PDN LIVE: Safety and Security Concerns

Good morning and welcome to the Personal Defense Network live Q and A for August, 2020. This is actually the first time I've been back here at the Personal Defense Network headquarters studios since January we've of course been producing content social media, I've done some live events, things like that Q and A's doing a lot of different things to help people, you know understand what I'm thinking during the coronavirus, during the civil unrest, during this crazy year of 2020. But we haven't been able to do a formal broadcast from this space since January. So I really appreciate you guys tuning in. It's great to be back here in the studio.

The offices up here are just outside of Minneapolis. Obviously there's been a lot of concern about coronavirus here, and there's been a lot of civil unrest here, so very appropriate that we would be back here at PDN headquarters talking about the things we're going to discuss today. So what we're gonna be talking about specifically are the security concerns and safety concerns that a lot of people have expressed to me over the last six months now almost unrelated to the coronavirus. And then of course the last few months related to civil unrest and just the overall state in our country when it comes to crime, civil disobedience, rioting, looting, things like that, that were going on a lot in the early summer and that may very well come back to visit a lot of places around the country as we get into the election season. And then the immediate aftermath of the election probably regardless of who wins.

And of course it's important that we separate our politics from our tactics. And of course our politics from our medicine and from our concerns, as far as all those things go it may very well be fueled by politics across the country. A lot of the problems we have right now but our responses need to be tactical, they need to be strategic, they need to be thought out. And I think it's really important that you are applying fundamental principles, fundamental principles that we've talked about for 15 years here at Personal Defense Network. Things that are important to us to remain healthy, to remain safe and to be able to get ourselves out of worst case scenario situations or protect those that we care about.

And that may very well simply be your neighbor or another business owner in your community not just yourself and your family. So there's a lot of different things that we're gonna talk about. I've got a list of topics that I want to address. Obviously we've got some people here in the discussion area I've already got one really good question that I will definitely be getting to you here within this next 45 minutes or an hour. You have plenty of opportunity to put your comments or your questions in the discussion area at personaldefensenetwork.com.

If you're watching this as a recorded situation and you can't obviously ask a question or give me immediate feedback, one of the things that you can always do is reach out to Personal Defense Network. You can still put comments in there. They might get seen, we might get some customer service people to flag them and get them to me even if it's years later. What you can always do is reach out on social media. So you can reach out at Personal Defense Network we're on Instagram, we're on Twitter.

We are on Facebook, obviously I'm also on all of those platforms. A lot of our instructors are and I'm gonna be referencing I'm sure some of the other experts we have at the Personal Defense Network team. If this is your first time looking at a PDN Q and A live, we try to do these as often as we can. Traditionally we do them monthly, 2020 has been a difficult year. But we're probably gonna get back to that.

And we have hundreds of free videos and articles. So if you're not a member yet, we'll talk more about that as the day goes on as well, if you're not a paying member, if you're not a premium member, or a gold member, or a platinum member at Personal Defense Network there's still plenty to take advantage of here in terms of both these live events that are interactive question and answer, and are recorded videos that have been again over 15 years worth of content production and our articles and our blogs. So take a good look at the personaldefensenetwork.com website if it's your first time visiting. When we're done here because right now I wanna get into some of these thoughts. First of all, again 2020, just an amazing year in terms of people's awareness of their need to be prepared to defend themselves, to take care of themselves, to take care of their families.

You know, and I say amazing and I realize that that's a little bit opportunistic maybe, we're capitalizing on a bad situation to point out just how important the things that you if you are a member of Personal Defense Network or a frequent viewer or a follower of any of the training programs that the team has run over the last couple of decades, you already know, you already know that it's important to be prepared, it's important to be trained, it's important to be equipped, it's important to be aware. And in a worst case scenario it really could be life and death that's decided based on what you did months or years ahead of time. So that's important to consider. You know, how many of us in March, we're sitting around looking at a lockdown, looking at isolation, looking at being out of work, worried about the supply chain being disrupted, and we didn't have what we might actually need in our home. One of the things that we were putting out in March a lot of people inside of this community to the initial concerns you know, how much food do I need?

What do I need? Well, we were talking about two-week lockdowns so right away, you need two weeks worth of food. And I'll tell you I was really surprised how many people who are, you know, in that prepper category or people who are of the mindset of being prepared, who were ready to close their doors and stay home from work for two weeks and immediately break into, you know the MREs or the long-term food solutions. When really that kind of a moment that we all faced all around the world really somewhere between February and April, is the moment to take that cash reserve that you have. It's the moment to pool your resources with your family, it's the moment to do the inventory of what's in the pantry, go to the store and what I told a lot of people to do, and I could see the light bulb going off was, you know you go buy two weeks worth of groceries.

You buy two weeks worth of food. Remember with the pandemic situation we weren't talking about the grid going down, we weren't talking about a natural disaster cutting power, we weren't talking about obviously food spoiling and things like that it was just you were gonna have to stay home right? So the idea of preparation isn't just a stockpile of food for the end of the world as we know it, right? It's not just dry food and you know water purifiers. It really is what are you gonna do in the moment?

And some of that's counter ambush. So that's where I really wanna start. I wanna start with that isolation concern that we all had and that some people may be facing again, right? We could see mandatory shutdowns, we could see travel restrictions, we could see all that again as we get further into the year, it gets cold gain, we're seeing spikes, outbreaks, numbers. Whatever you need to deal with, right?

Whether you think it's appropriate or not and I know there's a lot of side discussion we could have for hours on whether the restrictions and the responses are appropriate, they are what they are. And it, from a counter ambush personal defense standpoint we have to think about that potential for isolation coming back. And obviously we all have a very fresh lesson in our minds from what it was like to be isolated from our work, from a supply chain, from a source of food. Obviously, sometimes the shelves were a little bit harder to stock at grocery stores. And there were a lot of limits in terms of what you could buy, where I would spend a lot of time in Florida, down at my Eastern headquarters, and it was a situation where if we had gone out in the first week of March with you know a pocket full of cash we could have bought two weeks worth of meat and other supplies very very easily, put them in the freezer, put them in the refrigerator and we would have been fine.

But if we didn't do that, and I know this happened a lot of places around the country, what you ended up with with a situation by late March, where you could only buy you know two packages of meat. So if you're down to, if you get to the store late and you're down to, you know, two chicken breasts and a package, a one pound hamburger meat for a family of four, well now what happens? You ended up having to go to the grocery store every day. And of course, if you are worried about transmission and you are worried about exposure to any virus, anything that's going on in public, or dealing with the angst, the civil unrest, the issues with masks and all the things we've had all around our country with violence also, well then it behooves you to not have to go to the store every day. So again, planning ahead and responding early.

