Episode 18
Big Banks are watching your gun purchases?! | #18 2A Commerce
Banks and card networks now have a way to flag who is buying from a gun store. In episode 18 of State of the Second, hosts John and Kaylee sit down with Greg from 2A Commerce to walk through how that happens and what it means for gun owners and gun businesses. Greg traces the pressure back to Operation Choke Point under the Obama administration, when banks began reclassifying firearm transactions as high risk and cutting off processing. The newer threat is the firearms-specific MCC, the merchant category code the card brands rolled out, which Greg explains effectively creates a private gun buyer list. The networks still cannot see exactly what you bought, but they can see that you spent a large amount at a gun store, and the probability says it was a firearm.
From there the conversation moves into the daily reality of running a firearms business online. Greg's company is platform agnostic and builds custom e-commerce, payment processing, and inventory integrations for the gun space. He explains why search engine optimization matters so much when Google AdWords, Facebook, and Instagram block firearms advertising, why most SEO firms do not understand the industry's vernacular, and how a new banking survey for FFLs lands on underwriters who often do not understand or do not like firearms. He also covers the crypto payment gateway his team built using USDC, the SEC lawsuit that stalled it, and why crypto's pseudo-anonymous nature protects buyer privacy. On the marketing side he ties together content, email, social, search, and affiliate marketing into one connected customer journey.
The back half turns to action. Greg argues the real fix is not reacting to each new rule but building an alternate banking infrastructure that does not depend on the federal government, the same bet he and his partner made entering the gun space in 2019. Kaylee frames the gun owner's leverage as three votes: the ballot box, the dollar, and the feet, and points to the Second Amendment sanctuary movement and Second Amendment Preservation Acts spreading from Virginia outward as proof the groundswell works. John closes with a challenge: take a new person to the range on the second of every month. Greg plugs 2A Commerce and his tacticalfresh.com marketing platform, and invites anyone serious about building the alternative to reach out.
Links
Questions this episode answers
How are banks and card networks able to track who is buying from a gun store?
Banks and card networks cannot see the specific item purchased, but they can see a large charge at a gun store and infer it was likely a firearm. Combined with the firearms merchant category code, this effectively flags who is buying from gun retailers.
What is the firearms MCC code and why does it matter for gun buyer privacy?
The firearms merchant category code (MCC) is a designation the card brands rolled out for gun-store transactions. Greg explains it effectively creates a private gun buyer list, since processors can identify spending at firearms retailers even without seeing the exact product.
Where did banking pressure on the firearms industry start?
Greg traces it to Operation Choke Point under the Obama administration, when banks began reclassifying firearm transactions as high risk and cutting off payment processing for gun businesses.
Why does SEO matter so much for gun businesses when advertising platforms block them?
Google AdWords, Facebook, and Instagram block firearms advertising, so search engine optimization becomes one of the few ways gun businesses get found. Greg notes most SEO firms struggle here because they do not understand the industry's vernacular.
How does crypto payment using USDC protect a firearm buyer's information?
Greg's team built a crypto payment gateway on USDC whose pseudo-anonymous nature shields buyer privacy, keeping purchases off the bank-and-card-network tracking system. He notes an SEC lawsuit stalled the project.
How should a firearms company connect content, email, social, search, and affiliate marketing?
Greg ties content, email, social, search, and affiliate marketing into one connected customer journey rather than treating them as separate tactics, so each channel feeds the same path to purchase.
What can an individual gun owner actually do to push back beyond voting at the ballot box?
Co-host Kaylee frames the gun owner's leverage as three votes: the ballot box, the dollar, and the feet. Beyond voting, owners can spend with pro-gun businesses and take a new person to the range, which host John challenges listeners to do on the second of every month.
How did the Second Amendment sanctuary movement lead to Second Amendment Preservation Acts?
Kaylee points to the Second Amendment sanctuary movement and Second Amendment Preservation Acts spreading from Virginia outward as proof a grassroots groundswell works to push back on restrictive gun laws.
