PDN LIVE: Ask Rob Anything – October 2020

Our co-members or Personal Defense Network guests. This is our live Q and A. We try to do one of these every month. Of course, it's been a crazy year. This is my second time really in the last six months, being back here at the Personal Defense Network headquarters. And it is great to be here. Lots of cameras, lots of lights, lots of support staff here. This is where we make a lot of the really cool things happen for our members at every level. And again, whether you're just a guest looking at personal defense network for the first time you're one of our premium members, a gold level membership or one of our platinum members who actually gets to partake of interactive classes with us and other instructors from the PDN team. This is where it all comes together. And it's really important that you understand that this really is a lot bigger than just a, you know me running around with my cell phone making some videos every now and then. This is our 16th year of producing content for people who are interested in being better prepared for worst case scenarios being better prepared to defend themselves or people they care about in a worst case scenario, certainly, but also safety security, medical information, fitness information the amount of information and the breadth of information related to personal defense, safety and security that PDN has put out since 2005 really is amazing. thousands of pieces of content. And if you've just been shared this video you're watching it live through social media. Maybe you're seeing it on YouTube. Be sure to check out personaldefencenetwork.com after the live show or when you're done watching this. If you're watching the recording. I see a lot of people in the chat lobby, right at personaldefencenetwork.com. This is also obviously available throughout social media across different platforms, including my own personal platforms and Personal Defense Network. You can see the announcements about all of our live events through Twitter, through Facebook and through Instagram as well as our email list. If you haven't registered free, obviously if you haven't registered to get on our email list do that@personaldefensenetwork.com. And once again, if you're a member, thank you for being a member and welcome to the Q and A live. Again I see a lot of people filling in the chat lobby. If you have a question, throw it in there. I may not get to all of them, but please do put them in there. We've got other questions that have come in from social media underneath some of our announcements that we were going to be doing this Q and A those will be coming up as well. So it is October, 2020. And again, what a year it's been between sort of starting off like it was going to be a normal year. We were gonna have another tour T-shirt This is an older two year tour T-shirt because the 2020 tour didn't happen. Coronavirus, the pandemic, a lot of questions about how bad it was going to be in March of 2020. So we canceled the tour and then we thought about maybe postponing it, maybe pushing it off. Let's see what happens. But I had just gotten back from teaching in Europe and everything was already shut down over there or shutting down very quickly. And it was obvious that we weren't gonna be able to do the tour. What's that? What that, what does that meant? It's meant a lot more virtual learning. It's been a lot more acceptance of distance education in every community but especially the personal defense community. You know, at the end of the day if you want to learn how to shoot, you've got to hit the live fire range and learn how to shoot. You've got to get out there and manage recoil and feel slide lock and things like that. If you want to learn how to fight and wrestle and grapple and control another human being you gotta get your body in contact with another body. And there are definitely ways to do that even during the ammo shortage. I know we have a question from social media about that. There's ways to do that during the Corona times. And we went out and proved that we've proved that not only personally, have I been teaching on indoor and outdoor ranges with Corona virus, transmission protocols in effect or outdoor ranges, without any real concern for the virus issues and different parts of the country. There's obviously different levels of concern at different times, over the last six months. There's ways to train inside of a an unarmed training venue, a dojo, if you will or any kind of defensive tactics scenario, situation where you can't limit your access to partners you can wear masks, if you want. You can use a lot of hand sanitizer. You can train with someone that you live with or work with anyway, someone that you're always exposed to that you're in close contact with and you can recruit them into being your training partner. Maybe it's a good way to recruit somebody to into taking their personal defense and preparation for personal defense. A little more seriously, right? If they are concerned about the Corona virus they don't want you going out and training with other people strangers adding people into your close circle, great. Get them off the couch and get them maybe in a very careful and controlled way obviously a wrestling around on the ground a little bit or practicing your striking and slow motion. Get the equipment. I know a lot of people have set up home gyms and a lot of people have set up home training environments both for the unarmed training aspects and the dry fire aspects of armed defense aspects. So let's talk about that when you're sitting at home and you can't go to work, the restaurants are closed. Maybe you're not eating as healthfully. Maybe you're not getting as much activity. And I know that has affected a lot of people, right? So over the last couple of months, I've seen, you know some good friends and a lot of people in social media talking about, you know, their Corona pounds that need to go away or they're quarantine pounds. They need to get rid of. That's really important. You know, we, haven't focused on fitness at Personal Defense Network for a long time but about a decade ago we really took that topic on very, very seriously. Obviously the fit shot issues, as far as out on the range people who are into guns and into shooting looking for ways to get excited about fitness and motivation and for the exercises and simple body weight exercises while you're doing your gun handling while you're shooting out on the range that can be a great way to keep your fitness or even just to check your fitness check your range of motion, things like that. John Brown, a very good friend of mine. One of our original instructors at the Valhalla training center in the combat focus shooting program, he of course has become very influential in the CrossFit world runs CrossFit, and gogi has traveled the world running the CrossFit kids program. And he contributed a lot of information during that era as well. So that information is still the same, right? Human bodies still work the same way. Functional fitness is still the same nutrition issues are still the same. So if you are one of those people who may have let their physical fitness fade, maybe you've lost some strength because you haven't been in the gym pushing around big metal. Maybe you've just added some pounds because you're not eating as well, or you're not generally as active as you would have been in a normal year. Check out the fitness information at personaldefencenetwork.com as well. Now that I'm back out on the ranges I resumed what is a normal fall training schedule for me at the beginning of September, I'm up in Massachusetts right after labor day weekend. And I have people out in the range who were saying you know, wow, it's, it's been a while since I spent a whole day standing up or involved in vigorous physical activity and defending yourself is an athletic endeavor. So that fitness is important. Let's go over here to the questions, grab a little water Mark, right before we got started this morning, he said I live in a relatively isolated area, few cases of breaking and entering, but with the real potential should desperate outsiders start looking for opportunities. Law enforcement response times are limited and high. So alarm services are ineffective. All right. So here's the deal. You know, when we talk about being isolated, we talk about living in rural America or even, you know the suburbs and suburbs at a time when the demand on law enforcement in the inner city or at your Capitol or wherever the protests or the parades are this week, it may actually be limiting the time which was already limited, right? Or extending the response times which were already kind of long in the rural areas of the US anyway, what are we thinking about in terms of limiting the opportunities for your family to be hurt? And of course, theft, right? Breaking and entering. That's a big deal as well. We've seen a lot of looting in the inner cities. I don't think we've seen any kind of significant uptick in looting and stealing, breaking, and entering things like that in the rural areas of America. But there's certainly a potential for it, right? We don't know what the next few months, next few weeks with the election coming up and what they're gonna bring as people get more desperate as people get more inclined to think that they can get away with things because the law enforcement is distracted or because law enforcement numbers are being cut or budgets being cut that could result in an uptick in crime. Now the worst case scenario