That's probably the most important thing about coping with isolation. Is sort of accepting the reality of it and then preparing as early as possible, as much as you can. And again, we're gonna try to avoid the idea of going into the food that lasts for 20 years that you've got in the basement. We're gonna try to avoid the idea of going into the 50 gallon drum of potable water that you've, you know have got stored in the garage. If you can go to the store and you can get that short-term, one week, two week, 20 days supply, and you have the funds to do it, then obviously that's a better way to respond to something like this pandemic.

Now, I'll be honest, this has exposed some weaknesses here at Personal Defense Network. It's exposed some weaknesses in my own personal planning. Because when we went back and we said, well gee let's share some information about what to do. You know, the vast majority of the survival information that we had was completely inappropriate to what we actually dealt with. And some lessons were learned there.

When it comes to isolation we also have to think not just about the food situation, but we need to think about the defensive situation. And in that scenario where I think Personal Defense Network had done a great job, at my own personal work, the book "Defend Yourself" on armed home defense at all the preparations locks, security alarms, cameras, the things that go along with just having a firearm and knowing how to use it inside of your house right? All of that information overlaps really, really well. So if you found yourself someone who was practicing good home defense preparation and you were trained for it, you were equipped for it, and you had your quick access safe, and you had your cameras and you used your alarms and you had good locks, you had lighting outside of your home, motion lights, whatever you had, you found yourself hopefully very easily prepared and confident in your abilities to deal with what we faced as the isolation or the pandemic kicked in during the spring. And again, I'm gonna say it over and over again might come back again this fall and we need to be prepared for that.

So, home security overlap preparation really good. If you had just gone by everything we put out at Personal Defense you'd have been all set. Supplies, maybe not. One of the other things I wanna talk about, we talk about isolation is the mental health aspect of it. The mental health aspect of isolation and being away from work and being away from friends, being away from your normal social activities, you know watching sports, participating in sports, going to the bowling alley, going out to the bars, whatever that was, right now around the country we are still restricted from a lot of our normal social activities.

If you're a season ticket holder at the football games or the baseball games, you're not being able to take advantage of that. If that was your release, if that was your venting, if that was the way you met people and hung out with the people that thought the way you did and live the way you did and talked about the things that you talked about, well that got taken away from you. Hanging out at the bars and maybe not even drinking a lot where we're not gonna talk about the alcohol use, right? As much you can go by the alcohol and drink it at your house, but the social aspect of being out and going to trivia night or watching the sports on the television or going to the movie theater with your family, all of those things. Organized sports, you know a lot of families take their children's organized sports very very seriously to a high school kid that may be the focus right?

If you're a high school kid watching this, or you have one at home that could be the focus of your life. It could be your social network, it could be your future plans, what school you're gonna go to, what you're doing when you go to the camps during the summer and all that, it could be directly related to those things that were taken away. So what do you have set up in isolation to help you with the mental health aspects of being cut off from all of that? The other side of that of course is you're cut off from everybody else and you might be stuck in the house with someone that sure, they're family, they're, you know, your partner, they're your spouse, but at the end of the day 24/7 for 5, 6, 8, 10, 20 days in a row that can weigh on any relationship right? And that can create annoyances and little things that you know, kinda bother you, but you didn't think were worth mentioning, by day 10, they could cause a fight.

And if you're not communicating well, if you're not communicating really well. I know a lot of people that have big families that were in small homes, or even you know, normal size home a large home when you're all confined in one space, by mid-March, early April were having daily meetings, right? Vent sessions, sit around the table and say whatever you need to say. Talk about whatever you need to talk about. And then of course mentioning Walk The Talk America wtta.org/love.

If you go to wtta.org, you're gonna see a little pop-up window, mental health screening, for gun owners, for the family members of gun owners, for anyone in the firearms community. It's very two-way friendly resource. And quite frankly, all of the screenings are not firearm or specific by any means, they are powered by Mental Health America. It's free, it's anonymous, and it's a great way to maybe just relieve some anxiety you might have about whether or not you're suffering from depression or clinical anxieties. When I use it colloquially, if you're worried about something, whatever it is, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, depression, a true clinical anxiety to where it's debilitating concern.

You can go there and take that screening and talk about it. And I know a lot of people have taken those screenings especially over the last six months and found out that you know what? They don't really have anything to clinically be worried about based on their honest answers there. Other people have found resources, again free local community resources through mental health professionals that are second amendment friendly, that are not gonna weaponize a mental health care, try to take away your guns or make it harder for you to live a good life and be prepared to live a long healthy life. So wtta.org definitely deserves a shout out there in terms of isolation.

Let me check in here. I am monitoring the chat room. You know, this is something Carl brought this up. I'm gonna go back, I know there's other questions that were asked first but this is a real quick and easy one. Carl Butler's States have laws commit, against committing a crime while concealing your identity, not necessarily just wearing a mask and carrying, right?

And this is really important. So I'm assuming if I go back up here, there it is, Brett Brown, majority of States mandating face masks where does that leave you, leave us with EDC? So this is not a concern. And I think it's really important that we as members of the firearms community and the Personal Defense Community Safety Education Community can't say this with more of a period or maybe with more of an exclamation mark and can't say it often enough. We have a lot of really important things to worry about even on the gun rights side, but especially in terms of just the things we're talking about today, the safety and security concerns related to the pandemic, related to civil unrest, especially as the election season gets closer.

We don't need to look for things that aren't really an issue. What I've encouraged everybody to do. If you have any concern whatsoever, you have to not go to the internet, not go to the chat rooms, not even go to the Q and A here at PDN Live, but go to your local law enforcement jurisdiction or your State Attorney General's office or whoever controls concealed carry. It would be the secretary of agriculture in Florida, I think it's the commerce department in Tennessee, wherever the concealed carry permits, if they exist in State or to the Attorney General's office, maybe the State police, maybe your local police, Those are gonna be your resources to go to with your concerns about the masks. But as is pointed out here by, I think who was it?

Carl, as was pointed out in there by Carl, these laws that people are concerned about about wearing a mask and carrying a gun every single one that I've seen. And I've seen several of them now because people send me the links, they all reference the intent, this is so important with criminal activity and with criminal charges and certainly with prosecution, the intent to conceal one's identity, right? If you're wearing a scarf because it's cold out and you walk up to the window at the Burger King and you, you know or you walk up to the counter at the Burger King and you try to order something and you're carrying a gun, you're not attempting to conceal your identity. And obviously the same is true of medical masks. So be really careful about that.

