every time you go to the range, you are training with the intent of having the skill set necessary to defend your life and then someone else's in an extreme case, then it's training. And if you're just punching paper for fun with your idiot friends, then it's just leisure. That's not training. I think, I think intent matters a lot here. And I also, you know, what some people see as just, it's sometimes hard to tell because if you put me on a flat range next to say my brother-in-law on a flat range, it looks like I'm just punching holes in paper. But what I'm doing is I am doing, I am doing very deliberate drills at a speed that that most people cannot perceive as a deliberate drill. That's fair. Let me offer one more thing before we move. Come on, Phil, you didn't lose your train of thought that fast. My bad. I done you dirty. You did me dirty. Oh, it was so insightful too. Oh, that's annoying as hell. It'll come back. Maybe next week. That does me no good. No, it does not. Oh, that's fucking annoying. Anyway, y'all can have a good laugh at that. Phil has reached the ripe old age of 43 years old and loses his train of thought mid-flow. Oh, no, no, no. Thank you, Mark. You didn't try to, but you brought it back to me. Good. I will say this much. I do think that there is one... There's one thing about IDPA and IPSC and all these things that does take it to a point where I no longer consider it to be training. Okay. And that is when in the pursuit of the better score, you start doing things that you would never on earth do in a true carry situation because you're trying to beat the game. Okay. We're not training anymore. We might be improving skills. Sure. But it's the difference between the guy who goes out to an IDPA match and he's going to draw from a holster you could conceivably draw from or you could conceivably carry. He's carrying a firearm with a reasonable trigger pull. He's not running a full race gun. He doesn't have the rig with all the frigging 45-degree canted magazines. He's running a rig that is representative of what he would truly carry on the streets. That's actually how I shot IDPA and IPSec for the most part, was I shot with my carry rig. And in those boundaries, I say, you can call that training and I'll back you up on that. But I also know guys who come out to my local range and they have literally fully built race guns that are firing customized ammunition that is just barely enough to run the slide. Yeah, mouse fart guns, yeah. And to me, it's like, okay, None of that, none of the thing you're doing now is representative of what a normal person would carry for self-defense. Yeah, probably. So I don't think it's as applicable, even though some people will insist it is. That's where you get down to the intentionality I brought up. I mean, if you approach the game as game to win, not game for training, then yeah, of course, you're not going to get as much out of it. This is the comment that Mark threw up that saved me from my stupidity. Games have rules. It's limiting what you can do for safety reasons. But I would argue it's the other way around. It's not just limiting what you can do because of safety, but it's because you have a rule set in play, it incentivizes a person to try to win the game. The greatest example I can give you is when I was in college, I used to autocross with the local Central Louisiana Autocross Club. And I raced... in a class that my Mazda Miata was fairly competitive in. But I raced against a guy who went to the freaking nationals every year. And he came from STS, which is one class, into STS2, which is the class I was in, and bought a ringer of a Mazda Miata, the lightest one he could get with a 1.8 liter engine. So he had more torque, but he had less weight. And then he prepped the car to the literal legal limit. Of the rules. Sure. If the rules said you can do A, he did A. And if it said you can do B, he did B. And it was a spare no expense, I am here to win. Okay. There was, and like this is totally obfuscating, the fact that he was just a phenomenal driver. Like he'd drive the pants off me no matter what I did. But even if we had the same skills, I was driving a car that I drove on the weekends for fun. Not a full-blown, you know, prep-to-the-legal-limit race car. Yeah, you were driving a street-legal car, yeah. Yeah. So the gap between our cars was such that there's no reasonable amount of driver skill I could have injected into this equation to beat him. I was not willing to trailer my car and trailer a spare set of wheels and tires and I was not willing to do the things he was willing to do to win the game. Cause to me, it was about, I drove this car here. I'm going to drive it home when we're done. Yeah, no, I get it, man. There's there. So there are, there are people that will buy advantage and there are people that are skilled. And sometimes there's an overlap of the two. Um, you tend to know which ones those are when they, when they step up to the match. It's, It's usually pretty obvious, but you know, we, we had, I joined a new, a new range earlier this year, a new private range. And when we were going to the concealed carry bay to do our, our practice holster draws and whatnot for, um, getting qualified for the concealed carry bags, it's a private range and that's how they do it. You just got to shoot, shoot a few rounds and show them that you can holster your pistol. Without shooting yourself in the foot. Or anybody else. Um, just that you know how to execute a proper holster draw. Um, there were a couple of people there that had the raced out rig. They had the raced out rig. I was shooting my concealed carry rig from concealment and from concealment from a concealed carry rig. I was breaking two to three shots before they were