Scratching Post | Cornered Cat | If you have to fight, fight like a cornered cat.

March 7, 2018

In 2013, the US Supreme Court ruled (in Salinas v. Texas) that in a police investigation a person must specifically invoke their Constitutional right to remain silent. Otherwise the very fact that they said nothing in response to questioning may be used against them later in court.

Here are two sentences I recommend all upstanding citizens memorize and occasionally practice saying in role play:

“Officer, I am invoking my right to remain silent. Please let me contact my lawyer now.”

This would be the final step in Ayoob’s five-point checklist. It should be repeated as often as necessary, word for word, until it has the desired effect.

2 Comments

5 Facts You Don’t Know About AR-15 Rifles

March 5, 2018

When you opened this, I bet you thought it would be yet another article explaining that AR stands for ARmalite (the original manufacturer) and not ‘assault rifle’. Guess again. Today we’re simply going to talk about how AR-15 rifles work and how people in America use them. My goal is to avoid the duck vagina problem.

**1) They are less powerful than your grandpa’s deer rifle.**

They are used for deer hunting in some states, but forbidden for deer hunting in others because they are considered too weak for an ethical, clean harvest.

To be clear, the AR platform is a very flexible design and — like Glock pistols — these rifles can be configured to shoot many different calibers. For the AR, this includes 7.62X39, 6.5 Creedmore, 6.8 SPC, .243 .300 Whisper, .50 Beowulf, .458 SOCOM and more. You can even find AR rifles chambered in common handgun calibers such as 9mm and .45ACP.

But the standard AR-15 fires only .223 Remington or 5.56 NATO ammunition. Both of these rounds fire a small bullet that most commonly weighs around 55 to 90 grains (compare this to a standard .45ACP pistol bullet of 230 grains). ¹ The bullets have a diameter just barely larger than that of the .22LR, although both rounds use more energy than the .22 does.

All of this means that the most common AR-15 rifle uses small and light bullets that have lower penetration and lower energy than most hunting calibers, so they are often not suitable for big hunting opportunities. The light bullet does not work well in high winds or across long distances, nor does it do as much damage as a larger bullet usually does. This is why the minimum deer hunting caliber in many states (including Washington and Colorado) is 6mm — a round that is larger and more powerful than either .223 or 5.56.

Bottom line: AR-15 rifles have limited hunting utility not because they are uniquely powerful or destructive to game animals, but because they are considered small and underpowered for many hunting tasks.

2) They can be built from scratch using simple tools.

An AR receiver isn’t complicated to make. In fact, it is one of the easiest gun parts to manufacture using simple tools. In the past week, my Fb feed has served up pictures of AR receivers carved out of wood, or bolted together using different widths of aluminum sheeting from a hardware store. A higher-tech option for those with access to a 3D printer: it’s easy to find online blueprints to simply print that piece. And of course anyone with access to a machine shop who has basic mechanical knowledge could make a receiver in less than an afternoon.

Because the AR-15 is a modular design, many of the parts can be interchanged. The serialized part — the crucial central piece that gets tracked as the core of the firearm under federal law — is called the lower receiver or simply the lower. The other parts of the gun include an upper (or upper receiver), a stock, and a barrel. People who talk about “building” an AR-15 mean that they have chosen a specific set of parts to go with the receiver they purchased. Many people have multiple parts to go with a single receiver, so they can swap out the type of barrel their gun uses or choose a different configuration for the sighting system by changing the gun’s upper.

There are many thousands of AR-15 accessory parts available online, from hundreds of different manufacturers. Many gun owners also have dozens of AR parts just lying around in a closet or garage somewhere, waiting for the owner to get around to putting them together on a rifle.

3) There are an estimated 15 million AR-15 rifles owned by regular people in America.

From NBC News: “Today, one of out of every five firearms purchased in this country is an AR-style rifle, according to a NSSF estimate. Americans now own an estimated 15 million AR-15s, gun groups say. New AR-15 style guns range widely in price, from about $500 to more than $2,000.”

Why so many? The AR-15 platform is — as we noticed above — very easy to personalize for the user. With an adjustable stock, the rifle can fit nearly every shooter in the family, from a petite young teen to a very large adult male. This makes it a surprisingly economical choice for family shooting fun. As we also noticed above, the .223 round is lightweight, which means it produces very little recoil, so a lot of people (especially those sensitive to recoil issues) find it both fun and easy to shoot.