The wearing the mask because it's a, because you're complying with a mandate, because you're complying with a restriction, because the business owner, the private property owner has said, hey we'd like you to wear masks here, or out of your own concern for transmission, whether it's receiving or depositing any of the coronavirus when you're walking around in the public or you're in a store. That mask is not being worn to conceal your identity. So this is really, really not an issue. I've said that very emphatically, since it first came up in March and no one has sent me a note or a letter, I don't, you know if you have one post it here, let me know, call my attention to it because there's a lot of us out there in the training community, telling people it's not an issue. If there's any jurisdiction in the country where this has become an issue, please let us know.

We don't need to again spend even this much time probably on the idea that they might try to arrest people for concealed carry otherwise legally when they're wearing a mask that has been mandated by a restriction or, you know some compelling legal authority or for private property. Now remember same thing works the same way for private property. If the private property says you can't carry a gun, well you can't carry a gun, right? That's their choice, go somewhere else if you don't like it. Same thing with a mask.

If they're telling you wear the mask, go somewhere else if you don't like it, wear the mask. You go in wearing a mask and carrying a gun and the private property owner doesn't have any problem with it, you've got nothing to worry about. So keep that in mind. Let me see what else we have here. Randy, you like the way I started on time.

That has nothing to do with me. I would probably be running late, but the team over there in the control room, make sure that I am on time. So thank them. And we do have a big team here, it's important, I think it's obvious when I'm here sometimes, when I'm like doing the live from my phone in the truck could be people assume I'm running PDN in my basement. There's a huge team here that makes this all happen really really well.

And they definitely keep me on time when they can. I'm not always like super cooperative there. Jeff says with the current climate we're living in it's more important than ever to be prepared. He goes on to talk about the current ammo situation. So let me talk about that a little bit.

It is true that there is right now we're in one of those times where it's hard to find ammunition, it's hard to find inexpensive ammunition and it's especially hard to find inexpensive, what I would call training or practice ammunition right? So I'll give you an example down at Ancient City Shooting Range where my Eastern headquarters is down in St. Augustine, Florida. We did not take in an order of nine millimeter that we could have taken in from our primary supplier a couple of weeks ago right? The idea was the owner just decided that he didn't want to have to put nine millimeter ammo out for $20 a box.

And, you know, just because that just it's ridiculous. And to, if it was less than 20 dollars a box then the range would have lost money on it. So it's kind of easier just to say to members and say to people like hey man, we just can't get reasonably priced ammunition right now, we expect to have back in probably by the time I get back down there in about 10 days, there'll be ammo there. Prior to that for the last couple of months we've only been able to have 147 grain to provide to the members at the range. We haven't been able to nine millimeter, we haven't been able to get the kind of standard 115 grain practice plinking rounds that most people use.

And it's just because of this drought. We've gone through this before. And in fact, probably now about eight, nine years ago one of the times we went through this this drought complete drought of being able to find good training and practice ammunition, I produced the DVD here at Personal Defense Network and it was called I think your best 100 practice rounds or the best 100 rounds for practice and what I did, and I think I taped it actually out in the Pacific Northwest I think it was on a range in Oregon. And what I did was I went down all the components of you know, well-rounded, armed defense skills. Just the shooting skills.

The shooting in weapons, weapons handling skills. And I used 100 rounds to do a comprehensive practice not learning because you're gonna need to put it in more reps over time obviously to learn any of these skills, that you're just gonna have to bite the bullet. If you're a new gun owner and you wanna take a class you're gonna have to bite the bullet and buy the bullets to do that. But if you already have been trained, if you already own those skills and you just need to keep them sharp, 100 rounds practice, and I think it's available now as a download, obviously not a lot of people buying DVDs these days. But at personaldefensenetwork.com you can find that DVD download, have it on your laptop, on your tablet, on your phone and watch it, take it to the range, do whatever you wanna do with it, but even just, if you just go and read the description of that, it'll give you a really good idea of what I think are the key component skills that you should own as someone who's carrying a gun in the public space with the idea of being able to protect yourself or someone else.

And then it will kinda remind you that you don't need a lot of reps. You don't need a lot of live fire reps to maintain your skills. Now if this goes on for years we're gonna have to figure something out. But if we're talking about six months, you know get us past the election, past the inauguration, get us in the next spring, a hundred rounds a month, you can definitely maintain your skills. Once again, and we're running classes, we have classes coming up in Massachusetts, I've got classes coming up in Colorado at the end of August and we've got our instructors training all over the country, 4 to 500, 600 rounds a day, that's the kind of effort you need to put in to establish the skills.

So once again, it comes down to preparation, right? If you didn't in invest in training ammo and practice ammo ahead of the curve, you're gonna be paying the price now. It is out there, but it's expensive. Obviously there's other options. The Mantis X you know, laser or sorry, tracking trainer that kinda tells what you're doing.

The stuff from Laser Shot. Obviously NLT SIRT, the SIRT pistols, they just came out with a great option for people that wanna train with long guns, using the SIRT pistols inside of a clam shell that you can accessorize just like you accessorize your long gun, your AR style long gun with a red dot, with a sling, whatever you need. Though there are options out there for Nonlive Fire Training. Again, for skill maintenance those things can be great options. We've got a ton of video information and article information here at personaldefensenetwork.com on dry fire practice or nonlive fire practices as sometimes I like to say, but at the end of the day, you definitely need to get out to the range to learn the skills and to maintain them at some point.

See what else we have here and then I'll jump back into my list. We have the mask issue, Georgia, okay, so interesting here, John says that in Georgia the governor specifically said that wearing the masks, the issue of wearing the mask while you're carrying the gun wouldn't be an issue, wouldn't be enforced. And he's got a link there. And then we've got a YouTube question virus, Try it again. Virus statistics can be questionable depending on who is reporting them.

How much lockdown living is necessary, would I specify different types of preparation for people living in the city versus real. Okay, so Ken, again I don't wanna get into the politics of it. At the end of the day, you've got to make a decision. You've gotta make an objective decision based on what you believe is right or wrong. And this is something we always said, this is another philosophical foundational concept at Personal Defense Network is the idea of should versus could.

And what that, that's meant a lot of different things. But in this case when we apply the should versus could principle, what I'm asking you to ask yourself is what should you do? Because if you're basing what you are doing solely on what some authority is telling you to do, right? Or what some perceived authority maybe is telling you what to do, I think you set yourself up for not only like a foundational moral crisis, but you you could very well be setting yourself up for, you know falling for a misinformation campaign, or following somebody else's agenda. And someone else's agenda may not be protecting you and your family and your community.