breaking their first one. And this was quite clearly a person who had just entered into the shooting world based on their gun handling and, and based on the way they were not comfortable loading their magazines, you could tell they hadn't done it a whole lot, but they had the $ 5, 000 race pistol. You really, yeah, you can have people with skill who buy a win as well. And had there been somebody skilled running that gun, yeah, they probably would have smoked me because it was a faster holster. Like, You know, the holster where the barrel's only in there about that far, so you can break it out of the holster with like an inch and a half of lift instead of having to draw the full length of the gun. Sure. Maybe that buys you a 10th of a second or so, but at that point, yeah, it's not training anymore. It's, it's just a game, but intentionality is key. A couple of things here, raggle and Mark going back and forth. There are no rules in a gunfight. It says raggle. And I agree with Mark. There are rules in a gunfight. The rule is to win. There is no second place. Isn't that a Clint Smith quote? If it isn't, it sounds like it should be. It's something that I think I've heard him say before. I mean, whether that's Clint Smith, Jeff Cooper, or any of the other old hands, that saying's been around for a while, and it's because it continues to be correct. Also, there's no such thing as cheating in a gunfight. Yes. No such thing as cheating in a gunfight. Yep. If you think there's such thing as cheating in a gunfight, refer to rule number one. There's no such thing as cheating in a gunfight. You always see the family of like the four kids that did a B & E and got smoked by a dude with an AR in his house saying, well, that wasn't fair. It wasn't fair for four of you to break into the dude's house. We're not talking about fair. Nick, are you aware that some people are allergic to accountability? They are. Yeah. They are. Anyway. So, yeah, sport, recreation, target shooting. I got two more, and this is where things get a little weird. Tradition, culture, ideology. Look, hey, man, the history of my culture, which is American, is self-defense and carrying a gun. My cultural identity requires me to carry a firearm every day. And I would also say, since we're going down that road, bear in mind that America is a gigantic cultural melting pot, and there are more than a few sub-ethnic groups that are here in this country that are here because they were horribly persecuted in the country they originally came from. Some attempted to be exterminated. And others just mistreated most horribly. And, you know, like you and I have talked before about, like, the Poles, the Finns have famously low tolerance for anything red or communist or socialist or Russian for lots of good reasons. Yeah. You know, they're, oddly enough, like, the Jews is one population that I still can't figure out because the majority of them are very anti-gun. But you'd think they'd be the most pro-gun bunch in the whole frickin' world after... Hitler marched 5 million of them into gas chambers, but I'm not Jewish, so maybe I just don't understand that cultural significance. But I look at all these cultural subgroups here in the U.S. that make up this melting pot, this miasma we call Americans, and I think to myself, I'm like, you know, a whole bunch of people here, the Cajuns, were all freaking forcibly deported at gunpoint from freaking Nova Scotia and sent down the Mississippi River, and thousands of us didn't make it. Yep. The Native Americans, the Trail of Tears, all these subgroups that are still scattered throughout this broad melting pad we call Americans, that all culturally can point to something in their cultural tradition and say, this is a time when if we were armed, we might not have been rolled. Up the way we were. At the very least, you'd have a chance. Yeah, and while on the one hand it's very easy for a person to discount, it's very hard for a person to argue against when a person comes forward with that argument of, you know, my family was literally murdered by fascists or murdered by communists or murdered by, you know, murdered by this junta, this warlord, because they were disarmed first. And only by the grace of God did I escape to this country where we have the right to arm ourselves. So yeah, there is a certain amount of cultural tradition, and I would even call it ideology, that's baked into the idea of, like, I have guns to defend myself from a thing that has happened to my family before in another time. Yeah, I mean, look at, what was it? Black Wall Street. The Black Wall Street firebombing. Mm-hmm. Look at the coal miners at the start of the Union era. I mean. Coal miners, we're talking about like in Appalachia. Yeah, I mean, like where the Pinkertons, a detective agency that still exists, machine-gunned women and children because the men wanted a union. I'm going to tell you, for anybody that's not familiar with that little chunk of, those two little chunks of American history, you should be. You really should be. I can't say you'll be proud of your country for reading that, but you'll be better off for having read it. You're definitely going to be more suspicious of rich and powerful corporations who still employ the Pinkertons today. Oh, you mean the Rockefellers are still alive and kicking? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. If not in name, certainly in spirit. Most of the Golden Age barons, family members, and descendants are still the ultra-wealthy class today. Yeah. That amount of wealth doesn't go away. Very few of those families lost everything. I remember when I was younger, I kept hearing that group people referred to as the robber barons. And, you know, young, couldn't give a shit less about history if you put a gun to my head. That just flew right over the top of my head. And now I think back to those moments and I'm like, wow, my history teacher was trying to tell me something. I was just too freaking young and stupid. To pick it up. Well, they also really undersold it. They really did. I distinctly remember that unit we covered in a couple of different history classes where And nobody told me about the Pinkertons machine gunning women and children. That shit I would have remembered because I was obsessed with Gatling guns and Civil War firearms at the time. Yes, I also didn't find that out until I was a full grown adult. Yeah, they should probably tell that to the kids. That the U.S. Government allowed the Pinkertons to machine gun women and children. I won't let that go until the Pinkerton agency is dissolved. Mark's saying it out loud, though. Not even taught in school anymore. Probably not, because it's not nice. Of course, but I would just give you all this little nugget. For those of you who have children of your own, or those of you who mentor younger people, because you can do that whether you have kids or not, teach them the ugly parts of this nation's history, even if it is 10 or 20 years before it finally blossoms in their little brains. It is not lost. They'll remember the honesty at the very least. Yeah. That is one of the things I have tried really hard with my daughter is to teach her the parts of American history her teachers will never. Sometimes because they don't know it. Sometimes because it's really not nice. Most of them don't know it. I was a bit of a history buff growing up as a kid because the books were fascinating. They really were. They were better written than most of the books that school was having me read. So things like, uh, they met at Gettysburg were stuff that I was reading. Um, we were soldiers in the original book form. Uh, and a few others of those I was reading in like elementary and middle school. And, uh, I was actively correcting history teachers in class with things I remembered. Um, You know, I got to say, this is one thing I disagree with my wife on. I don't think the kids are too sensitive. I really don't. I don't think the kids are any more sensitive than they were back in the day. I think the difference is people coddle them. Which would make them more sensitive. No, it just gives them less exposure. That's all it is. It's not that they in themselves are more sensitive. It's that they have not been... exposed to appropriate amounts of horror. I agree with both of y'all on this as well. Bearing in mind that I come from the standpoint of children are innocent. That's what they're supposed to be. They're kids. They start out sensitive. But as part of my upbringing, as part of me raising my daughter, I have had to in measured amounts, slowly, gently rip some of that innocence away from her so that she can see the world around her for a reason. Even to the point of like, you know, when I, when my daughter was really young and I've told this story before, when she was really little, it occurred to me one time when I was out running errands, just me and her, I was putting her into her car seat. If that gives you an idea of how old she was at the time. I realized how incredibly vulnerable I was while I'm belting her into the car seat because my head's in the car. My body's outside the car. She's in the car. I am focused on what I'm doing. I cannot maintain situational awareness. So I told my daughter, like, hey, if I'm buckling you in and you see somebody walk behind me, just let me know. And, of course, she asked why. And I'm like, well, you know, if it's like a little lady and I take a step back, bump into her, I'd knock her down. I don't want to hurt her. I don't want to do that. So just if you see somebody walking behind me, let me know. Four or five-year-old Piper got that, and true to her word, somebody walked behind me one time just trying to skirt between two cars, and she let me know. it wasn't until years later and more lessons about self-awareness and more lessons about how dangerous the world could be around you that she asked me what was the real reason you told me to do that and i'm like Literally, because I realized that if somebody wanted to abduct a small child, the perfect thing to do is to jump me while I wasn't paying attention because I was buckling you in, jump in the car, and then take off. And it's one of those things where it's like. When she was four, I let her keep some for innocence. When she got a handful years older, I had to take some of that innocence away in the interest of preparing her for a world that can be very violent and ugly at times. But I think the problem to both of y'all's point is that we as society, we as educators, as parents, as peers are allowing children to maintain that innocence to too much of a degree far too late in the life. I think the difference in perspective that me and my wife have on it is she views the saying that the kids are too sensitive. And maybe this is the point Raggle's making too, that kids are too sensitive because of the lack of exposure. Whereas I view it as a statement similar to a peanut allergy of the kids are not actually more sensitive. They've just never been exposed to reality. They've been kept from reality. It's not that they are mentally incapable of handling it. It's that they were never taught to handle it. And I think not teaching them to handle it is a great disservice. I think you two are actually saying the same thing. We probably are, just from different directions. And I agree. The sensitive kids, neither one of us is saying that it's a good thing. But I think a lot of people take the statement that the kids are too sensitive and they take it to