here obviously is that somebody thinks that they can show up at your house and hurt you or your family without the police showing up or without you being prepared to defend yourself. Underneath of that, we've got the issue of loss of property, right? With damage destruction of property and then loss of property through theft. Well, here's the deal usually thinking about this all the time, and if it's the civil unrest or the pandemic, or, you know, people being out of work that's got you thinking about this, great, right? I'm not going to slight you for that in the least. But what I want you to do is think about how you live your life and how you utilize different tools of safety and security all the time, right? Not just when you're you're alert and when you're thinking about it but really it should be something that's happening in the background all the time. And I'm carrying a medical kid, I'm carrying a gun I'm carrying a knife, I'm carrying a flashlight. I've got my backpack with a body armor in it, more medical gear and other extra flashlight, some cash, things like that. You know, what are these things that are just part of your everyday life. Well at your home, what you should have as part of your everyday life is lock your door, right? How easy is that? Making sure you have a good quality lock. And of course, this is more information you can get at personaldefencenetwork.com. We've got a lot of information on locks, doors, windows, and alarm systems. I will tell you that one of the things I'm excited about doing as we go into the winter season here this year at PDN is we're going to be revisiting a lot of the alarm technology issues that we've covered in the past. But now the technology has come so far. The things that you can do for a hundred dollars worth of electronics that are tied into your inside the house wifi network, really, it's amazing. So what are we talking about? Good quality locks and use them. We're talking about perimeter lighting. We're talking about the idea of CPTED crime prevention through environmental design making sure that you trim those hedges back. So somebody doesn't have it an hour. They can stand behind your hedges and try to pry your window open or get into your house some other way where no one's going to see them. And they're going to feel very comfortable. That also is going to have a sound deadening effect, right? If you have a lot of shrubbery around your house and somebody is in there, you know tapping on a lock or trying to break open a window it's less likely anybody's going to hear that if you've got a lot of dense shrubbery. So keeping the shrubs trim, keeping the trees trimmed up high so that you can look out your window basically and see to the edge of your property. Same thing when you drive up to your home you want to be able to see your windows and doors and see if they've been tampered with or if they've been broken open. Because if that door has been broken open and you don't have family members in there you don't need to go in the house, but again good doors and locks, good windows, and using them keeping that perimeter clear making sure you can see into and out of your house. And you can always pull the shades. If you don't want people seeing into the house when you're in there. That's a great idea, obviously, but when you're in the house, you won't be able to open those shades and see out to the property line. Lighting and talk a little bit about that. Automatic lighting. Again, these are things that, you know 20 years ago, maybe the technology was fickle. Maybe it was a little more expensive. Maybe it had to be hardwired in, you know now if you've got a light socket outside of your house or you can just screw in a light that has the motion sensor it gets its power either from solar power or right from the socket where the light bulb goes. And that motion light is, you know less than 20 bucks, you own it. It goes out there and it works. This technology is inexpensive and reliable in a way that it just wasn't five, 10, 15 years ago. So again, thinking about lighting thinking about the perimeter thinking about strengthening your perimeter. And let's talk about cameras. Cameras can work for you in a couple of different ways. You know, we've all seen the commercials or heard the radio commercials with the the cameras that let you talk to someone, right? Whether it's the nest or the ring camera or some other brand, you have the camera in the front door and the guy comes up to steal the packages and you get an alert on your phone and you say, hey guys, stop stealing my packages. Well, that can be used for a lot more than just, hey guys stop stealing my packages. Right? You can use these types of cameras. And again they're very inexpensive Wyze is another company W-Y-Z-E. There are cameras that I use personally at a couple different locations around the country. I can pick up my phone log in and actually interact with people. Whether it's people that I want to tell them what to do a family member with an emergency, when I'm not there I can coach them through what to do. Maybe you think about this you have a firearm locked up and staged for personal defense, but you know, your family members they don't practice on that quick access safe. Maybe they don't even know the code. Maybe it's an older teenager and you don't want them to have the code to that gun because you don't want them generally having access because they're teenagers. And we all know that sometimes teenagers can be, you know kind of blind to risk or they're little overly curious or they want to show off for their friends, whatever your reason is. But on the day that they're home alone after school and you're at work and you know they know how to use the gun, they practice. They've done the drills. They've done balance of speed and precision drill is, you know that they're comfortable and confident with that gun. They're trapped at home and someone's trying to break the door in and you can see that person on that doorway camera. You can get on that audio camera with them in the barricade room, give them the code to the safe at that moment, because now it's life and death, right? And what are we talking about? We're not talking about reckless leaders, leaving guns around the house for miners to be able to have access to it. We're talking about being able to coach your family through a medical emergency, being able to coach your family through accessing a defensive tool being able to remind them to push the deadlock or, you know set the lock that goes up into the door frame or down into the floor on that barricade room. You can now coach people through the actions they need to go through with those cameras. Think about cameras inside your house. If you're inside your house and someone breaks in you go to your barricade room. If again, if you have your phone, you can look at those cameras and see people moving through your house. It's completely different than the motion sensor alarm systems of 10 years ago, where, okay so the motion sensor in the hallway is going off or at least it was 30 to 45 seconds ago. And it, most of the houses I've lived in in 45 seconds you can be in a completely different part of the house. That camera lets you know, what's going on real time. So I'm a big advocate of cameras inside the house at least as much, if not more than around the perimeter of your house, when it comes to active defense or knowing exactly what's going on when you're not at home. And obviously if there is a theft that can help you present some evidence to help the police catch those guys and maybe find your stuff or at least get some justice against those guys who were trying to take the stuff that you've earned and that you want to protect as always I am not an advocate of generally using lethal force or even I would say escalating the level of risk that you're in to protect property. Right? So for those of you who don't know I recently had a truck stolen and it was stolen from out on the street parked out in front of my apartment in Denver. And you know, the question of course comes up in my mind. What if, it was still around 3:00 AM, but you know , what if I had heard that glass break or if I'd have been up, maybe I'd been out. It could just come back in or I was up, you know, whatever having a glass of water. I hear that glass break look out the window. And I see someone breaking into my truck. Well, you know, in less than 30 seconds I can have a long gun. I can have a pistol in my hand from a quick exit safe or where it's stage. I can be on that balcony. If I want to pointing that gun with a light laser whatever else, you know, at that guy telling him to stop get out of my truck, but then what right? Am I going to shoot a guy over a truck? Truck was found 27 hour later. It's sitting in a parking lot in Denver. I'm gonna get it when I go back to Colorado this weekend there is some damage. I'm sure there's some personal stuff missing but at the end of the day, I'm not in court, right? I'm not the focus of national news because a the firearms guy who's big in the guns who trains all the time who wears PDN t-shirts who shows up on video shot a guy over a truck. Right? And what if I pull that gun out? And I didn't know but he's got a partner sitting across the street and he pulls a gun out, shoots at me, maybe hits me. Maybe he misses me. Maybe the round goes in to somebody else's apartment maybe Cindy Lou, right? Little baby pinkish she wakes up to see her what's going on. And she comes out sticks her head out in front of the