So we know ultimately right? The second amendment in the United States is meant to help us protect ourselves from enemies foreign and domestic that might hurt us. So the idea of just simply going with what the law says, right? Or going with what the rules are, or going with the group of experts that you're hearing from right now say, it's always not, that's not always gonna be the best advice. It's not going to be my advice.

It's not always gonna be the Personal Defense Network advice, right? At the end of the day, we're not giving you legal advice, we've been really clear on that. Even though we have some legal experts here, legal advice is something very very different from personal defense education. So what should you do, right? And I'll give you an example when it comes to the mask situation, right?

I believe, and we're gonna talk about this being out in public anyway, it's on my list. I believe that if you're in an environment where masks are expected, notice I'm not saying mandated, I'm not saying imposed, I'm not saying there's a compliance issue, but if you're going into an area where masks are expected, they're the social norm, and you choose not to wear a mask, you have to accept some responsibility for potentially causing a confrontation. Well, what's one of the basic fundamentals of personal defense is conflict avoidance and conflict deescalation. So if you're going into the store which is a private property store and they have decided they want you to wear the mask. And whether they've decided that because of a government restriction and they're complying with it, or they just personally are worried about coronavirus and they want you to wear a mask, I don't care.

When you go on to that private property of they're saying we want you to wear a mask and there's a person there at the door, making sure you're wearing a mask or keeping the occupancy at a certain level and putting people in a line, wear the mask. And stand on the little taped line, six feet away somebody else, because that's what you should do. And again even if you're gonna say, well, they don't, they can't ask me. ADA says they can't ask me if I have an underlying mental health or sorry physical health condition, where if I put the mask on I have a problem with my lungs and I can't get enough oxygen, so I don't have to wear a mask. And whether that's true or not, I know there's a lot of people that are kind of using that, right?

And they're walking up to the door of the store and they're saying, I have a medical condition. I can't wear a mask and you can't make me and you can't know anything about it. Okay? You may very well be making a legal point that you can make, right? You could say that if you want, but you're also potentially causing a confrontation over something that's relatively simple.

And on the other side, if you believe that complying with a mask order or, you know, listening to what a private property owner wants you to do is some kind of you know, a moral compromise that you're not willing to make, I would suggest you just stay home to avoid that right? So when you asked the question Ken about what I think is appropriate in terms of a lockdown again, I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm taking in a collection of aggregated information from a whole bunch of different sources, including a lot of doctors that I know that are in hospitals that have been dealing with the coronavirus. Some of you may know that I went up to New York and we opened up a range. We opened up a range against the governor's restrictions on ranges being open. We had medical supervision, we had consultation, we had private CCW holders, we had law enforcement participate in the class, the range, obviously they took the biggest risk in opening the doors to us.

And we ran a class, with masks, with good hand sanitizer use, with social distancing, with a lower, shorter duration than we normally run classes. And with a, with less density, with fewer people in the class than we would normally run in a class. And we felt like that was responsible. We felt like that was the way to do it. It was what we should have done.

And it was reasonable given what we were the real risks of coronavirus transmission and the real risks if we were to contract the COVID-19 given the people that were participating. There's a lot of people that I would have recommended not attend that class because of other health concerns that they have right? So the should versus could issue has to get factored in. So I'm not gonna tell you if I think lockdowns are a good idea, if masks are a good idea, hand sanitizers is a good idea. I will tell you that I have not locked down, I've been traveling.

I have been moving around a lot but while I've been moving around, I've also been wearing a mask quite often, obviously complying with private property or private business owners requests, whether it's an airline or a local shop. And I've been using a lot of hand sanitizer. I've taken a couple of tests, I'm antibody negative. So I feel like what we're doing is working. And again, that's what I would suggest you do.

Is take all the information in that you can, decide what you're going to comply with, what you're going to do for your own personal safety when you're in the crowds, when you're in the public space. But remember part of your responsibility, especially if you're carrying a gun around is to avoid conflict and to deescalate whenever possible. Don't let, I said this at the very beginning, don't let your politics dictate your tactics. And that's really hard for some people to process sometimes because we get very emotionally worked up and obviously our second amendment rights and our gun rights and our personal defense rights and our freedoms are incredibly important, regardless of where you are but particularly here in the U.S. we value those to a very high degree.

That freedom shouldn't be seen as recklessness. It shouldn't put you in danger and I'm not talking about coronavirus exposure, I'm talking about the danger of a fight, right? We've seen that, we've seen people get shot, we've seen people get stabbed, we've seen people certainly get a lot of YouTube videos and streaming videos on Instagram of people getting into the yelling matches that could have escalated into physical violence very easily. And those things end up with a lot of legal ramifications, social ramifications, emotional ramifications for everybody involved. So conflict avoidance and deescalation, incredibly important as we look at the crowd issues.

One of the other crowd issues I've got on my list is this issue of being in a vehicle and being surrounded by a crowd. Now this is something that we've addressed before. In fact, there's a video out there somewhere where we basically did it almost like tongue in cheek and we talked about defense from within a vehicle while armed and the camera sort of zoomed in on me, it was in one of the tour trucks a few years ago and the camera zoomed in on me, and I think I had a hard point, one of the Ram Mount Crossbreed Holsters with a firearm in it. So let's say that you're here and you know, you've got your gun in the holster and this and that and you're at a traffic light and you have a threat in the middle of the intersection, you know, threaten you in a way or your occupants in a way that you think you could potentially be hurt, killed and you wanna use, you know you are justified in using lethal force to defend yourself and rather than reach for the gun, I reach for the gear shift and I floor the truck and I run the 3D mannequin target, one of those tactical 3D targets over, and you know hit it with the wheel and an arm goes flying and I kind of drive off. And that was actually filmed and put out on the internet in social media about two before a very high profile law enforcement use of a vehicle as a weapon to stop a lethal threat, who was we're running down the street firing his gun and you might remember this video where one patrol car is following the person at a pace where they're matching the person who's running, and in another patrol car comes in from the right side of the screen and just runs the guy over and smashes into a sign in the strip mall or the corporate park, executive park wherever they were there.

And that was literally two weeks or three weeks after we had published this video saying this could be justified. This could be what you need to do. So let's establish that first of all yeah if you're under lethal threat and you're inside of your vehicle and the appropriate thing might be to use your vehicle as a defensive tool to stop that person from hurting you or someone else. However, if you're sitting at a red light and a march, protestors, rioters, whatever you wanna call them, a march comes by in front of you and blocks the intersection and the light turns green, you are not justified in flooring it, running into the crowd. You're not justified, I don't think and even moving at one or two or three miles an hour, just because they shouldn't be blocking the road, doesn't give you the right, if you're not actually threatened directly you and the occupants of your car to start moving that 3, 4 or 5,000 pound vehicle through that crowd.

