Do You See The Light?

I put a lot of effort into this post about what makes the best tactical flashlight over at my day job. To the best of my knowledge, there really wasn’t any independent, third-party test of what a common tactical flashlight actually can or can’t do until I published this piece last month. I tested things like stated lumen output, runtime, water resistance along with stuff that doesn’t usually get compared, such as candela and running temperature.

Plus I tested just how “blinding” the “blinding” output of a tactical flashlight really is, and I gotta be honest, the result surprised me a bit.

Look, a concealed carry gun solves one problem: It projects lethal force at a distance. That’s it. It’s true that even the threat of such a thing can solve other self-defense problems, but those other problems must also involve lethal force, or else you’ve put yourself behind one heck of a legal eight ball*.

Carrying a gun is great, but have other options as well, such as pepper spray and a bright flashlight. We face a variety of problems out there in the cold, harsh world, so it stands to reason we should have a variety of solutions to that variety of problems.

* You know the drill. Not a lawyer, not legal advice, yada yada yada.

Upcoming Training: Warrior Club At Training Grounds.

This will be a bit different for me. In the past, I’ve written about how quasi-military training is NOT what we armed citizens really need to learn, primarily because we don’t have to do the same things that the military does. The job of the military is to use overwhelming firepower to beat an enemy into submission in order to take over their territory. That, thankfully, is not my job as an armed civilian. My job as an armed citizen is to avoid contact with the criminal element as much as I can, but if I can’t, I need to use enough force to break contact wit the bad guy (up to and including lethal force) until law enforcement arrives to bring closure to the situation. Two wildly different goals such as that demand wildly different training styles. Yes, the fundamentals of sight alignment, trigger press and so on may be the same, but the reasons WHY we are learning those things are completely different.

However, the horrific suicide statistics in the United States, especially suicides that use a gun, have touched me deeply. I lost a good friend to suicide, and I think it’s high time that we as gun owners step up to the plate and do something about this tragedy in our midst before something is done to us and our rights are yet again diminished.

Men returning home from the horrors of World War Two found solace and comfort in the safe spaces of the Rotary Club and the Elks Lodge and dozens of other service organizations, but men returning home from our years-long involvement in Afghanistan and elsewhere have no such refuges to cling to. This is why I’m interested in what Training Grounds is doing with their Warrior Club.

There is a Warrior buried within all of us. Find yours as you and your team go through intense, fun and unique training exercises, designed to push you and build camaraderie among friends. Fun, fast paced and designed to teach multiple skills in a short amount of time. You will leave amazed at the new skill you’ve learned or the old skills you’ve improved on.

Social media and all the other wonders of our internet-based society are keeping locked up in our homes, away from the contact of real people. While I have gained some very close friends via social media, the fact is, they live all over the globe, and they aren’t available to be if I want to chat over a cup of coffee. We need more opportunities where men can come together and bond in-person, face-to-face and realize that they don’t have to tackle the problems of the modern world by themselves. This movement has to start somewhere, so why not have it start on the friendly confines of the firing range?

Stay tuned.

Context Is King

Throughout the hundreds and hundreds of hours of firearms training classes I’ve had, there’s been exactly ONE class that has attempted to apply the skills of marksmanship and speed to my everyday life: The Armed Parent/Guardian class from Citizens Defense Research.

I find that a little ridiculous. Yes, marksmanship is a skill and yes, you can learn it in a class, but there are reasons WHY people come to a class, and one of the biggest reasons out there right now is personal protection. Yes, people get hooked on training and turn into “hobbyists” (and Lord knows I’m one of them) but most gun owners need a reason to train that goes beyond the training itself.

Our lives do not exist in a vacuum. However, the square ranges we train on encourage us to think that what’s learned on the square range stays on the square range. In our pursuit of perfection, we forget that most people don’t share our passion for the .2 second split and the sub-second draw: They just want to keep their loved ones safe in an uncertain, unsafe world.