mean the kids are physically incapable of handling it when it's actually not a physical incapability. It is a lack of exposure. It's not like an allergy the kids have that you can't do anything about. It's not... being incapable of handling it it's because they haven't been forced to handle it they cannot handle. It and and we have a responsibility to raise strong independent individuals you cannot do that without exposing them to hardship and horror i i really don't think you can i mean phil i know i've said this on the show before you can tell a lot of these kids by the time so uh i've been noticing it a lot with the interns as we've been having more interns over the years and at work and you can tell which of the kids have almost died a couple of times and which ones haven't. And the ones that have almost died a couple of times, they just handle life better. They do. They just handle life better. They handle setbacks better. They handle criticism better. They handle danger better. The ones that have never been exposed to anything dangerous in their life. The second something goes wrong, they panic and shut down. And that is the worst thing you can possibly do. You know, in the same vein, my wife and I were talking recently about her experience teaching and, The fact that she has kids who it's very obvious from her trying to negotiate them through a lesson plan. They cannot do something without step-by-step-by-step instructions. They cannot handle a string of seven instructions and then run off and do those seven things and come back. They cannot iterate off of an instruction that was given. They cannot fill in a gap in between two instructions that were given. It's the older two kinds of people in this world, those that can extrapolate from incomplete data. Yeah. But what she was noticing was that these children were obviously never allowed to struggle with anything growing up, and they don't know how to struggle. The minute they hit the least little difficulty, they just stop and freeze in place. Mm-hmm. Whereas with our child, like admittedly, like I hate seeing my daughter struggle, but we also made a very conscious effort of she has to learn how to fight her way through these things. She has to learn how to figure these things out on her own. One of the most frustrating things on earth, by the way, is watching a young person with almost exactly your personality. And you can hear the gears grinding inside their little melon because you just know. They are mad as hell, and they are having a little bit of trouble figuring this out, but they're not going to damn well dare ask for help because they want to figure it out for themselves because that's how they've been raised. Hey, man, that's the best way to learn. If you can problem solve in real time for yourself, you put yourself ahead of a serious proportion of your peers. Agreed. Could not agree with my wife more. Gentle parenting is harmful to children. It is. There's a word past harmful, and I would agree with that. I think gentle parenting, that would be a good episode to be like one of these days we need the wives on. Sold. We need to make sure we include that as a potential topic to talk about gentle parenting. Those two could go off the rails for about 20 minutes. We could just sit back and drink a whiskey. I'm fine with that. Yeah. I would have to buy more whiskey. I accidentally drank all of my whiskey on the fishing trip. Oh. Oh, you poor child. Well, you know, I had a couple of my cousins with, and they also happened to be big fans of whiskey. So we drank all of the whiskey. One of them did not realize it was full-strength, like 150-proof whiskey when we started drinking it. And halfway through a Domino's game, they were taking a nap. I was about to say, learning did occur, apparently. Learning did occur. 5 a.m. comes awful early. Yeah. So before we go to our last bullet point, tradition, culture, ideology, was there anything we're missing in there? Because I do feel like there is that group that, like, and I will just say that, like, from the aspect of, like, ideology, like, you and I have talked about the fact that, like, for me growing up, guns were not leisure, guns were not fun. guns were literally a singular tool of protecting your family from harm. Sure. And that is, I would almost call that like, if like an ideology I grew up with. Yeah. And it is certainly one that I've done my best to share with my daughter. Like, you know, like when we talk about firearms in this house, I've told her in the past, like, if you don't, if you, if you only want to learn how to shoot just enough to get by, I'm not going to push any harder. You have to decide you want to pursue this more than that. But you have to know basics of how to handle guns, how to be safe with guns, because one day you might have to defend yourself. And that was always what the discussion was couched in is that this is a tool of self-defense. Sure. No more, no less. I got one that we didn't get in here that we probably should have. Just basic safety. We have to acknowledge in this country there are more firearms than people. Fantastic, guys. Let's get it to like three guns per person. Would love that. It'd be great. Let's get those numbers up. Rookie numbers, we can do better. We only own, like, two-thirds of the world's firearms. We can do better. We can definitely improve on that. But if your child does not know the rules of firearm safety and you live in America, you are doing your child a disservice. You know, I've literally had that discussion with people who, like, they took the position of, like, well, I don't have guns in my house and I'm never going to have guns around my kids, so I don't need to have to talk with them. Absolutely. Was it a third to half