And if you do, chances are they're gonna pound on your car, or you might have a weapon pulled on you, you might have someone hurt you, you might have someone throw a rock through the window and hurt your kid who's sitting in the backseat and you have to think about that once again, conflict avoidance and deescalation. Now on the other hand, if the crowd of rioters, looters, marchers come in front of you, turn and look at you and come at your car and actually present a direct threat, if someone in that crowd points a gun at you or someone else and you believe the appropriate thing to do is use your car or use a firearm as we've seen also happen around the country to defend yourself, well then you're completely justified. But the rules don't change just because there's civil unrest. And the rules again certainly don't change just because you don't politically agree with the march, or with the protestors, or with the idea that they're blocking the intersection. I've seen far too many videos of people who could've just sat there and let the parade move on.

Could have sat there for 15 minutes and let the police come in and disperse the crowd. Could have sat there for 10 minutes and let the people get bored and move out of the walkway. Or quite honestly could have put their car in reverse or made a sharp left and turned around and gone another route, but instead they've chosen to confront the people who were blocking the roadway. They've chosen to drive purposefully into them even though there was no obvious threat. Whether one could be articulated or not, you shouldn't do that.

And if you create a lethal force situation, or you create an environment where you could get hurt or you actually need to hurt somebody else to defend yourself, again I think you're in the wrong. So plenty of information again Personal Defense Network has plenty of information on defending yourself from within the vehicle. Learning how to draw your gun without covering yourself or occupants shooting through glass. All of these things could be incredibly important, but don't make them important. Don't put yourself into a situation you don't need to get into.

Think about like some fundamental basic defensive driving concept, right? Avoid bad parts of town. Well, if there's a riot going on, take the loop, don't go through the middle of downtown. If you do find yourself in a situation where the crowd is coming towards you and they aren't supposed to be in that town, obviously you're not looking for a confrontation, remember that every single time you come to a stop, every single time you're driving in traffic, you should think about a very simple basic ideas, make sure you can see the bottom of the tires of the car in front of you. If you're sitting in your vehicle and you can see the bottom of the tires of the vehicle in front of you, you probably have enough space to maneuver, right?

You don't have to be four car lengths back, because guess what happens? Somebody is gonna come in and cut you off anyway. But if you have a reasonable about a half a car length or so reasonable honest space between you and the vehicle in front of you, you should be able to maneuver your vehicle to turn around, to make a sharp left, to cut through that parking lot, to look for that escape route so that you don't get trapped. We get into the issues of how to move another vehicle out of the way, ramming a vehicle, low speed pushing a vehicle out of the way if you need to. There's a lot of different things that go into defending yourself with, or while you're in a vehicle.

But again, your best bet is to avoid or deescalate a situation. Just tolerate it right? I did a live last week and the idea was look, if I'm sitting in a vehicle and there's a sketchy crowd around me, I don't wanna pull my gun and escalate the situation. But I absolutely might take my seatbelt off, obviously make sure the doors are locked. Make sure I keep the car in drive, make sure I have space to maneuver my car, take my seatbelt off, expose my firearm so that I can reach it.

I might even put my hand on that gun so that I am staged but I'm not gonna pull that gun out, I'm certainly not gonna point it at people until I have a situation where I actually need to do that. And that's actually one of the other things I have here on my list of things to talk about. In the public space we have taught the staged position for a long time here at Personal Defense Network. The stage position, is when you put your hand on your firearm, you're not trying to conceal it, you've exposed your concealed firearm, you've put your hand on the gun, while your hand is on the gun, you do not draw the gun until you perceive a need to use the gun to defend yourself. So the idea is once I pull that gun out, somebody can grab it, somebody could misinterpret my intentions, right?

If I'm not ready to shoot you, I don't want you thinking I'm ready to shoot you. I will shoot you if I need to. I will use this gun to defend myself. But this is I'm about to shoot you. And this looks like I'm about to shoot you to that person over there.

Who might be your friend, right? Who might be a police officer, who might be just somebody videoing something that's gonna later say I confronted you. They start the video right now, yeah a guy showed up and pulled the gun on somebody. So if I can keep that gun in my holster all the better. And even if I do come to a ready position, there's a big difference really, between this ready position and this extended shooting position.

So be really careful about pointing guns at people you don't need to shoot. It's just not something you need do. And again, can you do it legally? Don't care. Should you do it?

You shouldn't do it. That's the Personal Defense Network position, that's my position. Learn about the compressed ready position and the staged position and practice them. Practice getting your gun, your hand to your gun without drawing it and giving verbal commands, gesturing to somebody, grabbing your family members, opening doors, locking your car doors, the seatbelt, the whole thing. Practice doing all that stuff in the staged position.

Practice doing all that stuff in the high compressed ready, because if you think that you're gonna run around like somebody on TV with their gun extended telling people to back up, back up, back up, you could very well get hurt, especially in a crowd, right? Just because you have the gun doesn't mean it's a magic talisman is gonna protect you. And if that police officer comes around the corner and sees this person when they were told somebody was shooting in the crowd, you're probably not getting that verbal warning. Hand on the gun, looking for the person who actually is the bad guy, getting your family to safety, infinitely better way to go. Now, there is something I wanna talk about real quick, because we are a little bit more than halfway through here.

And that is a download and this download is free. And I think we're gonna get a little banner that comes up here, a little graphic that'll tell you about it. This is top five bad shooting habits. And obviously it's not just, hey look, here's some bad habits but it's going to tell you how to solve them, how to address them. Now, these aren't just your generic, you know marksmanship type habits, right?

These are things that I have seen students do over and over again on the range. It's something that I teach other instructors to be prepared for because you're probably gonna see these things in almost every class. And it's the kind of thing that you see when you watch people post videos when they're out shooting and not just shooting. Because honestly, if you post a video of you taking, you took your family members out, you took your five five-year-old, you know you take your kids out, you go shooting. I'm not the guy who's gonna show up in the comments and critique your plinking technique right?

But if you're telling me that you're training for armed defense, if you're telling any other instructor or if you're coaching someone else, even if you're not an instructor. You take somebody out and oh, you just bought a new gun, let me take you to the range, come on, let's do this, these are the things we're talking about. What are the bad habits that shooters have? What are the bad habits that people who say they are preparing to use a gun to defend themselves or others? What are those bad habits?

