The People You Admire Reveal What’s Wrong With You

I was thinking about writing about the body of the Beast and their 100% Biblical, yet seemingly new, policy of “canceling” people they disagree with. But then I got distracted by a Clint Smith video.

Clint Smith is probably the leading Internet firearms comedian, but that’s not his only credential. He’s a former marine. He was a cop for a while, and he was a SWAT team member (hopefully not like the one in Miami who shot at an autistic man from about 100 feet and hit the black guy next to him). He has all sorts of firearms stuff in his resume. He co-founded Thunder Ranch, which is a respected school for people who want…actually, I’m not quite sure what they want. To be militia members? To convince themselves they’re Clint Eastwood? The facility teaches all sorts of things that seem to go way beyond anything a normal person could expect to experience as a crime victim.

It looks like he’s a bona fide authority with a remarkable trove of knowledge, but he’s mainly famous for crabby Youtube videos in which he goes off like Sam Kinison on a gallon of espresso.

The strange thing is that people post comments I would describe as worshipful. They thank him for setting them straight and correcting all the nonsense they learned in the past.

I just saw a video on which he offered all sorts of strange pearls for the faithful.

Let’s see.

1. You shouldn’t swim in the ocean, because most shark attacks occur in less than three feet of water. A Marine said that. A former SWAT team member. Be afraid of fish.

Don’t Marines show up in ships and storm beaches? Am I wrong? Was that the Air Force?

2. He jabbed people for failing to keep fire extinguishers beside their beds, because statistics say you’re more likely to “burn alive” in a fire than in a home invasion. What about the low odds of shark attacks? Should you carry a fire extinguisher while you swim?

I don’t have a fire extinguisher by my bed. I do have a ridiculous network of smoke alarms connected to a wireless system that calls the fire department, and I sleep next to a plate glass door that opens onto my yard. The fire extinguisher is in the kitchen, next to the shark repellant.

There are a lot of bad things that can happen during a home invasion that don’t involve death. Beatings and rapes come to mind. So does theft. When you think about odds, shouldn’t you consider the fact that bad outcomes other than death are much more common than death?

Burning alive is pretty rare. People who die in fires are generally killed by the smoke.

3. He said he wouldn’t have a .380 up his behind if he had room there for a tugboat. This guy has to be pushing 80, and he has exactly the kind of mouth you don’t want around your grandkids. This is what he has learned in all those years. Even if you liked him, you could not invite him to a barbecue at your house. And what about people who can’t handle a 9mm? There are plenty of them out there. A .380 you can shoot is better than a 9mm you can’t.

4. He criticized .300 Blackout, an AR15 caliber similar to 7.62x39mm, because it supposedly has a trajectory like a mortar round for long shots. Do civilians make 400-yard shots in self-defense? Has that ever happened in the history of the United States or even the world? The .300 Blackout has more killing power than the 5.56mm at realistic distances, and it penetrates obstacles, such as walls and furniture, better. Should you give all that up just in case you happen to become the only civilian in the history of the world to kill in self-defense at 400 yards?

5. He picked on people who question his choice of a 1911 for carry. He admits he and the gun are old. Then he says, “Did you ever think there’s a reason I got this old?” Wow. Wouldn’t you be more likely to live to be old if you carried a high-capacity gun? I love the 1911, but I’m not going to give up 3 to 10 rounds just so I can carry a gun I love and be a wise guy.

6. He said all horses and motorcycles were good for was turning people into “bone donors.” New phrase to me. He went into the infantry and then worked on a SWAT team, and he thinks people who take unnecessary risks are foolish. Okay.

7. Regarding .223 Remington, he said he had never wanted to take the place of anyone who had been shot with it. Couldn’t you say that about a BB gun? Is this really the standard by which you judge a caliber? He also said he didn’t know if it was the best choice in the world. If he doesn’t know that by now, what has he been doing all these years? This is pretty low on the difficulty scale for an expert, and it’s pretty much a threshold question when you’re teaching people how to defend themselves.

8. He said serving on a submarine was stupid and asked who would get into a can with a bunch of other people in the middle of the ocean. Subs are the strongest part of our nuclear deterrent, far and away. Isn’t that a good reason for a person to go live in a can?