of all households in the U.S. own firearms? I mean, I don't want to pick nits, but knowing that you live in Illinois, I'm pretty sure on the average playground you could find a gun unsecured if you look hard enough. Yes. Assuming it's at least an elementary school playground, yeah. Maybe with the serial number ground off of it. Usually with the serial number ground off of it. But their license happened to be Chicago PD. That is also a possibility. But I guess that's kind of my thought process though is that I think that that is a perfect– I mean, okay. So admittedly, it's a bit flippant. But the thing I used to tell people all the time is like I'm going to have a talk with my daughter about cocaine when she gets of age because I don't want her to put the stuff up her nose and ruin her life. But it doesn't mean I keep a key sitting on the dining room table just in case we want to have a party one night. Exactly. And the same reason why even if you don't own firearms, you still talk about gun safety with your kids. You shouldn't. I think gun safety should be taught in schools. Look, the second amendment is a core cultural touchstone in America. Yep. How many movies say what percentage of movies comes out with guns? At least a third, at least a third of movies that come out, have a gun in it. It's, it's a core cultural touchstone in the U S she did not. She was, you know, I think a little intimidated by the gun collection when she moved in. I will say that. I mean, Gillian, Gillian grew up around like 22s and, you know, like hunting rifles. But I'll be the first to admit, like, she's still to this day, not really comfortable around like my AR, my AK. And it's not like a, it's not like, well, okay, but it's not like a, ooh, I I'm, I'm scared of scary black rifle, but it's like, it's a lack of general. It's a general unfamiliarity with the weapon system. Give her a Remington 74 auto, give her a bolt action for God's sake. She'll run that like greased lightning. Give her a 20, give her any 22 off the shelf. She'll rock and roll with it. But yeah, Modern sporting arms, ARs, AKs, my SKS even. She's just not familiar with it because she just doesn't have a lot of time behind them. And, you know, that's not unreasonable. But assuming a person knows the fundamental rules of firearm safety, it doesn't matter what the gun is. You abide by those rules, you will not have a problem. In fact, most of the time, you can break one of those rules if you're following the other three rules. You're fine. That is the fun thing about the firearm safety rules is that you have to break two of them before an oopsie happens. Minimum two. So I think just as a responsible parent, regardless of your stance on firearms, you should be knowledgeable enough to teach your children firearm safety for their own safety because your house might not have guns and mine does. And if... You are not knowledgeable to have that conversation with your kids. I promise you there are resources out there if you just use a little bit of Google Foo and you go looking for them. I mean, okay, the NRA, I detest the organization for a variety of reasons, but I will happily admit their firearms training resources for brand new or uninitiated shooters are a thing, and they're wildly good. Especially the ones that are aimed at children. They're not bad. Heck, a basic hunter safety class will give you all the information you need. And they are available for very cheap to free depending on your area. Yep. And I'm going to tell you, having gotten a certification to teach that class around here, the first, second, and fourth thing they talk about is gun safety. Because they really, really, really don't want to have to call 911 on your behalf. Nope. And a matter of fact, they don't want you to have to call 911 on your own behalf and years after you leave the hunters, the hunter safety course. All right. Last banner, possibly the most controversial. Cause this is the one I get the most pushback on is whenever we start throwing around the T we're talking about tyranny. Yeah. You, you, do you notice who built concentration camps during COVID Phil? Hmm. The Australians, the Australian government, guess who they targeted the most heavily with their concentration camps. Phil. The indigenous population. Oh, that is so friggin' on the nose. The oppressed, colonialized minorities got put in concentration. Camps, Phil. By the colonizers, oddly enough. Like, a year after they did that whole big disarmament scheme. Serve me up on a silver platter, we're done here. The jokes write themselves. Could you guys have Hit it on the nose any harder. You bastards. Like, really? Yeah, but this is the thing that I cite occasionally, and I get the most varied, weird reactions. Because, I mean, I'm very quick to point out, I'm like, you know, our founding fathers penned the Second Amendment just in case we had to shoot the government officials again. And people get really weird when I say that out loud. But then I start talking about things like, well, you know, the British were trying to tread us under and they were quartering soldiers in our houses and they were doing this and doing that. And that's why the Second Amendment was penned in case we had to oppose a tyrannical government again. And they're like, but you don't really think our government would do anything like that. And I'm like, our government that basically, that greenlets enslaving an entire ethnic group of people brought over on ships from Africa, our government that greenlit De facto slavery of Chinese and Irish immigrants. Our government that committed genocide against multiple Native American tribes. Our government that forced Japanese Americans into internment camps. I mean, I can just keep going and going and