So there this free download, check it out. Again it can't hurt. Maybe you have a better idea than I do how to solve those problems. Or maybe you're gonna tell me those aren't the top five bad habits Rob, here's a bad habit I see all the time, 'cause I'm an RSO or I'm an instructor, I'd love to hear back from you. So check out that download after this, not right now, check it out in about 20 minutes and let me know what you think and hopefully you'll find them, those tips as valuable as, as other students have and other instructors have as well.

One of the things I try to do as much as possible is really empower other people. Even if you're just a responsible gun owner that has a friend who just bought their first gun, you know you have, I believe in educational responsibility, you know did they get a quick access safe? Did they know how to load the gun? Did they know how to unload the gun? Did they get a good holster if they're gonna carry it in public?

Have they taken a class? You know, did they get their concealed carry permit? Forget about the infringement issues. If you're gonna carry a gun around in public and you can get a concealed carry permit in your State, it's something you should do, right? Go through that process because why deal with the legal aftermath of not having done it?

And you just might get a tip or two from that instructor, that'll keep you from having an accident, a negligent discharge, or getting yourself into trouble when there was really no need for it. So, really important that we are ambassadors for responsible firearms ownership. And that's where things like this download will really help or you know sharing this video with people. Let's see what we've got here. Has someone, so this is a guest, Guest 2328, thanks for joining the show today.

As someone who wants to hit the bullseye every time at the range, while no issues being combat effective, any tips to just enjoy the time at the range to train versus trying to be perfect? Well, let's define perfection right? Let's talk about that. And this is a concept called combat accuracy. And I know you have in quotes here, combat effective.

I have used the term defensive accuracy for probably a little over a decade. Combat accuracy is what we used to call it of course my primary firearms program used to be called the Combat Focus Shooting program. It's now the Intuitive Defensive Shooting program inside of the USCCA it's defensive shooting fundament or sorry Defensive Shooting Fundamentals. We've got a lot of great names for it it's all the same stuff really. It's the evolution of the same stuff that I started training myself, practicing myself and teaching in the 90s, that we formalized as the Combat Focus Shooting program.

I'm gonna talk about combat accuracy. When we talk about combat or defensive accuracy, we're not just talking about this idea that if you pull the trigger and you win the fight, what you did was good enough. And that's how a lot of people put it. Now, is that true? Sure.

If you win your fight and no you know bystanders get hurt, then cool. But what you did worked. That doesn't mean that you should train to do and or emulate exactly what you saw work right? That makes sense? Because we know that the vast majority of defensive gun uses don't involve physically stopping a threat, right?

A lot of them don't involve guns being fired at all, right? A lot of them don't involve the bad guy getting hit even though guns were fired. And the vast majority, even times when gunned bad guys get hit they still end up running away, right? So the example I was given class, a bad guy shows up with a knife, you draw your gun, you shoot him three times in the chest, and he drops the knife, runs away, he goes over the hill, around the corner, behind the house, into the dumpster, hides in the dumpster and the police find him there you know, an hour later bled out in dead. Was that a physical stop or a psychological stop?

Psychological stop right? All that energy that person used to run halfway across the town and hide, they could have been using to try to stab you but they changed their mind, right? So was the shooting affective? It was. Was it combat accurate?

Did you hit the intended target area? Sure. If you're aiming for the high center chest you put three rounds in the chest, you were perfect. And that's, what's gonna get me back to this question, Guest 2328, I'm really gonna get back there. When you hit your target you are being defensively accurate.

So you have to think of accuracy as a yes or no. Now it's putting three rounds into somebody's chest and having them run away and they dropped the knife. You won the fight, putting three rounds into somebody's chest and they dropped dead right there, and they never take another breath and they never threaten you or anybody else again is still winning the fight, they're both winning the fight. And honestly at the end of the day, one isn't better than the other in terms of the tactical application of defensive shooting skills. When I say accuracy is a yes or no proposition, what I mean by that is, once you define a target area, right?

I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna pull this over here. I've got a little whiteboard situation. That's why we keep it here. We keep it here just in case I decide to use it.

And I want you to see this. If I take, and you can see this area right here, a human, I'm a horrible artist which is why generally the team's like, yeah you don't really need the whiteboard Rob. We can make graphics, we have skills and, but you know what I mean here right? So we've got a human torso, so there's the face, right? Bad guy.

And this is the high center chest area. So we talk about it, you know, being defined as coming off the shoulders, underneath the head, and it's an area about a wide open hand, a pie plate, 8 by 10, whatever it is. If I define that as my intended target and I shoot the person in the shoulder and they drop the knife and they run away and I win the fight, my shooting was combat effective in this sense, right? There's a sense of effectiveness, I was effective. I achieved my goal of winning the fight.

But my shooting was not accurate. My accuracy was off or my precision level I should say was off which makes accuracy a no. I did not put enough deviation control into this. if I hit the guy there, but he continues to come at me with the knife and I have to shoot again and I have to shoot again and I have to shoot again. And he keeps coming and eventually I have to push the knife away and bring my gun back and we're ready position and shoot him as he turns to shoot, coming back stabbed me again I shoot him in the back, and then he finally drops.

Well, were these four shots accurate? Absolutely. Were they effective? No. Can I predict the effect that a bullet is gonna have when it goes through the high center chest of the bad guy?

Nope. So if I can't predict whether or not this is actually going to affect the guy, then what I need to remember is, all I can control is where the bullet goes. So when you say that you're on a quest to be perfect, I say to you, make sure you're defining your goal well. Because if I fire 10 shots and they all end up in that high center chest box, and that was my defined target area, that's perfect, right? If I, say I wanna put 10 shots into this high center chest area, and I end up with this.

I was accurate with all those shots, but I don't consider that perfect, right? That would represent shooting too slowly because I actually put all the shots into a box that size. And that's smaller than my defined area right? So when we're talking about combat accuracy we also have to talk about, and this is something that, you know, literally, you know chapters in books and DVDs, there's all kinds of stuff out there unbalanced of speed and precision. So I wanna put enough control that's the precision, put enough control on the gun, so that I hit my intended target area.

And if I do that as quickly as I can, I don't put any more effort into controlling the gun than I need to, if I do that as quickly as I can and fill my intended target area, that is perfect shooting. So it really just comes down to it to redefining perfection maybe for you there are Guest 2328. The idea that you think about hitting the bullseye, like at first of all if you're shooting at a bullseye target we're talking about defensive shooting, you're probably using the wrong target, right? So if you look at something like our balance of speed and precision targets there's a silhouette that looks way better than that one, and there's a high center chest target area, and there's a triangle in the head for the headshots, there's three inch circles that also represent the headshots. There's two other boxes that are a 10 by 10 or 9 by 9 that represent chest areas down on the bottom.