In addition to the fun factor, many people use AR-15 rifles in competition. The action shooting sport of 3-Gun is perhaps the fastest growing competitive shooting sport in America, and part of what drives that growth is the flexibility of the AR-15 design. The light weight and easy versatility of the design make it ideal for such competitions.

For serious defensive use, let me quote Massad Ayoob: “The cops are the experts on the current criminal trends. If they have determined that a ‘high capacity’ semiautomatic pistol and a .223 semiautomatic rifle with 30-round magazines are the best firearms for them to use to protect people like me and my family, they are obviously the best things for us to use to protect ourselves and our families.”

So these guns are very popular for many good reasons.

Doing the math here, if a person wanted to suggest a mass government purchase of these rifles at fair market value, it would cost… um… pulling out the scratch pad, lesseee…. hmmmm, let’s lowball the general cost of the rifles, down to $1000 per, just to make the math easier, so we get…

$1000 x 15,000,000 = $15,000,000,000 (compensation)

But of course that would not be the actual cost of the program. An extremely efficient government program would spend around 20% of the money on the payout portion, and around 80% for overhead and administration. So…

$15,000,000,000 x 5 = $75,000,000,000 (admin & overhead)

Add the two parts together and we get…

$15,000,000,000 + $75,000,000,000 = $90,000,000,000 (total program cost)

90. Billion. Dollars.

$90,000,000,000 is rather a lot of money. For comparison only — and not to get into some stupid political argument because really who has time for that? — ‘the wall’ along the southern border proposed by Trump and his supporters would cost, by some estimates, at least $25 billion dollars. And that number is widely agreed to be far out of America’s budgetary reach. ²

Of course, the numbers above assume that all AR-15 owners willingly participate in the program and that there are no unanticipated costs to enforce refusals. For comparison, when the state of New York passed the NY SAFE Act to simply register such rifles, there was a 90% noncompliance rate. Nine out of ten gun owners in that state did not submit to simple registration, and it seems unlikely that a confiscation or buyback effort would gain any higher rate of voluntary compliance. Enforcing compliance against unwilling participants would likely drive the costs (both human and monetary) far higher than most would expect.

4) The military does not use them.

Because AR-15 rifles are not machine guns, because they are not fully automatic or capable of burst fire as explained below, they are not issued to America’s troops. Rather, the military previously issued the M16, which is a full-auto or burst-fire design that looks nearly identical to the AR-15 but does not work the same way. ³ The current issue rifle for many of American troops is the M4 carbine, a smaller and lighter variant of similar design.

What’s the difference? As most of us know by now, a fully-automatic firearm fires many shots with just one press of the trigger. Each trigger press sounds like this: BRRRRPPPPPP! and then the magazine is empty and must be refilled. Some M16 variants will fire the entire magazine all at once like that, while others will fire three shots with each trigger press (burst fire) and then the user needs to press the trigger again to fire more BRRRPPP-y shots. In either case, as Clint Smith of Thunder Ranch says, “Full auto is a great way to turn money into noise.”

A semi-automatic firearm, such as the AR-15 and most carry pistols, fires just one shot with every press of the trigger. Each trigger press sounds like this: BANG. You have to press the trigger again to get a second or third or fourth shot, just as you do with your carry gun. You can get a constant BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG going when you are a fast trigger-puller, but this isn’t the same thing as the BRRRRRPPPP of a full auto.

Also see: Why isn’t a revolver a semi-automatic?

Bottom line: Although there are rifles used in military service that look a lot like AR-15 rifles, they are not the same gun and do not work the same way when the trigger is pressed.

5) Most of the scary-looking ‘military’ parts are actually safety features.

Yes — really! When military procurement specialists look for firearms to purchase and issue to the troops, safety is high on the list of things they look for. So let’s look at the safety features on an AR-15 / M16 style rifle.

Adjustable stocks on a rifle are an exact analog to interchangeable backstraps and grips on a carry pistol. These parts make it possible for one firearm to better fit different sizes of human. A better fit means more controllability, which reduces the risk of errant shots harming innocent bystanders.

Similarly, many people find that a rifle with a pistol grip is more controllable, especially in tight quarters such as a hallway inside the home.

The barrel shroud — that’s the piece of plastic encircling the barrel at the forward end of the gun, sometimes called a handguard — protects the user’s hand from getting burned. (By the way, this is the part that gun owners sometimes gigglingly refer to as “the shoulder thing that goes up.”)