going about all the wonderful things our government historically has done that would be a really good reason why citizens should be armed. But at some point, I just get tired of kicking people in the balls and just telling them, like, you are wrong to oppose this based on these grounds. Like, I'm not saying in case there's tyranny. I'm saying in case there's tyranny again. It happens all the time. Like, heck. As recently as the late 1940s, soldiers coming home from World War II had to overthrow a local sheriff who was meddling in elections to the point where there was a gunfight between sheriff's deputies and returning veterans. Battle of Athens? Battle of Athens. Oh, that's a fun little historical touchstone for any of you that aren't initiated. Congratulations. Illegally brought home military firearms were used to secure an election. Didn't they also break into like a national guard armory? They did. So there were a bunch of guys that had some bring backs, including some full auto German fun, fun toys and grenades. And they rated a national guard armory to secure a free and fair election through the use of firearms against the, at the time it illegally elected sheriff. Yeah. And this was after they stole the ballot box, brought it into the, uh, brought it into the sheriff's department, and locked the doors and locked everybody out. And they were going to count them in secret to make sure it was done properly and that they stuffed it just so it needed to be stuffed. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Look, we have ballot stuffing going on to this day. We do. 100%. Some of it is just as egregious as what we saw for the Battle of Athens. The difference is now it's done electronically and it's a lot harder to prove. You know, it's done electronically, and so it's not as visible. It's harder to prove. Well, people are also able to do this a lot better. They are. Because to a lot of people, you know, Phil, you're a tech guy. I'm a tech guy. To a lot of people, computer be magic box that just do thing. God, that hurts my soul to hear you say that, but I'm not arguing with you. Look, I mean, I am a tech guy. This, magic box do thing. Right. I don't know how 90% of the settings in this work. My wife deals with that. I just don't have the time or inclination. I wish I could throw this in a fucking river. I really do. But I have customers that reach out to me constantly on the damn thing. So I, I will just say that, you know, nod, nod, wink, wink. The, the, One of the first things I wrote in the third chapter of my book was to take this thing and throw it out the window of your car if you were about to go and indulge in a lifetime of hood rat things for a reason. And you'll notice that for the rest of that friggin' book, the main character's never picked up another smartphone. Yep. It's never mentioned. Intentionally. Call that a bit of fantasy because, yeah, if things ever go to 11, I'm throwing this thing in the woods and we're never doing smartphones again. Yep. Look, it... These things happen all the time globally. Heck, we have the slave trade bigger than ever in Africa right now. Liberia, they are doing cannibalism and slave trade and a few other places. It's not good. The slave trade never went away. It only went away in European and Western cultures. Well, I mean, there's multiple countries in Central and South America where The people are basically being beaten, starved, and bullied in submission by an armed militaristic police force that is protecting a barely legitimate government. Cuba, Venezuela, or... I think El Salvador got fixed a lot recently. El Salvador hasn't been fixed yet. I thought Malay was doing a pretty good job with that, from what I heard. Wait, Malay isn't in El Salvador. I thought that was El Salvador. Or am I getting my geography wrong? Your geography is wrong. El Salvador is basically gangland hell. Oh, well, you know, there's that. I was about to say, El Salvador could be fixed if you took all of your politicians and hung them from bridges. Yeah, probably. And then took all the gang members and lit them on fire in the street. Yeah, that would work. Then again, that would fix a lot of countries. Well, yeah, I mean. Spicy but true. You know, it is accurate. I mean... Look at how corrupt our government is right now. I think common consensus is the vast majority of people see our government as overwhelmingly corrupt now within this country. 67%? Which is great. I love seeing people hate the government. I saw that in a poll recently that 67% of the country believed that all pieces of the government are corrupt. But now here's the thing of it. They compared this to past polling data where they kind of extrapolated. And of course, you know at the time it was like you know team team red thinks team blue is corrupt team blue thinks team red is corrupt but for the first time since they've been doing this poll 67 percent of americans believed both sides were corrupt and i was like oh that's that's spicy phenomenal phenomenal yeah when When Vote Blue, no matter who, suddenly realizes his own team is part of the problem, and Vote Red Till You're Dead also realizes his team is part of the problem, that's when things get weird. Yeah. It'll be an interesting next couple of decades, to be sure. I mean, assuming World War III. The next two election cycles are going to be wild. This one's going to be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, but yeah, tyranny. I find that whenever I bring this up, that is where I get– and I'll admit, I try really hard not to be preachy, but goddammit, I get really preachy when this subject comes up. As well you should because we're talking about death tolls in the millions. Yeah, but what frustrates me is when I encounter that