window. And now she's caught in that crossfire. It's just not worth it. Right? So when we talk about breaking and entering we talk about the civil unrest and things like that really really think about protecting yourself protecting your family trucks, insured. You know maybe there's some personal items missing from the truck. Maybe the truck will never be the same. It'll get totaled. I don't know. Maybe I'll have to sell it to somebody else. But at the end of the day, I didn't have to kill anybody. I didn't get killed. Cindy Lou was never in any danger and I'm gonna lose a truck. I'm gonna lose a truck. And I really want you to process that information. You talk about civil unrest and if you've got a business and there's looters and rioters and things like that there's a way to set yourself up to be able to protect your business, protect your community that doesn't involve recklessly escalating the risk to yourself. So keep that in mind as well. In fact, we're gonna be talking about some of the civil unrest stuff. For those of you who are gold level members at PDN we're gonna be talking about some of that stuff in the exclusive live event coming up later this morning or if you're on the East coast early this afternoon for PDN gold members. So we're gonna be talking about civil unrest there again. Let's see what else we got here in the questions. Here's one Randy says thanks for your premier body armor shirt video. I assume he means being, he's been working the polls on election night and he can't carry his gun but he's gonna be wearing that premier body armor shirt. So if you didn't see that I did a video but kind of a video montage where I think I drove maybe it was from Florida to Colorado or from Colorado to Florida, whatever it was. I drove across the country wearing the entire time a premier body armor t-shirt that has armor panels on the front and back soft armor panels under shirt that goes under like a pullover hoodie whatever it was and found it to be very very comfortable, very, very functional. The issue of putting it on is very simple. You just kind of put the there's pouches made for the armor panels that go into the t-shirt and then put that t-shirt on. I don't think we featured it here at Personal Defense Network, but I'm sure you can see that it, my personal YouTube, you can look at premier body Armour's website and their social media. I think they shared it as well. And if you want to wear body armor I think there might even have been a question about this. I saw it in some of the other social media one of the other social media platforms. So let's talk about that body armor for the civilian. You know, I think that Randy has articulated a perfect opportunity to when would you want to wear body armor, right? This isn't something you're gonna wanna do all the time. This isn't a regular activity, maybe, but because you know you can't carry a firearm or even if you could carry a firearm at the polls you're going to be in a situation where you want to feel a little safer. You know that it's a highly targeted area. It's a very volatile election. The polls may be the perfect example of where you would wear body armor to go into a situation that you might not want to wear it. When you go to work, you might not think about wearing it. When you are going to pick your kids up at school you may not think about wearing it when you go to the local bar to have a drink. But when you're in a situation of escalated danger, right? A place where you would like to know that you're a little more secure and a little safer a little better prepared to survive a really bad situation or protect others. Body armor may be the perfect thing. You know, I think that a lot of people have talked about body armor as a worst case scenario, home invasion situation, right? So go back to the breaking entering. Somebody is trying to get into your house. Your alarm goes off or the camera alert goes off. You get your family into the barricade area. You've got a gun in your hand you have reason to believe that the bad guy might have a gun or multiple bad guys might have guns. There's gonna be bullets flying. Let's go back to that scenario with the truck situation, right? Let's say that guy breaks into my truck. And for whatever reason, he, you know, says, Oh, wow look at this. There's a extra magazine. Are there a couple of nine millimeter rounds in the door. I wonder if this guy has guns in his house I'm gonna go in and find out, right? So now he's trying to break into the house and I've been alerted to this and I've got Cindy Lou with me. So what am I going to do? I'm going to take her to the barricade room, lock it down start looking at the cameras, get my firearm ready. And at this point, maybe I would put on body armor. Maybe I would take a ballistic blanket or a backpack with body armor in it. And I would give it to her. Right? And now she's going to put that backpack on backwards. So it's in front of her and she's going to be in the back corner, that barricade room. So she just gets a little bit of added protection. So that's probably the most common way we've talked about body armor, ballistic blankets or any kind of ballistic panels at Personal Defense Network is in the barricade situation to protect you or your family. But certainly it's becoming more and more common for people to go out in public wearing this stuff. And Premiere Body Armor is a great company. I have one of their panels in the backpack sitting over here. I'll be flying from where am I am in Minneapolis. I'll be flying down to Florida back to the Eastern HQ tonight. And that panel will be in my carry on just like it always is. It's around all the time. I actually had some soft body armor. People have asked, well, what equipment did I lose in this? A truck theft potentially. Well, there were no guns in the truck. There were some armor panels. And there, there was a lot of medical gear. So we'll see if that's in there or not when I get back this weekend, but you know I'll be dialing up or texting guys at premier body armor to get those panels are placed. If in fact, they're no longer in the vehicle. So staging armor in your vehicle, staging armor in a backpack, a purse, a carry on bag, something like that or staging armor and your barricade area or in your vehicles is really a good idea. If you're ready to take that next step for some people that might even be the first step, right? If you work in an environment where you can't carry a gun maybe you haven't bought a gun. You haven't trained with a gun, but you're concerned about terrorism. You're concerned about domestic violence. You're concerned about workplace violence. Maybe that's the for you. And again, there's a lot of affordable options out there and comfortable options like the t-shirt front and back protection that Randy was asking about. So that's cool. Let's see. What do we have here . Live in a residential area that does not have much room between houses. I'm concerned about lineup fire clearance. So Chris is asking a question here. I'm not a thousand percent sure exactly what he's asking in terms of the relationship between a line of fire clearance and the space between the houses. So let me address this in a couple of ways. First of all, if you live in a very densely structured area, you got to remember that those are hiding spots, right? So those little alleys between homes, the the area between, you know, your house and your car the area between, again, the landscaping, the shrubberies the trees and your door, or the shrubs you have to pass between your door and your car. All of those places are hiding spots, right? That's where somebody could be waiting to ambush you. So then when you're moving around and check those corners wide, you know don't be afraid to glance over there a little bit. And again, when you can and where you can you want to remove those visual obstructions, those line of sight obstructions and the hiding places, right? One of the things we talk about in the aftermath of a defensive event. So some things happen, chaos you need a gun to defend yourself or somebody else. You use that gun to defend yourself. You come back in and you start assessing and looking around you don't see any immediate threats. You don't see the police right now. You don't see anybody who needs medical attention and you start thinking about, okay what do I need to be right here? Right? This is where you happen to be when you defended yourself maybe you're moving while you're assessing. One of the things we talk about is a position of advantage, right? So I don't necessarily want to stay exactly where I am. Maybe I, if there's a bunch of people around I want to get my back to the wall. Now I don't have to worry about looking in 360 degrees. I can have my back to the wall and look at 180 degrees or 120 degrees or 90 degrees down a hallway, something like that. And then on the other hand, maybe you don't want to be pinned up against that wall. Maybe you want to move out of that room or out of that space or into a building, right? You think about being in the parking lot of a convenience store you can get in your car and drive away. You can brace yourself back against your car. You can get up against the building, stay outside. You can go into the building and lock the doors and wait til the police to come. There's a lot of different options you have in terms of movement. One of the important things to think about is where could people be coming from or where could people be hiding? Right? And by people, I don't just mean threats. I also mean law