For instance, I enjoy the skill and the art of cooking, but my dinner menu is based on the constraints of time, budget and my family’s tastes in food. I’m not a chef in a restaurant, cooking what I want and serving it up to masses who have come to sample my creations. Instead, my skill and preferences in cooking are moderated by the people around me. My cooking doesn’t exist in the kitchen, my cooking only becomes important when I serve it up on the dinner table to my family.

So here’s my question to the firearms training community: If your absolute closest friend or relative, the person who brings you the most joy in your life, came to you and said they wanted to learn how to defend their life with a firearm, what would you teach them? More importantly, how would you make sure they started carrying their gun everywhere they could? Would you feel like you failed if you found out that, despite all your teaching, they still kept their gun in it’s box under their bed? What would you change to make sure they were safe, and not just “felt safe because they owned a gun”?

And why aren’t you doing that now?

And We’re Back.

Or at least, I’m back. Misfires and Light Strikes, my main gun blog, has received the lion’s share of my attention these past few years, but now I’m putting splitting my efforts between Quietly Armed, a business focused on firearms training in SouthWest Florida, where I’ll be writing about training and the armed lifestyle, and this site, where I’ll write about guns and the industry as a whole.

So welcome everyone once again, and stick around. Regular posting will resume shortly.

Welcome, NRA, To The TeamGunBlogger Lifestyle

We started TeamGunBlogger because we weren’t seeing the gun industry talk to today’s gun owners. There are thousands (if not millions) of gun owners who didn’t buy a gun to go hunting, they bought a gun for personal protection and/or competition.

While not in the gun-manufacturing business themselves, the NRA is finally catching on to this fact, and has rolled out NRA Freestyle TV.

While they’ve got their own page and video player, but to me, it’s their YouTube channel that matters to me, because that’s where people from outside the gun culture will find their videos and have the opportunity to what gun ownership is really like.

Like this one.

The message (aside from the fact that Jack Reacher’s fight coordinators screwed up) is that no, you can’t use the movies or the media as your guide to what owning and safely using a gun is all about. It’s subtle, but it allows people like you and me to counter the narrative that guns kill people.

Funny, I own a bunch of them, and all I’ve killed with my guns is some tasty quail and a few coyotes. It’s almost as if my guns respond to my will, and not the other way around or something.

We already know that’s true. It’s time for the rest of America to know it too.

Keeping Your Gun Safe in the Home

A few months ago, I mentioned that I carry in my home just like I carry outside of my home. Yes, I have a quick-access gun safe and I use it at night to store my CCW gun, but day in, day out, I keep my carry gun on me except when I’m wrestling with my sons or some other activity. 

Why? Because it’s faster to engage a threat with a gun on my hip or in my pocket is faster than any off-body storage method, that’s why. 

Another gun lock test.

This one, to be honest, has me searching for other means to secure that shotgun, which is the gun I have in my house for when everything else has gone wrong. 

Not a big fan of how this one turned out, partly because Jaci is not familiar with a Mossie 500, and partly because I wasn’t happy with how that lock operates. GunVault doesn’t make this lock anymore, and I think I know why.. 

Which is faster: A gun in a nightstand drawer or in a gun safe

I’m not a big fan of leaving loaded guns lying around the house because it’s kinda like leaving the bleach jug in the refrigerator next to the milk jug: Something bad is going to happen, it’s not a question of IF, it’s only a question of WHEN.

So we decided to test things to find out if a gun safe safe is a better alternative to leaving your gun in a nightstand drawer, and the results really surprised us.

A few notes about this test:

• Jaci and Robert are almost identically-skilled as shooters
• They used guns they were familiar with
• Robert was not familiar with how to use that gun safe because we wanted to simulate the stress of figuring out how to open it correctly under stress
• The shots were so close together, the shot timer app on my phone couldn’t tell them apart. 

The gun safe we used was this model from Paragon safes, but if I’m honest, I prefer GunVault safes. 

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