And you can use that target to practice shooting at appropriately sized target areas regardless of the distance, right? The chest is the chest, the head is the head. And the areas that you're shooting at are pretty well-defined anatomically for physiological reasons. What happens if you put around into the base of the brain? What happens if you put around through the heart?

Or through the lungs or into the spine, right? What happens if you hit the diaphragm? What happens if you break down the collarbone? Or if you hit any of this vascular area here above the heart? Those are the things we want to happen to make it so that the bad guy physically can't hurt us if that's what we need to do.

Is physically stop the bad guy. So think about how you're defining perfection, think about how you're defining your goal. And that might make it easier because there's really, if you still wanna hit all your shots into one hole, it doesn't matter if I give you a 20 by 20 target or give you a one inch bullseye, you're still trying to stack all your holes on top of one another when you're firing the gun, and that's in your head. So you've got to shift your perspective. There is bulls-eye marksmanship stuff, and then there is the idea of balancing speed and precision, being combat accurate and defining accuracy as a yes or no proposition.

It's kinda like shooting at steel. Shooting a steel target and it goes ding you're happy. You should have the paper target sometimes you want to see that tight group, right? 'cause somebody is gonna take a picture of it put it on Instagram. You wanna think of it more like the steel target as long as you hit it, you're good.

Let's see what else we got here. Buying ammo, it feels like 2008 all over again. Yeah, it does, 2008 or 2012. Talking about masks. You know, when you wear a mask?

Where do you wear a mask? That's, I do think it's important. Like, again I'm not, I've shared my information and it's not really for me to say right or wrong but it is good to see what other people are doing. And then if you have a question, you guys can talk to each other privately and ask people why feel free. Let me go down my list of things.

We talked about isolation, we talked about preparation. Food was one area that we talked about. I also wanna talk about medical stuff. Let me, well you know, I'm actually I'm wearing my, and by the way, if any of you are gold level members at 12:30 today Central Time we're gonna have about probably about half an hour after we end this one, about 45 minutes from now we're gonna have a Q and A inside of the gold membership level just for everyday carry and we're gonna talk a little bit about how everyday carry might have changed under the coronavirus pandemic situations and or because of the crowds and the civil unrest and things like that. But this is something that if you're a PDN fan, if you follow my social media, you've seen this before.

This is my ankle medical kit. And there's certain things that are carried in here. We won't get into too much of the detail. But the idea is that, this is the kind of stuff we normally think of when we think of medical equipment. We think of what we carry around with us.

What we want to make sure that we have and whether it's, you know, in something like this, or it's in a pouch like we would have on the range or we'd keep in our car. There's another carrier here from the Immediate Casualty Care, that again we could just take, you know take this tourniquet or take a tourniquet out of here, just gonna be way easier, 'cause then I'll have to repack it. So I take the tourniquet out of here and I can put it in there just to give you an idea of how this all works. And this might be something that's easier for you to carry depending on how you dress it may be more comfortable for you than the ankle carry, right? Or you can just keep this in your vehicle, right?

Put this right inside of that map pocket, put these clips on there and you know where it is all the time. Well, this kind of medical equipment is important to personal defense. Obviously it's important to taking care of yourself. But what about medicine? Right?

That was a big deal too, for a lot of people. If you have a prescription medicine, and I know it's hard with some of the controlled substances, I know it's hard with some of the prescription insurance plans that people have, but it's probably a really good idea, if it's not gonna you know expire or go bad, that you find a way to get an extra month supply, right? And I'm not telling you to you know skip a pill every other day and make a pile I'm telling you to get with your doctor, you know, get with a friend who has a doctor. Talk to maybe multiple doctors, whatever it is you need to do, to be able to have that extra month or two supply, your prescriptions pills, Especially if it's life and death stuff, which, you know if you're taking medicine every day I hope it's life and death stuff it's keeping you healthy and keeping you around it's not something you're just, you know taken for for a recreational purpose or whatever else it is right? So make sure that you have that extra month and think about your family members.

I'll tell you the one thing I ran into, it was almost impossible to find kids medicine, just regular kids, cold and flu medicine type stuff, in any of the pharmacies or any of the big-box stores probably by late March, it was just wiped out. You couldn't find a thermometer and you couldn't find children's Tylenol and you couldn't find children's cold and flu or decongestant or any of that. And I get it like people, all of a sudden they were gonna be home for two weeks and whether it was going to help with coronavirus or not it makes sense to have kids medicine stocked up. Well, I had a stockpile in Colorado at the Western headquarters, but I did not have a stockpile down in Florida at the Eastern headquarters. And we ended up in a situation where my five-year-old daughter was spending a lot of time with me down there, and I had to stop at a couple of different places as we moved around to be able to create a stockpile of the standard stuff.

You know children's Tylenol, children's ibuprofen, decongestant, children's cold and flu medicine. And now, you know it's one of those gaps that I have filled. So now there's a stockpile in the truck, there's a stockpile at the Eastern headquarters, a stockpile at the Western headquarters, and we have that kind of stuff. So your prescription pills, kids medicine, just all that general stuff, your own general you know ibuprofen, aspirin, when you're stuck at home for two weeks, three weeks, 10 days, whether the grid's down or not, and you can't go out and get aspirin but you've got a headache. It doesn't have anything to do with a pandemic, it's just, you got a headache.

You wanna make sure that you have those kinds of supplies. The other types of medical equipment that we have, right? We've talked a lot about masks. So one of the things that I've started carrying around is just this pouch of masks. And I actually bought, I bought these masks.

This was when everybody was saying well we can't you know reopen because you can't find masks anywhere. And you know, I went to New York city again, back in this was April, oh the city is shut down. You know, you shouldn't go there it's crazy. Well, I got there, I parked my truck, as I was walking the block and a half from where the garage I parked my truck to the hotel I was staying at in Midtown in Manhattan. There were guys with tables on the side of the street, you know, next to where they sell the rip-off purses and the hats and sunglasses whatever.

Well, they had masks and they had his packet of masks it was $10 for 10 masks. And it's probably still nine of them in here but having a package of masks like this, probably important. And again, whether you find medical value in it or not, if you need to go into a store to get supplies, or you need to stop and get gas, or you're moving from one location to another and you cross the border and that State has mask issues and you see there's a mask person, you know an enforcement compliance person standing at the front of the restaurant or the rest of the front of the gas station, throw the mask on. So carry extra masks, have those for family members, for friends, for whatever. And again, even if it's just for the conflict avoidance and deescalation factor, having a couple of extra masks is probably a good idea.