enforcement, right? If I've got a crowd of people around and I've got a gun in my hand, I don't necessarily want law enforcement coming up behind me and thinking I'm holding them hostage. If what I'm really doing is just letting them know I will defend myself if I need to. So I would much rather position myself if I can if I hear the sirens coming, or I know the most likely route that the police officers are gonna take by car or on foot I would like to be able to see them coming and make eye contact. You know, let them see this hand and maybe go back to my holster and make sure that my gun is pointed down just in front of my feet. Let them know that I'm not the bad guy. I'm not the threat. So where could somebody be hiding or where could somebody be coming from? Those are questions we ask. When we think about densely populated areas, narrow alleys dark shadows, things like that around our home. Those are potential, what we refer to as danger areas. So danger at any place, the person could be hiding, any place the person could be coming from. If I don't have any immediate threats or potential threats to worry about. On the other side of that, because specifically I think it was Chris. Yeah. Chris is asking about ammo. Weapon would be best in this environment if this is the sort of never ending like debate over penetration. Right? So a couple of things about over penetration if we're talking about the concern, like, for example I just told you, like, I've got a an apartment out in Denver, right? So if I'm concerned that I might fire around and that round would either go through the threat that I was shooting at, or that if I miss the threat that I'm shooting at that that round could still have enough energy in either of those cases to go through the wall, into the apartment next to me. Few different things on that. First of all, it's probably a, an overrated concern, right? At the end of the day if you're using proper defensive ammunition and you hit your target, this should not be an issue. You don't want a lot of extra energy in your proper defensive ammunition coming out of the threat that you intend on hitting. And if you're shooting in a controlled way and you're managing your deviation the way you should be balancing speed and precision you've been practicing you're in a controlled environment obviously in your home and an uncontrolled situation but in a controlled environment you should be able to get those hits, right? Close range, dynamic situation. But we're going to approach the use of lethal force and armed defense, assuming you're gonna get your hits. So when you choose your ammunition you want to choose ammunition that's very likely to not have a lot of energy on the other side of a human body. Does that mean not using a rifle? Absolutely not. There are a lot of different rounds that will dissipate their energy if not all of their energy and stay inside of the human body for the five, five, six, for example, right? Maybe for a 300 blackout round. If you're using a suppress Thrinder blackout if you're using a long gun that is chambered for a pistol round, again a hollowpoint bonded hollow point ammunition that's going to retain its weight. It's gonna maximize the permanent wound cavity by expanding as much as possible slow down and stay inside the body. Even if it comes out of the body. When you have a five, five, six round that's broken in half or that's much room or that's turned into a shrapnel essentially it comes out the back. There's not a lot of weight which means there's not a lot of momentum, which means that it's not going to carry a lot of energy into that wall. And certainly not out of that wall on the other side and the same thing for the bond at hollow point that hollow point that expands reliably maximize its surface area slows down as much as possible in the human body. Even if it comes out on the other side it's not gonna have a lot of momentum. It's not gonna have a lot of energy. And it's got a very large surface area relative to the way a nine millimeter bullet looks, you know sort of going into the magazine that surface area after expansion is gonna hit that wall. And again, very likely to slow down now, the heavier your bullet and the faster it's moving then the more momentum is going to carry through that wall. So you think about something like a 45 round may carry more momentum and penetrate deeper through multiple walls inside of a home or in an apartment structure than a nine millimeter round, simply because of the weight. Right? So that's something to think about. So lighter, faster ammunition designed to break apart or expand rapidly and dissipate its energy in that environment. Really good idea. Shotguns, you wanna talk about like number four shot, maybe like a Magnum Turkey load, number five, something like that as opposed to a slug. If you have a slug, like the Winchester slug that's a pre fragmented, not pre fragmented but a scored slug it's designed to break apart. So you have a fragmenting slug that slug and especially I'm a big fan of 20 gauge. If you are interested in a shotgun for home defense or close quarters, personal defense, big fan of 20 gauge. So the 20 gauge segmenting slug or something again like a Magnum Turkey load that's probably where you want to look. You don't wanna have that full ounce, you know, 15 1600 feet per second, nun segmenting or non expanding slug that could rip through a few walls and come out the other side. So keep that in mind as well. When it comes to that, basically if the the kind of ammo that you would use in a personal defense concealed carry for your handgun that's probably the same exact thing you want to use inside of your house. You don't wanna use those, you know, bear hog hunting rounds that are designed for maximum penetration. So I hope that answered one way or the other hope that answered the question for you, Chris we're coming up on about the halfway point. So if you have questions, throw them into the chat. I do have some people in the control room monitoring the social media platforms as well. So if you're watching this and it's easier for you to throw something into the Instagram or throw something in the Facebook, that's fine. I do have a couple of questions here from one of the people in the control room, going over to social media. The best way to train and practice during the ammo drought. So I mentioned this earlier and maybe that spurs the question in social media or this was something you've been thinking about. I know a lot of people have been asking me about what we're doing for classes. Well, this is not our first drought, right? Like we've been through this before. If you go back historically in the intuitive defensive shooting program, right? Back then we called it the combat focused shooting program in the mid 2000's. At one point, our two day class was 1500 to 1800 rounds. And there's a lot of reasons that we've evolved that program to where there there's so much more to do in that class other than just get repetition and coaching on the gun handling and on the live fire. Right? In fact, I like to empower people when they come through the classes, you know, as does the whole CFS team or the defensive shooting fundamentals team in our US CCA program. We want to encourage people and empower people to leave the class better, educated better educated about the concepts, the techniques and themselves, so that they can go out and practice and develop their skill after the class. So if you show up with, you know X number of rounds only use half of them because we're really digging down deep into the concepts and fundamentals and techniques and your personal coaching for how you get better, what you need to work on. And then you take that other half of the ammunition home and you do your own thing, and you learn how to develop your skill on your own in the class. Then you have ammo leftover to go practice with. So that's really important to understand is that, you know I don't want you to use in your last bullet in a class environment. I want you to make sure that you have ammunition stored up stage, ready to go so that you can extend your practice to get repetitions over time. Because no matter how much repetition we get in that first day or two of a training class or the only day or two of a training class you're never gonna own any of these physical skills. You're not gonna learn the stimulus response patterns unless you practice over an extended period and get a lot of repetition, right? So how do we do that in a drought phase? Well, at the end of the two thousands we had the first drought since I've been a full-time instructor. The first time I ran into a drought was the end of the 2000's. And all of a sudden people didn't have, you know 1500 to 2000 rounds to show up to a two day class with, so what did we do? Well, obviously we cut the round countdown. How did we fill the time? What we filled the time with more explanation about why we train the way we do, why we advocate for the techniques that we do, why we recommend certain types of gear and not other types of gear. So we've got a lot more, I think conceptual we've got a lot more explanatory. We slowed things down. We came up with more drills that were cognitively challenging and demanding a little bit lower round count in those practice drills than some of the other practice drills. But eventually once you're good at hitting the high center chest at nine to 15 feet once you can reliably get a headshot at nine to 15 feet it's time to start expanding your ability to get those hits and