9. Regarding custom guns, he said something incredible: “What makes you think you’re going to fight with your gun?”

Okay. First of all, I don’t have anyone else’s gun. All I have are my guns. I don’t know how to get my hands on someone else’s gun. What makes Clint Smith think someone else’s gun is going to be handy when I have to defend myself? How is that supposed to happen?

Customized guns can have great things like laser sights, flashlights, red dot sights, night sights, improved triggers, improved grips, and larger magazines. I’m just listing things that would clearly be helpful in a gunfight. What conceivable reason could you have to turn all that down?

How will having a customized gun hurt me if I have to fight with someone else’s gun? That is not clear at all. Would I somehow lose the ability to use other guns? Should I get rid of most of my guns and only keep one, because if I keep shooting my .22’s, I’ll be totally unable to work a Glock?

10. He criticized people who put a lot of junk on their rifles, not because the junk doesn’t work, but because it’s heavy. He said, “There is not an infantryman alive who wants a heavier gun.” Is he teaching infantrymen? I think it’s obvious that you don’t want 10 pounds of tactical junk on your rifle, but even if it’s there, you can probably carry it across your living room or yard. Shouldn’t instruction and equipment have some relevance to the needs of the people you’re teaching?

He said, “You don’t need a heavy rifle. You need a rifle that functions.” But he promotes the AR15, which…often fails to function, shooting a caliber that often fails to incapacitate.

11. He said a woman who wanted to buy her first gun should get a Glock and 25 magazines. He really said that. What is a housewife going to do with 426 cartridges in one gunfight? Find me one example of any human being, anywhere, including Fallujah, who needed 426 pistol rounds to deal with a single engagement. Well. Maybe in Fallujah. In America, you won’t be facing the Republican Guard, and you have to stop shooting people once they quit.

I think this guy is proof that being funny, having strong opinions, and intimidating people with your resume and with insults can get you a much bigger audience and more respect than you actually deserve.

“He’s an expert! He has a rare collection of knowledge and skills!” So what? When you’re learning to defend yourself with a gun, you don’t need Isaac Newton to teach you. It’s all simple stuff. There are probably half a million people in the US who could teach you just as effectively as Clint Smith. Here’s how you hold a gun. Here’s how you aim. Here’s how you use cover. Here’s what you should be thinking about in a gunfight. It’s not advanced physics. The guy at your nearest instruction facility can probably teach you just as well as Clint Smith, without the profanity or weird, inappropriate SWAT and infantry stuff.

Look, if you were the best woodworking instructor on planet earth, and you acted like this guy, I would be perfectly content to go and learn from the thousandth-best instructor and deal with someone more mature. Running a table saw is just not that hard. It works the same way with shooting. Clint Smith didn’t invent anything, and he can’t patent anything. He’s not doing well because he can give you something no one else can give. He does well because he’s a great self-promoter.

There’s a guy up the road from me who has a school. I’m sure he can teach me anything Clint Smith can, without lecturing me about his phobia of carnivorous fish.

Here’s another problem: he contradicts himself. What good is advice if it’s self-nullifying? Example: he says having a lot of ammunition is very important, and he says people with backup guns should have backup guns as powerful, or more powerful, than their primary guns. Then in the same video he tells his audience how great revolvers are, and he says you should fear a man who carries one gun, because he knows how to use it. He makes fun of young people with plastic guns and big magazines. What happened to the housewife with 25 Glock magazines? Have we decided that was a bad idea?

No one calls him on his nonsense because it would be like going into a room full of Jimi Hendrix fans and reminding them Stevie Ray Vaughan was better. The worship has nothing to do with logic. They’re like the food nuts who clap when Alton Brown ruins a steak.

Smith’s outfit created a Thunder Ranch .44 Special revolver. The cost was $750. It came in a pretty box, and it had pretty wooden grips and a ridiculous Thunder Ranch plaque sort of a thing attached to it. People criticized it for reasons which should be obvious. He wrote a column in a gun magazine and called them…dirty language alert…”turd suckers.” He marketed a very silly gun out of pure materialism, and people who didn’t swallow the bait got called a dirty name.