A flash hider or flash reducer does not make the flash invisible. It doesn’t even necessarily obscure the flash from outside observers. What it does do, is make it so the user does not get blinded by a bright flash of burning powder at the end of the barrel when they fire the gun. As a safety idea, being able to reliably see what’s in front of the muzzle might seem pretty important.

***

So there you have it. Five things about AR-15 rifles you probably didn’t know.

Notes:

One pound = 7000 grains. ↩
h/t to Claude Werner for the comparison. ↩
Modern AR-15 rifles are semi-auto and available for purchase by ordinary citizens under the same rules that govern other types of firearms. Modern M16 and M4 rifles are fully automatic and available only to military and law enforcement personnel in line of duty. Twenty years ago and more, there was a full-auto version of the AR-15 used in military service, but the full-auto version of the rifle used in military service then is not identical to the semi-auto version available to civilians now. If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is. And that is one of the reasons the military rifle’s designation was changed to M16 — because so many people were so easily confused as to which configuration was under discussion, the full-auto military version or the semi-auto civilian one. ↩

2 Comments

The *other* phone call

February 28, 2018

Some years ago, I was talking to Paul Lathrop of the Polite Society Podcast when he asked me if I had ever gotten “the phone call” — you know, the one from a student telling me that something I taught them had saved their life.

My answer was no. I had never gotten that phone call from the survivor of a shootout. But I have gotten many emails and calls from people who have used something I taught them to stay safer and avoid a situation that could have turned much more serious — a home invasion that never happened, an aggressive panhandler who turned away at a firm “I cannot help you”, a chilling trip to the grocery store where a decision to make a fuss inside the store may have stopped something terrible from happening in the parking lot. Those stories are heartwarming and scary, encouraging and energizing for any instructor.

But even with all that, I told Paul, that type of phone call isn’t my deepest motivation as an instructor. That isn’t what drives me to become the best instructor I can become. For me, it’s the fear of getting the other phone call — the one that breaks the news that someone I worked with, someone I taught, someone I cared about, died in a violent crime. And that whatever I taught them, it either wasn’t enough or it wasn’t right. “The funeral is Saturday. Will you come?”

Sooner or later, every conscientious firearms instructor must face that possibility. With every class you teach, whether it’s “only beginners” or people further along on their journey, you owe your students the very best work you can give them. And you owe it to yourself to learn as much as you can and to become as skilled as you possibly can become — because you never want to get that phone call.

Nobody… really?

I wonder if Fuentes realizes just how common concealed carry really is? It seems that at least 6.5% of American adults have carry permits. That number jumps to around 8% of adults when we remove California and New York from the count.

So “how to carry a gun” is not exactly rare and esoteric knowledge. It’s something that at least one-in-twenty adults in America already does, at least some of the time.

But that’s just men, right? Women can’t do this thing.

Huh.

There are at least 16.3 million concealed carry permit holders in the United States. Women made up 36% of permit holders in the 14 states that provide data by gender, which would — if trends were solid across the remaining states — mean that at least 5.8 million women have concealed carry permits now. Eight states had data from 2012 to 2016 and they saw a 326% faster increase in permits among women than among men. ¹

Okay then. We’ve apparently all gone out and gotten our carry permits, but we find it literally impossible to carry … right?

For the past 18 years, I have carried nearly every day of my life. Everywhere it was legal, everywhere I could. It has changed my life in some pretty profound ways, especially my internal landscape. But it was neither impossible nor even particularly hard to do, once I made up my mind to just do it.

But How?

On a practical level, there’s really nothing wrong with wearing a belt and a holster underneath a pretty cover garment. I’ve done that the majority of the time, for years. The cover garment does not have to be a business jacket (done that), or a sloppy sweatshirt (done that, too). Of course it can be either of those things, but it doesn’t have to be.

My favorite cover garment right now is a long, snug tank top layer with a bit of lace on the bottom that reaches my upper thighs. But it’s snug, so the gun’s outline shows. Doesn’t matter, because on top of that I often wear a cropped sweater that just barely brushes my belt line. The cropped sweater breaks up the outline of the gun, while the tank top conceals the gun. It’s cute and warm for a winter look, the layers are in style and it works just fine. No stupid old jacket or ugly IDPA vest required.

Big news here: cute clothes can hide a gun just as well as — or better than! — ugly ones can.

But this isn’t news to you, is it?

Anyway, if I don’t want to wear a belt, I have other options. I might, for example, put on a Can Can Concealment Hip Hugger or Corset Holster. Inside, I’d probably add a S.H.E. (Soft Holster Insert) from Concealment Solutions. That would protect the trigger much more securely than most soft holsters manage to do. I could wear that with any skirt or dress I own, and — bonus! — the gun rides in the same place on my body as it does while using a conventional holster, only without a belt.