to manage the gun under a wider variety of circumstances. So that's something you can work on in the drought, right? You can talk about gun handling. You can talk about moving. You can talk about assessing the environment. You can talk about decision-making information processing all of these things. Now, granted, as I said, at the beginning of the show if you want to learn how to shoot if you want to learn how to press the trigger to make the bullet go where the bullet needs to go. If you want to learn how to manage recoil if you want to learn to recognize slide lock and do an emergency reload when you need it if you wanna learn to recognize malfunctions and you wanna learn to clear them in an inappropriate way, when you need to you need to be doing live fire, right? I get it. You need to practice with your gun. You have to make sure your guns working. You get a new gun, a lot of new gun owners out there. Yeah, you need ammunition. You need time on the range. And if it's worth 50 cents a bullet it's worth 50 cents a bullet. It's the timing you need to have these skills now or you need to have these skills in two weeks. You can't afford to say, well nine millimeters should only cost me 20 cents around. So there's no way I'm paying 15 cents around. You might need to pay 50 cents around. Okay. But cutting back on the repetition cutting back on the extended versifier cutting back on just the marksmanship practice. If you've done your job, when ammo is plentiful you have established a baseline of skill and you shouldn't need to spend a whole bunch of money to maintain your skill. This may not be the time to go from an eight to a nine, right? But if you just got your gun or you're just thinking about defensive use of firearms and you're like a one or a two, yeah. We got to get you up to a six to seven maybe level eight in terms of your potential before you can be responsibly armed. And that might mean just go ahead and buy in that ammunition. If you can't buy the ammunition or if you you've established your baseline skill how do you move forward and train? And of course, everybody here knows if you're a PDN member even following us since the beginning SIRT pistols have been around on PDN. As long as SIRT pistols has been around the a S-I-R-T from next level training cert pistols. And now they have the SIRT stick which you insert a SIRT pistol in and you get to train with the technology of the SIRT for long gun use for braced pistol use for SBR use for whatever it is that AR configuration you can put your optics on it, set it up with your sling make it emulate your live fire gun as much as possible. And of course that's what the SIRT pistol does. Both the full frame guns as well as the single stack compact guns you can set them up in a lot of different ways. You can set the triggers up very specifically to emulate exactly the trigger you're working on. And you can even put the sights on those guns or the laser or the weapon mounted light on those guns in the way that you do on your carry gun. You can use them from your holster. You can use them from your quick access safe and you can get a lot of good practice and development time with a SIRT pistol there's things you can do. You can learn to manage recoil, right? You can get over competent about the number of shots that you can fire in a second, for example you're never gonna recognize slide lock. You're not going to have a malfunction with a SIRT pistol. So think about what you can train well with a SIRT pistol or dry fire with a blue gun, red gun whatever you might have and find ways to maximize your time. Once again, I'm gonna send you back to personaldefensenetwork.com, scores of videos about training and a dry fire environment. Years ago, we had the tactical professor, Claude Warner a friend of mine guy full of wisdom full of thought around all sorts of areas of training, including high-end marksmanship really high end skill development. He's an expert in revolvers particularly compact snubnose revolvers for defense. He's also one of the guys who probably has thought more about how to train effectively, efficiently and safely in a dry fire environment than almost anybody else in the sector. Right? So we did a DVD with him that now has become video clips on our streaming platform. So you can look up the dry fire training methodology with Claude Werner right here at personaldefensenetwork.com. And then of course, a lot of videos with myself other instructors and Mike Hughes, the developer of the SIRT pistol talking about how best to use those things. The other thing we can get into is simulators, right? We can get into the, like the eye marksman simulator which we've talked about here at Personal Defense Network. If you're worried about marksmanship issues and really trying to develop your shooting skill as much as possible in the dry fire environment you might also look at the mantis, the mantis X products. Those are at very high level diagnosis of the kind of what's happening at a small micro level in terms of your movement of the gun, your movement of the gun during trigger press, your follow up , your follow through, if you will. Again, knowing that you're not gonna have recoil to worry about that's a little different but there are some very high level diagnostics you can get out of that mantis system. So think about those options when it comes to your training with your firearm, for armed defense during a drought. And remember, again, it's not all about the gun, right? You can do medical training, unarmed training. You can go through scenarios and simulations with your family on what to do if kind of things both outside the home and inside the home. So keep that in mind. Let's see, Glen says what's Glen saying here, appreciate the respect. And thank you. Semi-auto as a defensive pistol, he's read that the position of the finger should be the middle of the first pad of the finger. However, he has greater trigger control and shoots more accurately when he places the finger so that the first joint is on the trigger. So here's the deal. I think, again, we can spend a lot of time talking about being the best shooter you can be in isolation, right? Or we can talk about applied defensive shooting skills. And I think it's infinitely more important in the context of our conversation here that we talk about applied defensive shooting skills. So, first of all, let's talk about gun fit because really it's how your hand fits on the gun. That's going to dictate where your trigger finger naturally lies on the trigger, right? So if you're having to grab a gun in a way that puts your trigger finger, you know really deep into the trigger guard and the triggers right here because you have a really small subcompact gun or you have really long fingers or a big hand, well we would say that that gun doesn't really fit your hand very well, right? It's certainly not perfect fit by any stretch. Similarly, if you've got a gun where you're it's so big in your hands, that your fingertip is just barely hitting the trigger, right? And a lot of our modern striker fire guns and back to all the modern sacrifice guns that we recommend have some form of a tab safety or a trigger block safety right there in the middle of the trigger. That's a hinged kind of thing with a trigger where you've got to actually be putting full pressure on the trigger full contact with the trigger before it will move. Right? So when you look at those types of triggers if you just barely have contact with that center tab in the middle of the trigger, you could have a malfunction from the user side, from your side failing to be able to pull the trigger because your grip is off just a little bit. So again, we would say that that gun doesn't fit your hand really well. So go ahead and look at the gun fit, videos and articles. And some of the other discussions we've had some of the PDN lives that are in the archives about choosing a defensive handgun gun fit is incredibly important. So when I think about fit, one of the most important things you're gonna see you'll see it in the videos, you'll see it in the articles it's in the books that I've written, this idea that your strong hand thumb should be on the weak side of the gun and be able to articulate fully up and down. So if this knuckle is behind the gun and you can't move this thumb up and down or you, you know, when you practice and shoot you get a little bit of a, an abrasion there and I'm not talking about slide bite. I'm not talking about a cut from the slide. I'm talking about pressure here that rubs the skin from that beaver tail at the top of the grip, if that's happening you get a different gun or you got to adjust your grip. So you adjust your grip. So that, that thumb is completely on the weak side of the gun. And it gives you more control. You can get the magazine release better. You can lock the gun, open. All of those things. When your thumb is in the right place. And the gun is sitting in the right place in your hand. Now your finger comes into the trigger when your finger lays on the trigger. If it's anywhere from, you know, the middle of this pad down to that joint, I think you're fine. Anywhere from the middle of the pad down to the joint. And again, as you said, it may not be what some guy wrote in an article, right? It could be anywhere in there. You, I know people have said that joint, right for reliability, and you don't need maximum control. You just need to make sure your fingers on that trigger and you can squeeze that trigger and fire the shot. A lot of people from a target shooting