 Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Sabdel Defense, and today we're gonna talk about bad ideas. So I saw this tweet recently here from Mike Sernovic. I don't know how to pronounce his name, honestly, so I apologize for butchering that. However, it was about some gun advice that he was just randomly handing out on Twitter, and this guy pops into my feet every once in a while. He's a general conservative, leaning guy. But this piece of advice was so horrible I wanted to make a video about it. And rather than just slamming it like, hey that's stupid, don't do it, I wanted to explain why it's a bad idea. So the tweet, which I will try to maybe put up right here, I had to read this a couple different times in order to actually understand what he was trying to say. But basically he's saying, instead of getting a real gun, get one of the guns they use to start foot races. You know, they shoot a gun in the air and that's what starts the foot race. And they fire blank cartridges, right? Because no one will get close enough to see if it's a real gun or not. And this is somewhat equivalent to Joe Biden's, just shoot two shotgun blasts off in the air and scare people. You wanna protect yourself, get a double barrel shotgun. Fire two blasts outside the house. I promise you, whoever's coming in is not gonna, you don't need an AR-15. You don't need 30 rounds to protect yourself. Buy a shotgun, buy a shotgun. And there's a reason this is a really bad idea. The reason behind why this is a very bad idea is because what you are relying on in that situation is intimidation, right? You have heard of fight or flight before, but if you've ever read on killing by Grossman, he talks about how there is fight, flight, intimidate, and freeze. There's kind of four different responses to deal with conflict. And the most common in the animal world, and you'll see this a lot, especially in inner city neighborhoods where gang rivalries are common, is intimidation. The most common response is intimidation. So what you're doing there is you're saying, hey, I'm big, I'm tough, you don't want to mess with me because it's gonna go bad for you. So you're trying to intimidate as a way to avoid the fight, which is a really interesting psychology beyond that, because most people that are intimidating actually don't want to fight you. That's why they're intimidating you because they're trying to avoid the fight with their intimidation. So using guns as a self-defender in an intimidation manner, firing those two shotgun blasts in the air, giving them the old Joe Biden special, buy a shotgun, or using a not real gun to intimidate someone to make them think it's a real gun is a bad idea. And the reason that's a bad idea is because if they call your bluff, you're screwed. We don't want to rely on a psychological stop. There's two ways to stop someone who's trying to kill you. Convince them to quit, like they mentally decide, hey, I don't want any part of this anymore, which honestly, and to be fair, is the most common outcome when you pull out a real gun. Someone says, ah, I don't feel like getting shot today, I'm gonna go do something else. The other way we stop people, and the most sure way is a physical stop. They are physically incapable of continuing to try to kill you. That's why most people in the gun world talk about shooting with that magic eight inch circle because you got your lungs and your heart and your spine and you got a bunch of different stuff in here that if you get shot is going to physically incapacitate you from trying to kill someone. So that's typically the way we talk about self-defense gun use. We're gonna shoot people in that magic eight inch circle until they are physically incapable of trying to kill us or they decide they wanna go do something else. Intimidating people with guns is not a good idea. One, there's the whole legal trouble, whatever, whatever, but if you didn't meet the qualifications for lethal force and you pull out your gun, that's a different issue anyway. Different video, but what we wanna do is we want to make the other person physically incapable of trying to kill us. That's what we're talking about here in a self-defense situation. So the idea that you should use a gun or a fake gun or a water gun or a bottle of hairspray and a lighter or whatever, anything else, as an intimidation tool gets you in hot water because the mindset that puts you in is I'm trying to intimidate so I don't have to fight. Well, if the other person is there for a fight, they're not gonna care about your intimidation. The other problem with this is it puts you behind in the OODA loop if you're at all familiar with that, if you're not a different video, don't worry, you can look that up, but they're getting ahead of the OODA loop on you because they can orient the side and act and their action of actually pushing the fight is gonna reset your OODA loop because now you're not prepared to do that. You acted like you were prepared, but now you're not prepared and you're gonna get yourself in hot water. Using guns in general as an intimidation tool in a self-defense situation is a terrible idea. If you have a gun and you're not willing to use it, you should probably get something you are willing to use like pepper spray or Taze or whatever, and I don't recommend that, use a gun, be willing to use it. However, if you're saying I couldn't really shoot anybody, I'm only gonna pull up the gun, I'm gonna scare them with it, that's gonna get you in a potentially bad, bad situation. So we don't use guns as intimidation tools because one, it's not necessarily effective and two, it could go worse for you if you're not actually willing to fight. We want to train as self-defenders to be willing and ready to fight. If the fight comes to us, we're gonna finish it, right? That's probably heard that as a kid maybe, like you don't start fights, but you finish them kind of thing and that's essentially what the situation is. We're not gonna go out and start this fight, we're not gonna go out and continue this, but if someone is threatening my life, I am gonna be ready to fight all the way. I'm not gonna try to intimidate, I'm not gonna try to go halfway, I'm gonna look for a physical stop so that someone can stop trying to kill me. And that's why using guns as an intimidation tool is a terrible idea and Mr. Mike Sernovic or whatever should politely delete that tweet because to be frank, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Do brave deeds and endure.