New Video Series – Back to Basics with Jeff Gonzales Episode 1: New to Concealed Carry

VIDEO – Back to Basics with Jeff Gonzales Episode 1: New to Concealed Carry

CCW Safe is proud to present a new video series with Jeff Gonzales of Trident Concepts. The Back to Basics series is a ten part video series covering the basics of concealed carry covering gear, mindset, avoidance, de-escalation and much more. 

In Episode One Jeff goes over a brief overview of some basic things concealed carriers should consider.

Transcript:

Jeff Gonzales: Hi, I’m Jeff Gonzales, president of Trident Concepts. I’m here for back to basics with CCW Safe. Today, we’re going to talk about New to Concealed Carry. If you’re new to the idea or the lifestyle of Concealed Carry, there’s a couple of things that I might suggest that you think about. The first is to practice situational awareness, really put a little bit of effort into trying to think about your surroundings, both when you’re at home, when you’re in a vehicle, when you’re walking, wherever your destination might be.

Just try to be a little bit more aware of what’s happening around you. This is one of the most simple things that you can do to avoid any type of critical incident, is to be paying attention to what’s happening around you. After that, the next thing is to look at obtaining your license to carry. Right now, we’re in unprecedented times and a lot of people are going to say, “I don’t really feel like I need to have a license to carry because I might be in a constitutional carry state, or I might be in a state that doesn’t require a license to carry.”

I think that’s great. I still think it’s valuable to have that license to carry, because the one thing that I feel it brings to the table is better awareness of deadly force and use of deadly force. If you have an understanding of what you can do, what you can’t do, you’re going to be a little bit better prepared for those types of situations, without you having to think on the spot of what you should do or what you shouldn’t do. Now, that ties into the next point, which is to know the law. I feel like, most of the time, the layman has a little bit of trepidation about trying to understand the law, because it can be very confusing.

Now, there are several resources that help you process that information in bite sized chunks, that allows a little bit easier for you to understand, but it’s super important that you understand the laws in your state, as well as any state you’re going to visit and realize that while you might have a license to carry in your home state, if you travel to a different state, you must abide by those laws, so be familiar.

After that, let’s talk about defining your mission. If your mission is to carry concealed, how often, what’s the frequency that you’re going to carry? Are you going to carry it every day? Are you going to carry it as needed? Are you going to carry it once or twice? Do you run into problems such as your workplace is a prohibitive environment? All of these types of things are going to help you figure out what your absolute minimum is going to be for your concealed carry mission.

Now, a lot of times what that means is that your selection of gear, which is the next bullet point we talk about, the selection of gear, like, if I’m going to be carrying every day, I probably need to put a lot of thought into that gear selection, because when you are talking about every day, it becomes very challenging as far as the gear, because now you’re looking at comfort. Now you’re looking at, can you wear these different types of wardrobes with your firearm? Does your firearm support these other types of wardrobes? You really get into a lot more complexity when you start to look at every day. Not that it’s a bad thing, but you need to really put more emphasis in your gear selection.

After you’ve talked about your mission, that allows you to go down a more narrow path to help selecting your gear, because one of the problems that I see is, number one, if you’re walking into this industry for the first time, it’s a little overwhelming. You’re bombarded by all different types of marketing and all different types of publications telling you this, that or the other. As the layman, how do you navigate through that? If you have done a good job at defining your mission, it allows you to maybe tiptoe a little bit easier through all of the unknown. When it comes time to selecting your gear, some of the things that we talk about is, you might not get it right the first go around, and that’s okay.

Do the best that you can, realizing that you don’t have a lot of information to start with, and you can do a lot of research and you can talk to a lot of people. In the end, it’s going to take you actually purchasing that firearm and practicing with that firearm to determine whether or not it’s going to work for you. Most of the time, if you’ve done a good job at defining your mission and research, selecting your gear, you’re going to be fine, but if it doesn’t fit or it doesn’t work, don’t take it, don’t be upset too much, because there’s a lot of things called- buyer’s remorse is a big thing that we talk about, where somebody is going to push a piece of gear because they’ve invested in it and it’s like, “I’ve got to make this work.”

I get it. There’s also the other very real possibility that you may only be able to afford, purchasing one firearm at a time. I get that too. As you move in this new journey, you’re going to become more educated, more enlightened, more aware. You’re going to start to realize, “Okay. You know what? When I first purchased this, it met my needs, but now my needs have changed and I need to change with them. This brings us up to the last point, which is education and training. I can’t emphasize it enough that, one way or another, you’re going to have to invest in learning the skills, learning the trade craft, if you will. You can do that in a lot of different ways. There’s a whole selection of different sources that you can go to.

You can read, you can watch videos, but probably the best that you can do, as far as the quality of your return on investment, is going to be to attend formalized instruction. The reason why I say that is simply because you’re getting a lot of information, one-on-one with a qualified or vetted instructor, that’s going to allow you to work through those problems with his observation, his or her observation, providing you feedback right then and there. You might watch a video, think, “This is cool. I’m going to go to the range and try this.” You go to the range and you try it and you realize, “Maybe that didn’t work that well.” Your maturation cycle, as far as skill develop, is just elongated with things like that.

Sometimes going to formalize instruction, what happens is, you get something right out of the gate, something solid, right out of the gate. Then you can start to add more do-it-yourself type scenarios moving forward because you’ve got a good solid base. That’s what I’m trying to emphasize, is we send out surveys to a lot of different people at different different times to try to get a gauge for what’s currently happening, what are people really thinking.

One of the things that I noticed in the last survey was, those that weren’t carrying for a lot of reasons, but a main reason was that they didn’t feel comfortable. When we further defined why they didn’t feel comfortable, we asked what would make them feel comfortable and of the selection of answers that we had there, one of them was formalized instruction and it was a 70% response there.

That says a lot of things that a lot of people would value seek and formalized instruction. That means that you’ve got to do a little bit of homework and find something in your general vicinity that you can invest the quality or invest the time into getting a quality product. Hopefully, this helps set the tone for those that are new to Concealed Carry and looking at moving down this path. I’d love to hear any questions or comments. Please feel free to post them down below. Until then, I’m Jeff Gonzales. Take care and stay safe.