background from a high level marksmanship background will tell you you know, exactly where that finger needs to hit the trigger on the pad. Remember in a dynamic situation when I reached down and grabbed that gun, it's the gun fit in my hand in general. That's going to determine where my trigger finger comes in. Not some fine tuning that I do on the range when I'm thinking about marksmanship and thinking about getting everything perfect. So you want a natural grip on a gun that fits your hand that lets your finger come in and make good solid contact with the trigger. And then from that point, you learn what a good smooth trigger press feels like and you learn to control the gun. So I wouldn't worry too much about the fact that your finger is in exactly where, you know somebody told you it should be but I also would wanna make sure that you're not trying too hard to make your finger go to the place that lets you shoot. You know, the one inch group at 20 yards cause the one in group at 20 yards isn't what we're talking about for defensive shootings. So again, not to obsess over it to know that kind of anywhere in that range is okay. Not that there has to be a specific point. You know, if you're, you've got a good solid grip on the gun, your thumb can move. You can hit that trigger and you can put the shots where you want. I say, you're good to go. Let's see, what else do we have here? Video-based training versus live fire advantage disadvantages. I think, I think we talked about that a couple of times, Jim that looks like it came in from social media somewhere. You know, again, if you mean by video based training, like this what we're doing now, obviously you physically you have to experience some of this stuff to really be able to learn it and certainly to develop your skill. That doesn't mean that you can't spend, you know months of your life learning through video through audio presentations through reading articles or books, right? So you can learn concepts. You can watch diagram or you can look at diagrams, you can watch demonstrations. You can learn a lot through video and distance education. Some of these things in order to really put into practice and to own the physical skills you have to have experiential learning. You have to go out and actually experience what it feels like to do these things and how your body moves and how your gear works and all of that. So it's sort of separating the domains, right? What can we learn really well through video? And then on the other side, what can we re what do we really need to have a physical experience for? Right? That's one level of this question. The other level is things like the video simulators. And again, I'll go back to I marksman because we've used a lot of demos. We've done a lot of that. And it's very affordable, very easy to use version of video simulator training that you can get and you can learn about it, Personal Defense Network. So if you look at the iMarksman system there are things you can do in terms of judgment. There's things you can do in terms of response to different events that you watch on video. Of course, it can tell you where your shots went. But again, if you're worried about Marksmanship go to the range or use the SIRT pistol or use the the mantis X, the video simulators where you're actually engaging in something that's playing out on a screen in front of you that that's really much more about decision-making and judgment, right? It's about using your verbal skills. It's about deescalation. It's about your movement. It's about when you reach for the gun it's about where you position the gun. When you decide to shoot, when you stop shooting what you do after you shoot all of those things that judgment, decision-making the application of your skills. That's what I'm worried about in a simulation or in a scenario environment. And that's what the video simulators provide. Either a simulation or even a fully immersive scenario at the really high end. And that's going to help me understand your judgment and your application of skills. And it's gonna help you learn as well about your ability to apply your skill versus perform your skill. So there really is a difference there too. The domain differences are skill development and learning and practice and then skill application and judgment and decision-making. So the video stuff can be great for that. Let's see what else we got here. We've got about 15 minutes left or so Kevin Demand from new gun owners the number one lesson takeaway we should all get on day one. I'm gonna go like big, big picture, right? The number one responsibility of every firearms owner is to prevent unauthorized access. All right, it's not learning the four rules. It's not becoming a good marksman. It's not knowing how to clean your gun. It is preventing unauthorized access to your guns, right? What does that mean? Just lock them up now. Not necessarily what it means is you want to prevent take reasonable steps, right? To prevent unauthorized access. I mean, you can lock a gun up in Fort Knox, right? And Goldfinger might still be able to get it right? So like the idea is just because you secure your gun, doesn't mean someone can't get access to it, right? Not every stolen gun is stolen because of negligence on behalf of the gun owners. Sometimes thieves are really determined, really good. They have the time they have the access they have the know-how and they're able to steal a gun. I'm not just talking about that. So I'm not taking reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized access. Well, who shouldn't have access to the gun. Right? Let's think about the question. The question is, what's the number one thing a new gun owner needs to know. Well, you need to know prevent unauthorized access. So the follow-up question is, well, who's not authorized? Well, obviously somebody with malicious intent, right? So somebody who's gonna break into your home or your vehicle and steal your gun. That person already is in the category of we don't trust this guy, right? Probably not gonna, maybe he's gonna use the gun to steal more stuff. Maybe he's gonna use the gun to hurt. Somebody hurt himself. Maybe he's going to sell the gun to somebody. He's not going to care about who he's selling it to. Somebody else who's in that criminal world is maybe going to use the gun to hurt somebody. So we don't want people to be able to steal our guns. Let's not make it easy. Right? First of all. The second thing we wanna do is this is important. And it comes back to this. Why I think this is the most important thing that a new gun owner needs to learn. The second group of unauthorized personnel is people that don't know how to use the gun, right? People who are not educated people who are not physically capable of using the gun well they don't understand how to use the gun intellectually. They don't know how the gun functions, well guess what most new gun owners are. Most new gun owners are in that category. There are people who don't know how their guns work. They don't know how to use their guns well. Hopefully they're physically capable, right? It goes back to, did they pick a gun that fits their hand? Did they pick a gun that they can control the recoil? They can pull the trigger. They don't need to, you know, use their whole arm body strength to get the trigger, to go bang. And in which case they lose the ability to control the alignment of the gun and put the bullets where they want it to be. You know, does it have sites that you can see? Can your vision, does it work with the sites on your gun especially if you're gonna be using this gun in a life and death situation, that's probably important that if you need a high level of deviation control you'd want to be able to see your sites. So the questions of, can you use the gun? Do you understand how to use the gun? If the answer is no, then that new gun owner needs to prevent access to themselves, right? From themselves to the gun. What does that mean? Now again, this isn't political right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Everybody should be able to own a gun but everybody who owns a gun should be able to go out and get that training. And everybody who owns a gun should go out and get that training. Not just be able to not just have it available but it's really part of the responsibility of gun ownership. So when someone says, you know what what's the first lesson a gun owner should learn. It's that you need training. You need practice. You need to develop your skill. And that's a subset of preventing unauthorized access, right? The other people that we don't want to have access to our guns, people who have impaired judgment. Right? And that could be temporary, right? When you're drinking you probably shouldn't have access to a gun, right? If you've, if you have impaired judgment or impaired motor control, you're drunk, you're high. Maybe you're taking some kind of medication for pain. You've got some kind of an issue. Maybe it's a medication. That's a antidepressant. Antidepressants, SSRI, a lot of talk about those in gun world and related to active shooters and a lot of different things. If you have impulse control issues, rage control issues, judgment perception issues. If you have potential issues where you might have suicidal impulses, right? That don't occur to you because of anything else other than just this new medicine you're taking. And in the long run this medicine could really help you, right? Help you to be a much better person, a better live a better life, interact better at