Obviously if you consider these a medical issue, right? You want, you have an N95. One of the things I did was I went out and bought one of those P100 masks, a true respirator with the interchangeable filters back in March. I didn't have one conveniently in the vehicle, and I went out and found one with a couple of extra filters. And I put it in the vehicle as I was moving around because we didn't know what we were dealing with.

Now obviously I'm not wearing a P100 mask when I go into the convenience stores, or when I'm driving around many Minneapolis today, but it might have been that. And if you didn't have that you weren't prepared, if you didn't have the mask, you didn't have the gloves, hand sanitizer is another one. You didn't have the hand sanitizer, all those things were almost impossible to find for a period of time in late March and that could have lasted and it could happen again. So when we talk about medical supplies, long-term medications for isolation issues, and also the compliance medicine, medical equipment, the social compliance medical equipment, the conflict avoidance medical equipment. And again, I get it, you can do this, but there are people that are going to criticize you for walking into a store just holding your t-shirt up over your nose and that's maybe in some ways worse than just not wearing the mask, right?

Because you're sort of feigning compliance. Wear the mask or don't wear the mask, but again consider your actions when you decide to do those things. The last piece I wanna talk about in terms of civil unrest and moving around in the public space is armor. Now the idea of wearing armor and I actually have a t-shirt that has a couple of armor panels that I did a, about a seven minute video on you can go find that on the internet. We haven't had a chance to produce a full video here at Personal Defense Network.

We're gonna get back to producing full, you know educational videos here actually in September. So you're gonna start to see a whole new batch of videos. And one of them will probably be on that Premier Body Armor t-shirt with insertable panels, very very low profile. But any kind of a panel like this that you can get can be put in a backpack. I have carried a soft panel like this inside of this 5.11 backpack for years now.

It just slips into the back of that laptop compartment. It's a very easy, convenient thing to do. A lot of people after the school shootings, they talk about you know, should our kids wear backpack armors? Should we have backpacks that have armor in it? I'm a big fan of panels like this that can be moved around.

You can again, put them in the map pocket of your truck. You know, you give them inherent protection if someone were to attack you from behind. But you also have something that you can throw in a backpack, throw in a bag, throwing a purse, throw in a diaper bag, put in the back of your baby stroller, or just you know tuck under a shirt at the end of the day into your belt line, if you need to. So body armor is something that I think is becoming more and more prevalent in the defense community. You know remember 10 years ago, very very few people were carrying around medical kits.

Even very, very few instructors made a point of opening up the medical kits out on the range and saying, you know here's the tourniquet, here's the compression bandage, here's the hemostatic agent. Now it's pretty much something's wrong if you don't. And I feel like that's the way we're going with armor as well. So think about that. And I, and again, I'm not talking about plate carriers in cosplay or any of that when I'm talking about is low profile, defensive armor that you can wear in situations when you feel there may be an elevated threat.

And obviously times of civil unrest, if you need to go out of your house, you need to be moving around. That might be your time when you're gonna think about having that armor, as well as the home defense scenario, the imminent home invasion, where you might wanna have a situation where you can put the armor blanket or put panels like that in a backpack and put them you know on your kid's chest wear the backpack backwards, now the kid's behind you or you yourself, if you have to move through your house, have an armor response, defensive response with armor if you need to move around and you do encounter that firearms-equipped lethal threat. Let's see what else we got here. It doesn't look like we have any other new comments or questions. I'm assuming somebody in the control room is gonna wave at me if I miss something.

You know, there's over 150 people watching right now, which is awesome. You know, we're out of the habit here at Personal Defense Network of doing a live, and that means you're probably out of the habit of watching the lives. But again, I'm really, really happy that we're back in the studio, that we're kinda moving back towards an old normal, or establishing a new normal. I don't really care how you look at it. The idea is that we have to be talking about these things, we have to be preparing, we have to be training.

we have to be educated, we have to be practicing our skills that we established a couple of years ago that maybe we got away from because 2020 has been a ridiculous year in a lot of ways. However, I do know a lot of other people have taken the time and opportunity obviously to purchase their first firearm, to initiate getting their concealed carry permit, to take their first class, to get the medical training, to think about how they supply their house, to think about what their stockpile really should be, to be as comprehensive as possible. And I know that personal events network has played a role in that for a lot of people, which I'm incredibly proud of. The kinds of people that are coming to Personal Defense Network you know I think they're really the best people, the people that are wanting to take care of themselves and wanting to take care of others. We see that a lot.

So any questions you have for me or any of the other instructors, and we have a lot of people with a lot of medical experience, as well as people with unarmed experience, crowd control, deescalation, even some of the mental health aspects. I think of William April and the kinds of things that he does when he talks to people about risk management and just being aware of how fast things can turn violent. When I talk about wearing a mask just to get into the store and get out without conflict, it's not a political statement, it's not about compliance, it's not about what they are gonna do next, it really is about making your life as easy as possible, surviving as well as you can. And just getting through life without conflict. 'Cause if you can do that, your life's gonna be better.

If you end up in conflict or you feel that there's a conflict worth having, that there's a stand worth taking, always remember if you're carrying that gun that that becomes a lethal encounter, a lethal confrontation really, really quickly. Things can turn on a dime. There's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of stress in our country right now. Some of it's due to the pandemic, some of it's due to the pandemic response. A lot of it's due to social issues and civil unrest.

And we've got an election coming up in just a few months that probably isn't gonna make things better. A lot of people have said this, you know since March both sides of the political spectrum things are gonna get worse before they get better. We've seen some very low times in our country right now. I think that as we move into this election, the potential for that, the possibility for that is very, very real. We here at Personal Defense Network are gonna do our best to equip you with the best information we can give you, not just in terms of, you know our own personal opinions and our own personal ideas but really foundational concepts that you can then take and apply to what you're doing every day.

So reach out to me, reach out to any of our instructors, just reach out to the generic, you know, info at Personal Defense Network. Use that search bar, download the top five bad shooting habits I've seen on the range, I want your feedback on that. And again, if you're at a gold level of membership be sure to join us coming up in about 30 minutes for our everyday carry question and answer talking about standard everyday carry stuff, as well as the changes that we might have, if we're in an area of civil unrest or due to the coronavirus issues. And I appreciate you guys being here, even if you're just a guest, maybe you'll become a member and certainly our members thank you very much for being patient with us as we get back into content production here, and we get back to our normal schedule of releasing new educational videos, from myself and experts in all areas of personal defense and safety from around the world, thanks.