person– who ask this question, why gun? And we get down to tyranny, and they start trying to refute what I'm laying forth. I am literally, verbally, bludgeoning them with a history book. Over and over and over and over. And they just, they stick their fingers in their ears and go, la la la la la, and they just will not hear it. And then I get even more preachy, because I'm like, of all the things we've talked about so far, You can agree or disagree that any one of those are like maybe, you know, like. You could agree or disagree that any one of those things may be valid with certain parameters around them. But this is the one that I get the preachiest about because I'm not saying you need more than 10 rounds in case the deer come to your house. I'm saying that in all of human history... not even modern human history, not 20th century, not even back to Europe. I'm talking about back to the time of Christ. Marginalized groups have been repeatedly, repeatedly abused, exterminated, and had horrible things done to them because they were first disarmed. And that is a history that cuts across all ethnic groups, that cuts across all countries, that cuts across all languages, all religions, all people. going back to the beginning of human written history. And yet I still have to have this debate with people over and over and over that tyranny is a perfectly valid reason for people to have arms, not in case it happens, but in case it happens again. And people wonder why I have a hard time dismissing the theory that there are NPCs that exist. That there are non-player characters that are just out there running a script. And people wonder why I just, I can never get it out of my head. See, I agree with you whenever we start talking about like dead internet theory, because I have seen pictures of the bot farms and they are dystopian and terrifying. But the ones that get me wondering are the ones that are like, they're living, breathing human beings standing right in front of you. And there is just like, they have the intellectual brainpower of a Labrador retriever. I really do. I think there might be. There might be humans out there that are not sentient. I think there are. Because, man, I run into some of them on occasion where you can tell that the hamster wheel is spinning. The hamster's been dead for a while, and it's just sort of riding around on the inside of the wheel, really running on inertia here. What if? What if the problem is that the propaganda and the programming from the algorithm is so much stronger and so much more pervasive than you and I give it credit for? Could be. That it is able to turn otherwise semi-rational human beings into NPCs. It's possible. And then use them to manipulate things in the real world, kind of like– When Agent Smith in the Matrix jumps into a person and starts running around. It's possible. It sounds crazy until you start thinking about it, but I'm being a little bit serious. Of course, Raggle is saying it's just low IQ. I disagree with that for two reasons. I don't think it's low IQ. I feel some real dumb fuckers that are real creative and they are not following anybody's script but their own. Yeah, and I don't think it's just a low IQ thing because like I consider it to be a fairly high IQ trait to be able to like listen to a person and like accept the information they're giving you and then weigh it out and then make your own judgments. But the kind of thing me and Nick are talking about, like these are people who they've– they are following a script, right? And they're not stupid. They are able to stay on that script. They are able to reject information being provided to them. They were able to go to different parts of the script. All of them are very technically intelligent individuals, too. Yeah. Of course, like, if COVID taught me one thing, it was how phenomenally easy it was to turn the majority of the population into whatever you want them to if you can just abuse and scare them enough. A little disheartening, but It was instructive. Well, you know, so I don't think a culture can work where the vast majority of people are leaders. I don't, I don't think that can work because you would never have any group cohesion that way. Yeah. Raggles saying intelligence, a whiz number two, very different things. Right. But I don't think it requires intelligence proficiency. Or wisdom to follow the script. You can have one. You could have theoretically both and still not be a self-actuated rational actor. I understand what you're saying. You can have the wisdom of experience. You can have the raw data of intelligence at your beck and call. But if you're not self-actualizing, then. I got something for you. Mm-hmm. It's not intelligence nor wisdom that causes a person to, as you're putting it, self-actualize. It is either that a person is confronted with an alternative theory that they have to wrestle with and either use that to reinforce or to re-inform their own opinion. Or a person has to do that without an external bias. But that is what causes a person to be able to, like, figure things out themselves, make up their own mind. It's like the thing I've, the thing I always used to tell my child, and this might dovetail back into like how parenting has gone so horribly off the rails of last generation. But the thing I always used to tell people is like, my job was never to teach my child what to think. It was to teach her how to think it was to It was to be the person who was always going to be open-minded in every conversation and everything she brought to me. I would hear her out, but I would challenge her ideas. I would challenge her facts. I would constantly make her reconsider what she was saying. And there are things to this day that, as a 14-year-old young