Or I might grab one of my bra holsters — a Flashbang or a Marilyn — from the Flashbang company. The signature Flashbang rides right in front, tucked up underneath the girls, and it is surprisingly discreet even in form-fitting clothes. The Marilyn rides inside the bra, snugly fitting just under the armpit so the gun rides in essentially the same location as a classic shoulder holster. Only (again!) more discreet. I’ve worn that one to weddings in my dancing dress, and no one the wiser… not even my-friend-the-cop who nearly made himself cross-eyed looking for it, and finally asked me to dance so he could check a little more closely. I’m still laughing.

There are other choices. For example, if I were working out or planned to be very physically active, I might put on a Pistol Wear belly band. This remains one of my favorite soft holsters of all time, because it is so comfortable and made to stay with you while moving. I could use a SHE insert for it as well, but another option that works well for protecting the trigger a bit better is a Universal CCW Holster from Maxpedition. This odd little piece of sturdy webbing wraps neatly around the trigger guard, protecting the trigger from any outside influence. It also puts a thick layer of spiky Velcro on the outside of the gun so that it stays exactly where you want it to stay, without moving around at all inside the spacious Pistol Wear pocket.

Plenty of other options out there, too. I’m sure at least one of the five million other women who have carry permits could probably have given CNN similar information.

If they’d asked.

Notes:

Statistics in this post come from Crime Prevention Research Center, and are the most current numbers I could find. ↩

5 Comments

Thoughts

February 25, 2018

There’s a meme going around Fb that skeptically concludes “… but now suddenly we can arm and train teachers to double as the last line of defense?”

This is disingenuous, not least because it assumes that we’re talking about arming teachers rather than allowing teachers to choose to be armed. There’s a huge difference between those ideas. To the best of my knowledge, there have been no serious proposals to force any schoolteachers to carry a gun.

The proposals are not to ‘arm’ teachers, but simply to give teachers a choice — the same choice that any adult person with a carry permit has in daily life.

Teachers with concealed carry permits are disarmed by law, but should they be? Or should their carry permits be recognized even while they are at work?

That’s literally the entire point of contention here, and the points made on both side of the discussion sound a lot like the arguments about concealed carry being allowed anywhere else. ¹

Furthermore…

Newflash: teachers are already the last line of defense.

They always have been.

The person hiding in the closet with a classroom full of terrified kindergartners should have something effective they can do when the monster flings open that door.

Even the most loving human body makes a very ineffective ballistic shield.

This does not turn the teacher into a cop or security guard. It turns the teacher into a modern, tool-using human being solving a terrible problem in the only way that’s left after all other efforts have failed. It gives the teacher a choice where currently they have none.

The argument isn’t about whether or not teachers should try to protect their students. Good people already do that. But too often, they fail.

So the argument truly isn’t about whether teachers should get an ‘extra’ burden that they’re not already carrying. And it isn’t about forcing everyone to solve the problem in the same way.

It is only about whether those teachers who would prefer to use effective tools — for a job they’re going to try to do in any case — should be allowed to have them.

Notes:

It’s weird. As state after state passed shall-issue concealed carry laws, politicians in most states were incredibly resistant to looking at the experience of other states. The argument kept centering around theoretical “blood in the streets!” and “shootouts over parking spaces!” even when there were plenty of other states that already had passed such laws and had no such problems. On this issue, there are states and jurisdictions where teacher’s carry permits are already recognized and where teachers can indeed carry at work. Utah has allowed teachers to carry at school for many years, and … how’s that working for them? What do their mass-murder stats look like? How many children have wrestled guns away from their teachers and gone on a rampage? How many kindergartners have snatched their teachers’ guns? Why isn’t anyone talking about this? ↩

2 Comments

Too many funerals

February 22, 2018

Over on Gun Culture 2.0, social scientist David Yamane had an unpleasant interaction with a colleague on Twitter. That colleague shut down their conversation in an emotional way, saying that he’d been to “too many funerals.” Prof. Yamane asks an important question:

“… people being unwilling and unable to hear in times of distress raises a problem for me as an empirical social scientist. My trained approach to understanding the world is through systematically gathered data. But if you approach the issue from that perspective at a time when people are grieving and aggrieved, you run the risk of being seen as ‘deflecting’ the issue or, worse, as not sympathetic to the victims of the horrific crime.