Chapters
- 00:00 — Meet Greg and 2A Commerce
- 00:58 — What makes 2A Commerce different
- 01:41 — Why they entered the gun space in 2019
- 03:50 — Why SEO matters when ads are blocked
- 08:09 — The attack on banking and gun owner privacy
- 09:06 — Operation Choke Point and the gun-store MCC code
- 11:12 — The new FFL banking survey and underwriters
- 13:19 — Fraud holds, chargebacks, and who the card serves
- 17:46 — Building a USDC crypto payment gateway
- 19:58 — Security, WordPress, and crypto privacy
- 23:35 — Connecting content, email, social, search, and affiliate
- 34:08 — Vetting vendors and refusing the enemy
- 37:09 — Preparing for political attacks by building the alternative
- 41:58 — Three votes: ballot box, dollar, and feet
- 53:36 — Sanctuary movement and Second Amendment Preservation Acts
- 1:02:38 — Take a new shooter to the range
- 1:06:24 — Where to find 2A Commerce
About the guest
Greg is a co-founder of 2A Commerce, a firearms-industry technology and marketing company that builds custom e-commerce, payment processing, and point-of-sale and inventory integrations. He has been developing software for about 20 years after leaving the Navy, and he is a Navy submarine veteran who grew up with guns. He holds an MBA in marketing. He and his business partner entered the gun space in 2019 after Shopify shut down a legal firearms store. He lives in St. Johns County, Florida, a Second Amendment sanctuary county. He also runs a marketing platform called tacticalfresh.com.
Key quotes
"So by creating this, what the banks have effectively done is they have made a way to create a private gun buyer list." — Greg
"The cards work for the cardholder, they don't work for the merchant." — Greg
"We entered it because we wanted to create a space where nobody would get shut down, nobody would lose their payment services, nobody would lose their server hosting." — Greg
"We will work with the customer to identify which one of those systems makes the most sense for them based on their current operations." — Greg
"On the flip side of that, you have a second vote and that vote is with your dollar." — Kaylee
"The way that we prepare for it is by building the alternative." — Greg
"It is our job as gun owners, it is our personal responsibility as gun owners to stay informed, stay educated and stay active." — Kaylee
"You don't have to have a platform. You don't have to be an influencer to influence people." — Kaylee
Transcript
Now that we're all pumped up, let's introduce Our next guest, Greg 2A Commerce.
Speaker A:Greg from 2A Commerce, how are you?
Speaker B:Good guys, thanks for having me on.
Speaker C:So glad you can be here.
Speaker C:Tell everyone a little bit about yourself and 2A commerce.
Speaker B:Sure.
Speaker B:I've been developing software after I got out the Navy for about 20 years.
Speaker B:We specialize in custom E commerce, builds payment processing, integrating point of sale systems and inventory management systems.
Speaker B:So one of the things that makes us unique is that we are like platform agnostic.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And what I mean by that is we do not take a business and squeeze them into software that we wrote or we developed.
Speaker B:We figure out what the business needs and then we apply software tools that are available on the market or write custom function for them that allows that business to operate the way they want to operate.
Speaker A:So there's a lot of E commerce platforms out there.
Speaker A:What makes you guys stand out and what is the whole backstory of why you guys started this whole journey?
Speaker B:I love that question, by the way.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:So we had been doing development.
Speaker B:Well, like I just said, we've been doing it for 20 years.
Speaker B: So about five years ago,: Speaker B: And in: Speaker B:And at the time we had, we had been in the music industry actually we wrote a bunch of custom apps in the music space and had a lot of fun with that.
Speaker B:We had done a lot of non for profit work.
Speaker B:And I looked at him, I said, hey man, we are the guys that need to do something about this.
Speaker B:And so we decided that we were going to enter the gun space.
Speaker B:He grew up in the, in the country, in Tennessee, grew up with guns his whole life.
Speaker B:I'm a Navy submarine veteran.
Speaker B:I grew up with guns my whole life.
Speaker B:Love, love our country.