I’ll link to a blogger who provided a concise essay showing not everyone was drinking the Clint-Aid back then.

Why would you want to be around this guy any longer than you had to? I can’t imagine paying $1100 to listen to him for three days. Three minutes of standup comedy? Sure. But not three days of teaching. Would you want to spend three days listening to Jim Carrey routines?

The .44 Special is like a .44 Magnum except for the lack of power. It gives velocities down around 750 fps. I assume it only holds 6 rounds, given the diameter of the cartridges. It weighs almost 36 ounces, empty, or 10 ounces more than a 15-round Glock 22. It’s very slow to reload unless you carry speed loaders, and then…it’s still pretty slow.

It sounds like the ballistics are about like those of a 1911, but you’re getting those ballistics from an obsolescent tool, the deficiencies of which could easily result in you being killed.

Clint Smith stands by revolvers. Even though he carries a 1911. Okay. Our military went semiauto in…1911. One hundred and nine years ago. Even the cops figured it out by the 1990’s. A revolver weighs a lot, it has a terrible trigger for single-action shooting (the only kind of revolver shooting that happens in gunfights), and concealing it is like trying to conceal a bucket of chicken.

Why would you try to get self-defense students to carry a substandard, overpriced weapon? If I ran a school for amateur drag racers, I wouldn’t put out a commemorative Smart Car.

It’s amazing how people can attach themselves to, and nearly deify, individuals who are clearly best avoided.

Real self-defense does not require a college degree. You don’t need to know how to shoot prone. You don’t need to complete combat courses with popup targets. You don’t need to stand in front of a mirror practicing changing magazines. You don’t need to be able to hit anything more than 100 feet away.

Here’s what nearly all self-defense situations look like: a drunk guy kicks your door over and over at 3 a.m. You stand in your living room and yell that you have a gun. He comes in anyway, you shoot him twice in the chest, using whatever gun you had on your nightstand, and then you call the police. Or you may be walking in a city and find yourself confronted by an assailant armed with a knife, a hammer, or his own physical superiority. You pull your gun, and if necessary, you shoot him until he knocks it off. I’ll bet 98% of self-defense shootings are fundamentally similar to these two models. You don’t have to go put on your black ninja pants. You don’t have to know anything about bullet drop. You don’t have to have Jeff Cooper’s color system memorized.

Cooper. There’s another beauty. He said it would be a public service to supply urban criminals with ammunition so they could exterminate each other. How can anyone take a person like that seriously? He also said .45 ACP full metal jacket bullets were great for self-defense, well past the beginning of the hollowpoint era. I don’t know whether he kept a 1911 in his Model T.

Guru worshipers are a mess. They’re the same people who think Massad Ayoob is right about everything. He has no degree. He knows nothing about ballistics, which is a science. He can’t design a gun because he isn’t an engineer. He knows very little about law; I’ve seen what he wrote about the Zimmerman case, and he completely missed what was important, because he was not equipped to understand what was happening. He has no experience in the military. His police experience is not worth talking about, since it was part-time and happened in a tiny town about as dangerous as the Munchkin City. But if Masaad said it, it’s automatically true.

Get a good high-capacity pistol or two. Get a carry permit. Buy a high-capacity long gun for home defense. Learn to shoot very well. Know the difference between cover and concealment, for both yourself and your assailants. KEEP YOUR PHONE CHARGED and know how to use it to call the cops fast. Keep hearing protection by your bed. Put a lot of thought into how to run away from fights, because it’s almost always the best move. Always think in terms of defusing and escape. Using a gun should be like jumping out of an airplane. It’s only acceptable when the only alternative is far worse.

That ought to set you up just fine. If you want to go to a school, fantastic, but don’t assume some doofus who looks scary in tactical pants and runs his mouth is the supreme intellect of the galaxy. I don’t care if he was a cop. I don’t care if he was a SEAL. I don’t care if he went to Vietnam or Iraq. Some cops are idiots. A lot of idiots go to war, serve admirably and with great courage, and come back idiots.

I guess I’m not a Clint Smith admirer.