work with your family. But maybe for that first couple of weeks 30 days where you're going on to that pill or when you're changing medication that's when every medical professional will tell you that these judgment issues that's when they're most severely affected. So maybe you don't carry the gun out in public. Right? A few years ago, my spouse was in a parking lot where across the street, there was a road rage incident that a guy who had a concealed carry permit long experience with guns had been carrying a gun training with a gun responsible gun owner, went onto one of these antidepressants within a week or two had a road rage incident and shot a family across the street from my family. Right? And it was tied back to, yeah a guy lost control of himself. And it had to do not with these medicines being, you know evil in the fairies necessarily, but the effect it had on him in the short-term transitional period. So there's another group of people that shouldn't have access to guns and that would lead to like dementia, right? So if you have to take the guns away from, sorry if I take the car away from grandpa or grandma you take the keys away they probably shouldn't have a loaded gun behind the door. If you can't trust them to, you know, drive down the street I would not necessarily trusting them with lethal force decisions about, you know whether that's the UPS guy or a threat that's banging on the front door. Right? So we gotta think about that. So that's the number one lesson for new gun owners is prevent unauthorized access be a responsible gun owner. And that includes you. If you haven't had the training and the practice to learn how to use your gun well. Once you're learning how to use your gun well and you're responsible with it now that's where all the other stuff comes in. And probably if we take that a hundred thousand foot new gun owner picture out of it when once somebody's doing that, what's the most important lesson for someone who's gonna carry a gun in public or stage a gun for defensive use. It's really thinking about when you would use the gun, right? And not when you can use the gun, it's not a legal question. It's when you should use the gun when you would use the gun, when in a sober moment with no emotion, with no fear with no chaos would I want to use the gun, for example with let's go back to the truck theft, what I want to get into a gunfight over a truck that's insured parked out on the street in front of my apartment with my kids in the house behind me potentially in the background of this gunfire. You know, the answer is no, but if I wake up at three o'clock in the morning and I've never thought about that, and I'm, I, some of the alarms going off the window does broke and I get caught up in the emotion, right? The insult, the offense of somebody stealing my truck right? And my medical equipment, it, my premier body armor panels that are in the map pocket behind the driver's seat. Like now I'm mad. And if that guns within reach, I might make a decision rationally because I didn't plan because I didn't think about it. So thinking about when you would or should use the gun when you would feel compelled to use the gun and then going through those decision-making processes, the visualization maybe scenario training, things like that. So yeah, you got to learn how to maintain access control. You gotta learn how to shoot the gun and run the gun well and then you got to really, really put some time into thinking about when you would or should use the gun before you carry it in public or stage it for defense. Coming up on 10 minutes, Jerry, you said once a concealed carry license is obtained, should we introduce ourselves to local law enforcement officers? You know, ask asking that question, Jerry, I would assume that you live in, you know, a relatively small town kind of rural America setting, right? If you know, I was a reserve deputy training officer for San Juan County Sheriff's office for a number of years in Colorado, very small community less than 1500 people live in the County, very small agency, right? Counting the reserves and the part-times and six or seven guys, you know you spend three weeks in town, you kinda know everybody. Now there's a lot of tourists that come through Silverton in San Juan County. So there's a lot of people that come through that you don't know. But as far as the locals, you know, app did we know who had concealed carry permits or who had firearms or, you know who was a gun person or not? Absolutely. Does it change the way you deal with that person? You know, it might, right? If there's a situation where, who knows what's going on so you might not, you know, domestic violence intoxication, somebody's, you know, out of control not their normal selves, you know, that they have a firearm that's something law enforcement wants to know, right? When we're going to respond to that heated chaotic situation at the same time if there's a school shooting in that town and we come around the corner and we see Bob and we know that Bob carries a gun all the time. Well, if I know how Bob dresses and what Bob looks like it's probably important for me to know that he carries a gun every day and has a concealed carry permit. So that I don't think that, you know, Bob has just got a gun for the first time and he's now shooting up the school. And hopefully Bob is trained in the way that we talk about here at Personal Defense Network to avoid looking like the threat in that scenario, right? He's not inserting himself in a situation where he actually escalates the danger to himself and others. But yeah, absolutely. In a small town, knowing, you know who the good guys with guns are that that's something law enforcement appreciates and certainly, you know, is interested in, however you know, if you live in a major city, if you live in the twin cities and you know, Minneapolis, there's you know, I don't know how many thousands of police officers are here between St. Paul and Minneapolis, Ramsey County, Hennepin County. You've got all these County agencies you got state agencies get federal agencies. What do you know? You're not going to knock on every door, right? So you're not going to meet everybody. So I think it's a balancing act depending on, you know, the environment you live in the political climate around guns, where you live in small town, rural America, where firearms are common and Sheriff's departments and small city police departments or town police departments are pro gun. Generally pro-freedom absolutely makes all the sense in the world, but you got to play that out locally. What I wouldn't do is make, don't make it as a you know, hey, if you need anything, call me, right? Like that's where you go. You want to go in, if they're hiring and fill out the form and go to the police Academy and you want to volunteer as a reserve deputy again, a reserve police officer. Cool. You know, that's when you say, okay if you need anything, let me know. But if you're a, you know, armed citizen, carrying a gun under your second amendment, the rights protected by the second amendment to defend yourself or others if you need to letting the police officers know and that small town environment never a bad thing you just want to be careful about crossing that line to thinking, you know the fact that you have a concealed carry permit or that you're carrying under constitutional powers in 17 States now that you're somehow like a reserve deputy or you're part of the good guy force that's going to respond that's potentially gonna raise some eyebrows. So be careful how you present that information. We have a question from this is the one I saw earlier, social media. We talked about body armor And let's see what else I'm gonna I'm gonna scan through these little bit. Two hours West of Denver, looking for CCW training when and where is my next Denver class? I'll tell you what, if you're in the Denver area there's a bunch of good resources. First of all, guns for everyone is based in Denver. If you'd just want to get your concealed carry permit they are the path of least resistance. They do a great job at that. Getting people through the process of getting their concealed carry permit in Colorado and really they have people that they're influencing nationwide and they do it for free. So guns for everyone is put over 40,000 people through the concealed carry permit process and gotten them some training. So that's the first of all, if you just want to get your concealed carry permit, that's the place to go. Now I know that they're expanding into some other areas. They offer some more advanced training. They certainly are connected to a lot of instructors in Colorado and around the country. They can help you out at guns for everyone and make some recommendations. Personally, I'm closely tied with the Bristol cone shooting center in Lakewood, Colorado on the West side of Denver. They have it, a great staff. It's an amazing facility. The owners are awesome. And I've done a lot of teaching there and I've done a lot of instructor development there. So there's still some instructors on staff there who are teaching my programs. I don't do that much training in Denver when I'm in Denver I'm usually hanging out with young lady Pincus. She's now progressed from baby to toddler, to young lady. So I'm usually hanging out with her and not teaching as much in down there. But, but when I do Bristlecone has been the place but you want to look at what guns for everyone is offering or Bristle cone. And let's see, what else do we have here? Five