Speaker B:We love our second amendment rights.
Speaker B:And we were like, we're the conservative guys that hold these values that are in the tech industry, which is predominantly very, very left leaning, as you know.
Speaker B:And I'm like, I don't know, I don't know anything about the industry, but we're going.
Speaker B:And literally every single person that was a professional in my life at the time that I told them that we were going to go do this, they told me, don't do it, it's too high risk.
Speaker B:It's a, you know, you can't, you know, you're going to lose your business and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker B:Well, it's the best decision I ever made, quite frankly.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So we did, we entered it because we wanted to create a space where nobody would get shut down, nobody would lose their payment services, nobody would lose their server hosting.
Speaker B:And what we discovered is that there was not a single company, to my knowledge, even to date, there's not a single company in the entirety of the gun industry that does custom integration services the way that we do.
Speaker B:So we kind of decided we're going to go down this road.
Speaker B:And, and having made that decision, we also found that we filled a gap in the space, in the gun space that, that nobody else was filling and we kind of randomly fell into that.
Speaker B:So that was kind of neat to have happen.
Speaker A:You know, a big part of the backend work on the website is something that as a professional who used to do it, absolutely hate it.
Speaker A:And that's search engine optimization.
Speaker A:Oh yeah, it is awful.
Speaker A:And for people who've never done search engine optimization, it is hours and hours and hours of putting in a lot of work.
Speaker A:We'll shorten it to SEO.
Speaker A:What is the big deal with SEO?
Speaker A:What does that do for a company?
Speaker A:How does it help them?
Speaker B:Yeah, sure.
Speaker B:So not only do we have tech companies that are deplatforming us or payment companies that are removing our ability to transact, we also have advertising platforms such as Google, Adwords, Facebook, Instagram that won't actually allow us to even post advertisement in it.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So in the gun space, we have to get very clever on how we are going to get people to our websites.
Speaker B:How are we going to get people to know who we are and what we are?
Speaker B:So search engine optimization is, in my opinion, one of three most important tools that every.
Speaker B:Every single, every single company, it doesn't matter if you're a manufacturer, if you're a retailer, it doesn't matter where you fit in the gun space.
Speaker B:You should be doing search optimization because what search optimization does is allows you to return in Google.
Speaker B:Now, the interesting thing about your question is that we inherit a lot of websites that are already built, right?
Speaker B:And what most people don't understand is that there's a right way to technically implement the backend architecture, as you mentioned, on a website, so that it's even prepared to be set up for search, right?
Speaker B:So a lot of times when we get a site before we even get to the ability to do the search marketing, we spend three months retooling it just to get it to a point.
Speaker B:Where Google will even take time to look at it, right?
Speaker B:So page speed loads, optimize.
Speaker B:You don't have high text, low text to HTML ratios that are happening.
Speaker B:Your internal linking structure's working properly.
Speaker B:You don't have broken links.
Speaker B:There's a bunch of, bunch of technical items that are related to how you actually get your website to show up in Google.
Speaker B:And a lot of people are frustrated.
Speaker B:And a really interesting thing about search also is that most search optimization companies, there's only a couple of us in the gun space, I know of, like one other, but most of them do not understand the nature of what we're selling, right.
Speaker B:And so a lot of the businesses that had previously hired a search optimization company leave them and they come to us.
Speaker B:They're completely frustrated because every time they wanted to implement a new marketing strategy or every time they wanted to bring a new product to market, the company they were working with didn't understand the vernacular, what they were talking about.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So when you're doing your marketing in the gun space, it's very quick to identify people who don't really know what they're talking about.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:You know, one of my, one of my biggest pet peeves is when somebody refers to a magazine as a clip, for example, right.
Speaker B:I'm like, oh, gosh, drives me nuts.
Speaker B:So it's stuff like that.
Speaker B:When it comes to the marketing and it comes to the digital side, it's very important to not only have the content pieces, but you have to have the technical infrastructure, right?
Speaker B:Or you won't even rank well.
Speaker A:And that's the thing with SEO.