woman, we don't see the same way. Fair enough. You're two different people. We're two different people. But the thing of it is that, at a minimum, I'm going to force her to think about the things she is saying, and she has to come She has to come forward with a well-thought-out opinion that is backed up with either a philosophical line of thought or a train of facts, but it has to be durable because it's not going to be some flippant NPC nonsense she heard on TikTok and just throw it out there, and I'm not going to shovel it off the board right back at her and be like, that's nonsense. You haven't even thought about that. You can't explain to me how you came to that conclusion. You just heard it and repeated it, and I think that's the problem we're dealing with here. The majority of the people we're talking about who ask the question, why gun? It's because they heard it and it sounded cute and they're just repeating the things they say. But that's also why I wanted to have this conversation because I don't want to regurgitate the standard pro-gun talking points because I don't think that wins anything. I think we as gun owners, as recreational shooters, as Second Amendment advocates, whatever stripe you come from, it falls to us to try to advance the belief system that we believe through that 60% that's in the middle of the population. Because we're never going to win the 20% that think there should be no guns on earth, we should just press a button and make them all disappear. They're lost. But the 60% in the middle. True. True. True. Over the blue-haired nose ring wearer, it's not going to happen. No. But we just might win over everybody else that's standing around the water cooler. Sure. We could. And if not, then you can just be a smarmy asshole and ridicule the shit out of them for your own amusement. Like, that is also well within bounds. Mm-hmm. I'm just looking through the comments real quick before we sew this up, because it's like 9 o'clock and we both have work. We do. Early in the morning. I have a lot of work to get done before I leave for the trip. Yeah. Alright. It's always extra work to take work off. Isn't that a bitch? That's what happens when you get into even a semi-management role. Yeah, I'm not in semi-management, but I've literally... You and I were having a talk about how I've made myself so indispensable at work that I worked yesterday and... I worked about an hour before we went live. Oh, no. Got a text message. Hey, Phil, can you help us out real quick? And just didn't even say it. I literally texted my boss and said, I need it all clear before I start the clock. And he said, go for it. And I would just grab my laptop and my badge. And I was like, all right, let's do this. You know, there are times when I have considered, like, why not? Have I put myself in the position where I have to be responsible for this much when I could just be like half-assing it and doing about the same? See, my problem is, is that I'm, I'm really good at the things that I do. Me too. I have this bad habit of like, okay, we don't have the resources or the time or the manpower or any things we need to get this done. But Phil just figured out some way to make all that not matter, and it got done on time anyway. Yeah, I would be bored if I did not try as hard at work as I do. And I have set myself up for being somewhat important at work, and that's terrifying. Yeah, I told a co-worker of mine who's in kind of the same boat I am, I'm like, I asked her one time, because, you know, she's... I have a very unique skill set at work, and she has a unique skill set at work. Like, if she decided to stop showing up to work tomorrow, we'd be in a really, really bad position immediately. That happens. And I told her, I'm like, I was like, hey, don't sweat it. You have ironclad job security here. Like, you could show up in saran wrap and drop a deuce on the director's desk, and you'll probably get a talking to, but you won't get fired. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the nice things about that is if you decide to be weird one day, what are they going to do? Fire you? They don't have anybody else that can do this job. Didn't I send that, that thing to you on Instagram where it was like, the goal is to become so indispensable that you become completely unmanageable. What was it? Why do we not, why do we not talk to him before 10 o'clock in the morning? I don't know. He made it a rule sometime back in the nineties and nobody has disputed him since. Yeah, there are multiple people at work who know that when they come and talk to me first thing in the morning with a problem, the first question they ask is, have you had your coffee yet? I've got half the office trained. It is such a beautiful thing to watch. You're about to cross that threshold where it becomes law, Phil. You're almost there. Almost, man. All right, let's go ahead and wrap this up. This was filmed on a Monday night so that Nick and his lovely bride could have Thursday off. If you're watching this on Thursday, I hope you misbehave horribly in the comment section while no one was here to supervise you. And we'll talk to you all in another week. Good night, everybody. Good night. Clouds are heavy on the county line signs are flashing reading into time protecting the home locking down the block music Raising values while we watch the clock. Turn the dial, cut through the tricks. Welcome to Matter of Facts. Well, we talk prepping for the storm ahead. The iron in the hand, the words they said. Guns, politics, and the lines they drew. We uncover what they hide from you. Yeah, lay it down. No spin, no tricks. This is Matter of Fact. Static screams through the midnight air. A lot of. 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