common. Oh, well, yeah, don't forget. You can download that. I'm reading our own advertisement inside the questions. I thought it was a question. Did I know there were five common errors that people make wellness shooting range. In fact, I did. And I've created a free PDF download that you can take a look at. So you probably see that they're in the banner underneath my face and it's here inside of the PDN live chat room as well. So check that out. And can I further explain justified use of lethal force while carrying concealed weapon ramifications of a shooting incident? Man, this is huge, right? So guests three, three, one, three specific to concealed carry weapon insurance, right? This is really important. The insurance or the prepaid legal, or the funds like armed citizens, legal defense network that you can you can become a member of. And then the board decides, you know how much they want to help you, or if they can help you or how they're going to help you with your expenses and consultation in terms of the legal aftermath all of these things are important, right? And what I've said for years is this if you're an insurance kind of person, right? Like if you have car insurance because the state makes you have car insurance, conceal carry self-defense insurance, prepaid, legal whatever you want to call it that's probably not for you, right? If you're the kind of person who maxes out your insurance or the kind of person on your homeowners policy who lists all your jewelry and lists how that, like if you're that person that has riders on your insurance for the extra stuff, you know when you put new wheels on your truck you let Geico know that you've got new wheels on your truck because you're into insurance, then absolutely. In this aspect of your life you should certainly be very seriously considering investing in not having to face this worst case scenario of not only the emotional and legal aftermath but the financial aftermath can be crushing as well after a justified use of force. So obviously I'm, you know I wrote the live fire curriculum, the DSF level one and two curriculum for United States, concealed carry. They have a great product. I am a member of United States conceal carries program and their program... I've been a member of their program for over a decade now, right? I first got on their advisory board in 2009. So, you know, they've got a great option. CCW safe is another great company that I I've got a lifetime membership with great people over there armed citizens, legal defense network. I was part of the first group of trainers that supported the armed citizens legal defense network, been involved with them. They put out a bunch of great educational information. This is what I think really distinguishes the the insurance aspect from maybe like you do car insurance, right? Like maybe in some ways, you know, you do car insurance maybe you get a lower rate. If you take a defensive driving course. Well, guess what? With the USC CCA, they are a training and education organization, so sure they sell the insurance. They sell this opportunity to have some of your financial aftermath covered but they're mostly interested in educating and training people to be responsibly, armed, CCW, safe. They come in and consult with you immediately after an incident, right? And plus they offer some instruction as well. They've got some instructors associated with them to help you avoid the aftermath, right? Avoid even needing to shoot. And again, that's a big part of what's going on at USC CA armed citizens, legal defense network. You get a stack of DVDs. You get a pile of information when you first join armed citizens, legal defense network. Again, to help you understand the legal issues around the use of lethal force and hopefully avoid any negative aftermath after the shooting there's always going to be the emotional social. There's going to be some financial. There's probably going to be some legal all those things are going to be there but we want to minimize, right? We want to mitigate the risks and minimize the impact of the aftermath aftermath of a defensive shooting or a defensive gun use. So that's my kind of quick three minute take on those programs. It it's a separate conversation from let's talk about the justified use of lethal force, right? And again that's gonna take more time than we have here to get back into that. What I want you to look at is the should versus could idea, and a lot of the differences between just sort of looking at a matrix of, you know, well in this state, it's legal under these circumstances you got to think about the subjective, right? If you need, if you perceive the need to defend yourself with a gun or defend someone you care about with a gun you're probably gonna do it. And then the aftermath comes. So understanding again, visualizing thinking about going through those scenarios what are the conditions under which you are going to think using lethal force is a good idea before you're in that situation, because you want to think about it again in that calm, sober moment not just as a matrix of what's legal but as what's appropriate, what should you do? What constitutes real need, right? And then hopefully you put that in application in the moment of need and then you deal with the legal aftermath at that point. And certainly all of these organizations can help you out. But again, especially if you've taken that DSF program, or if you're looking for a program that combines the training with the resources, help you with the aftermath check out the defensive shooting fundamentals program at USC CA . Can you dry fire? So last question I'm gonna get to Clint says can you dry fire practice in your yard? Is this a legal practice? That is going to depend 100% on where your yard is, right? And that your jurisdiction, your law is one of the things that I'm always really, you know I've got a whole country here on my chest. I teach all across this country and other countries. I don't even pretend to keep up with all of the laws. So you are responsible for knowing the laws in your area. What I would tell you about it is, you know if you're using discretion, if you're in a situation where you know, doing dry fire with a real gun outside your home and anybody else can see you it's probably the wrong thing to be doing. If you don't have a range in your backyard and you can't do live fire there I wouldn't do dry fire with a real gun. If you have a SIRT pistol or you have a search stick or you have a blue gun, something that, you know might be a Nerf gun, might be a toy. You might be, you know, pull a banana out of your pocket. You know and it's not an actual gun that could have live ammunition in it, or it could be mistaken by somebody down the street or driving by for a real gun. Then you should be fine right now there may be legal issues there and there may be let the neighbors no issues there but I would be really hesitant to think it's a good idea to go outside and train with a real gun. If you can't actually use a real gun on your property, right? So if you can't live fire there I wouldn't use a live firearm. I would make sure you're using an inner training gun and not just an unloaded live gun. So that would be my thoughts there. Listen, this has been, I I've enjoyed it. I don't know. We, it looks like the comments looks like you guys have enjoyed it. We got a lot of questions, which is great. We have a, we had a lot of people I thought for an early morning, Q and A, for a PDN live. We don't normally do them this early. I wasn't expecting so many people. So it's awesome to see that many people in the live chat. And I know people are gonna watch this, you know for weeks and months and years to come on YouTube we don't always get to the follow-up questions. But if you submit them especially through PersonalDefenseNetwork.com if you become a member, if you register you get in there and you're going to get access to me and our other subject matter experts. And if you hit our social media, it's also very likely that you're going to get a response of some kind. Even if it's another member maybe a member that's a little bit more educated than you we'll help you out with your problem. I jump in there a lot and we have other subject matter experts as well. Don't forget the training talk show comes on with Derek pool and Barrett Kendrick training talk is a live show that has guests question and answer gear reviews. All of those things coming out regularly from Personal Defense Network check out our new videos, check out the old videos. You know, if you're a member in the last year or two at the personaldefensenetwork.com you may not have gone back and seen some of that stuff but some of it's standard definition, it's not flashy. It's not super high production quality like we tried to do now but it's still really, really good information. And we've got, I don't know, last time I checked there were over 40 different contributing instructors here at personaldefensenetwork.com. It's not just me but I do appreciate you spending this last hour with me. Look forward to seeing you guys if you're a gold level member, we are gonna do the exclusive gold membership, live Q and A talking about a lot of the current events, civil unrest things like that coming up in about 30 minutes. So I look forward to seeing you guys in that one. If you're not a gold level member, maybe join really quick get in there, take a look at that live and all the other lives and exclusive events that we've done for our gold and or platinum members as well. Thanks again.