“So, what is an empirical social scientist to do?”

Go read the whole thing; it’s a good read and there are already some good comments on there.

Here was my response:

Start by getting on the same emotional page as the person you’re talking to. Get in phase with them. Find, and point out, common emotional ground. (This can be incredibly tough when talking with people who think all gun owners are monsters who should be killed. Too many of those this week…)

Point out the most important common ground: we all want safer families and communities. We all care about the security of our nation’s schools. We all care about keeping our children safe from harm.

We only disagree about how to do that most effectively.

Too often the debate has been framed — by all sides of the culture wars — as a fight between “civil liberties” vs “protecting the children.”

But it’s not.

Vandalized billboard in Kentucky, urging people to “Kill the NRA.”

As a gun owner, I am tired of receiving death threats. Really am. During every noisy public news cycle like this, I receive death threats from fanatical anti-gun people. They threaten to come find me and kill my children in front of me. They announce that they hope someone shoots me with my own guns — often in lurid and bloody terms. And they don’t just go after me, personally. They put up billboards that say “Kill the NRA” and they go on national TV to say things like, “Maybe it’s time we pull guns from their cold, dead hands”. They send poison pen letters to my friends and threaten to ‘out’ them so they lose their jobs and their livelihoods. And they react with glee whenever a gun owner accidentally shoots themselves.

Why do I and my friends get death threats from fanatics during every news cycle like this?

It is because of the horrible, horrible lie that people tell each other: gun owners don’t care about dead children. Gun owners don’t understand how we feel, how we’re grieving, how we hurt, how scary this is …

As if we, too, are not human.

As if we, too, do not long for safer communities.

As if we, too, do not hug our children a little harder and hold our loved ones a little tighter when something terrible happens on the news.

Too many people assume that all it would take to get people to agree on stuff like this would be to get everyone feeling the same way about violent child-murder.

As if we don’t already.

So start there. Put the frame on finding ways to protect children and save lives. And keep dragging it back there every time it drifts. That calm and rational approach with all the statistics isn’t at all cold-hearted, and don’t make it so. It is the most warmly human reaction of all: an attempt to understand the problem so that we can find better ways to protect our families and communities.

Because we have all been to too many damn funerals.

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Resources for Conversations with Anti-Gun Friends

February 18, 2018

As a rule, I don’t particularly enjoy talking about gun politics. It’s one of the (many!) reasons I’ve generally steered away from the subject on this blog. There have been some exceptions, of course, because sometimes it’s just about unavoidable. And as I explained some time ago, during a similar noisy period in American gun political conversations:

“Cornered Cat is about women learning how to defend themselves. Period, full stop.

“Sometimes that means I must mention the political scene, because when a law is passed that makes it harder for women to defend themselves, that hurts all of us. This doesn’t just apply to ‘you can’t own this type of gun anymore’ laws, either. It also applies to laws that affect your legal situation before or after you shoot, and to laws that tell you where you can or can’t carry. All of these laws have a very strong impact on your ability to protect yourself, and that means you need to know about them.”

Not only this, but many of my readers are relatively new gun owners or people who work with new gun owners. And most people new to guns simply don’t realize how often we-in-the-gun-owning-community have had these conversations in the past. Or how very quickly things can change.

Anyway. Resources.

Dealing with Social Bullies. Trying to figure out what to do about a friend or acquaintance saying rude things to you on social media? Read this first.

It’s About Love. This might be one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. It was certainly one of the hardest. And it’s maybe the most important thing to say to an anti-gun friend while emotions are running high after an ugly news story.

The Longest and Most Thorough Pro-Gun Article Ever. This “Opinion on Gun Control, Repost” was written by my friend Larry Correia. Larry has authored many bestselling books. He also happens to be somewhat of an expert on firearms topics. Not only has he been an avid shooter, firearms instructor, and competitor in years past, he also owned a gun store in Utah that was licensed to sell NFA items. What I’m saying is, he knows what he’s talking about. The article is very long and very thorough. It pretty much addresses every one of the objections the anti-rights people have brought up over the years, and discusses them with very calm logic. The post isn’t at all rant-like and there’s nothing in it your maiden aunt couldn’t read. I’d suggest reading it, linking it if you’re so inclined, and keeping it in your bookmarks as reference material — it is that good.

Why You Need to Know How Your Gun Works. This post (another one of my own) explains why and how you need to know how your gun functions mechanically — and how that can help you have usefully productive conversations with your friends about gun laws.

Why Not Renew the Assault Weapons Ban? This older blog post, written by a political leftist for other leftists, provides a very fair and very clear argument against renewing the expired assault weapons ban. It explains what various gun features are and how they work, and also explains why progressives should not encourage this type of legislation. And it’s relevant again today, because what goes around comes around again.

13 Charts to Put America’s Gun Issues in Perspective. Nicely visual information from 2016. Worth keeping on hand when you need a quick and easy to understand chart.

I Used to Think Gun Control Was the Answer: My Research Told Me Otherwise. This one is a news/opinion piece from a person who thinks of herself as being anti-gun. It’s useful because she suggests some very narrowly-tailored changes that will likely help, and it’s also useful because it’s a quick tour of the things that have been repeatedly proven not to help. Handy information to keep around.

6 Reasons Your Right-Wing Friend Isn’t Coming To Your Side On Gun Control. This one is useful because it’s a good bulleted list of some factors you may need to explain to your friend — or that, if you’re new to the gun-politics conversation, that you may not yet have considered.

Finally, there’s one more resource I’d suggest. This one isn’t about conversations. It’s about doing one practical thing to help protect your ability to use modern tools in self-defense. It’s this:

SAF (Second Amendment Foundation). SAF does an amazing job fighting for our rights in the courts. They are very strictly non-partisan and non-political. They focus only on protecting 2nd Amendment rights. That means they’re doing work that all gun owners can get behind, no matter what other political beliefs they hold. They don’t endorse political candidates and don’t generally get involved in elections. Instead, they work through the court system to clarify and expand freedom that way.

6 Comments

A love-filled rant

February 17, 2018

Yesterday, I came across something Caleb Causey said, and want to share it with you. Please read this heartfelt (and heartbroken) rant, and think about it. Then act.

Caleb’s rant comes from a place of love and care. And to the extent that it sounds angry and frustrated, that’s just how deep the love and care really go.

All of us who have worked in the personal-protection training field have felt this way from time to time. Not because we’re trying to get your hard earned dollars (go train with someone else; I’ve quit, so don’t try that one on me). We get upset because it *HURTS* to watch people who could protect themselves, who could help keep themselves or someone they love alive, who could have the knowledge and skills to deal capably with a terrible event … choose instead to not get that training, not get that knowledge, not seek out those skills. To stay powerless and ineffective.

It *HURTS* to watch people die unnecessarily, when just a little knowledge and skill on scene could maybe have kept them alive. And it hurts even more to watch people feel helpless when they don’t have to be.

So yeah, the words below are a rant. But it tells some deep truths.

Anyway, here’s what Caleb said:

Hey look!!! “Something you can do!”

Going all King Kong here because I’m angry. And before anyone accuses me of “profiteering” during a crisis… I’ve had this course scheduled since the end of November on my website. I’ve been offering these types of classes since 2009.

I’m absolutely disgusted by anyone saying “What could anyone do?” or “Somebody should do something.” or “There was nothing anyone could have done.” BULLSHIT! Stop thinking that it is someone else’s responsibility to do something. Take responsibility for your own life. Take responsibility for your kid’s life. Take responsibility for the children in your classroom or in your school. Obviously expecting someone else to “do something” ain’t working out for anyone during these active killer events. So stop expecting someone else or some law to do something. Take responsibility!

One option is to learn CPR/AED. Learn how to identify and treat immediate life-threatening injuries. Start carrying some real medical equipment on your person, in your purse, at your desk, in your classroom, in your car, at home, at the gym, or anywhere you spend any amount of time. Why? Because it is impossible to determine when, where, or how many injuries will happen. Mindset and education should be a priority so that you know how to use those tools efficiently.
STOP EXPECTING SOMEONE ELSE TO DO SOMETHING!
YOU need to do something!

I don’t care if you take my courses or some of my colleagues’ courses; just get educated in modern trauma management at the basic level.

There is even a nation-wide FREE course coming up at the end of March you could take. There will literally be free classes all across the US that you can sign up for.

Here’s a link to the class from Lone Star Medics that’s coming up in just a couple of weeks: Lone Star Medics class

And here’s the information about the FREE nationwide “Stop the Bleed” events: Stop the Bleed Day

Stay safe. Take care of the people you love.

**1) They are less powerful than your grandpa’s deer rifle.**

2) They can be built from scratch using simple tools.

3) There are an estimated 15 million AR-15 rifles owned by regular people in America.

4) The military does not use them.

5) Most of the scary-looking ‘military’ parts are actually safety features.

Nobody… really?

But How?

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