Speaker A:Like old school SEO used to be like word stuffing everything.
Speaker A:So if you had 9 mil ammo, it would be like 9 mil.
Speaker A:9 Mil ammo.
Speaker A:Google changes their SEO protocol all the time.
Speaker A:All the time.
Speaker A:So you may rank for like 40,000 words one day and the very next day it's like five.
Speaker B:Oh, yeah?
Speaker B:Yep.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So we use like a, a tracking software that we are constantly monitoring the sites that we're doing search optimization for.
Speaker B:And it will show you you've lost.
Speaker B:All these keywords here are keywords you've gained and it's completely changing all the time.
Speaker B:Yeah, you're exactly right.
Speaker B:So I'm.
Speaker B:And what we do is.
Speaker B:Well, I can actually show you, I can show you exactly what key terms you've lost, why you've lost them.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So you're right on with that.
Speaker C:So one of the things that I first learned about two A commerce was on the credit card processor side.
Speaker C:And listen, everyone Listening to this podcast, you know, I know everyone knows that the attack on the second Amendment is not surface level attacks.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker C:And there's been some major things that have happened, some a few years old, some a little newer when it comes to banking and protecting gun owners, their information.
Speaker C:Can you go into a little bit of that side?
Speaker B:Yeah, I can.
Speaker B:And I will tell you that it's still very frustrating to deal with before I dig into it.
Speaker B:Like it's still a problem.
Speaker B:So it all started really with Operation Choke Point during the Obama administration.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And that's when the Obama administration started pressuring banks and they, the banks chose to reclassify firearm transactions as high risk categories.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So instantly you had a bunch of banking institutions that said, we don't want to deal with anything high risk.
Speaker B:So a lot of people lost their processing.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So that's where it began and it hasn't ended.
Speaker B:So Visa and MasterCard, just last year, well all the card brands actually just last year decided to create what's called an MCC code that designates a gun store.
Speaker B:It's specific to a gun store.
Speaker B:MCC code stands for merchant category code.
Speaker B:It's a code that the banks use to identify what type of business is running transactions.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So by creating this, what the banks have effectively done is they have made a way to create a private gun buyer list.
Speaker B:So if somebody goes into a gun store, let's say they spend $1,500, they don't know if that buyer bought a new rifle or if they just bought a ton of ammo.
Speaker B:But what they do know is that buyer went into the gun store and he bought $1,500 worth of something where the probability is pretty high that they probably just purchased a firearm.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So they can't yet track on the per item basis, but they can definitely track who's buying what at what type of store at this point.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:That's something that like most people don't understand is going on, that there's these very insidious things that are happening in the background of our society.
Speaker B:And it's not just our industry, Right.
Speaker B:It's all variety of industries.
Speaker B:It's coming down to just simple ideology.
Speaker B:They don't agree with you.
Speaker B:You can't transact, you can't run your business.
Speaker B:You know, so that's a, that's a recent thing that happened.
Speaker B:In the last four months the banks got together and this has been a colossal pain in the neck for us probably for the last three months.
Speaker B:Four months ago they come out with this survey that everyone that is an FFL has to fill out as they're coming on board.
Speaker B:If you've already got your processing, you're good.
Speaker B:If you're starting a new processing account, you now have to run the survey.
Speaker B:And the survey is 2, 3 pages long.
Speaker B:Most of the questions are redundant.
Speaker B:The answers are inherent to the fact that you have an ffl.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So why are they creating this extra layer of questions?
Speaker B:Well, these questions go to an underwriter.
Speaker B:Most of these underwriters don't necessarily prefer firearms.
Speaker B:And so what happens?
Speaker B:Because they don't actually understand what they're back to the SEO people that are doing that.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Because they don't actually understand what the vernacular is within the questions and how we're answering them.
Speaker B:They.
Speaker B:They will close accounts.
Speaker B:I literally am working on an account right now to get open that is a tactical promotion company.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:They do a pretty cool marketing strategy on how they sell and promote tactical gear.
Speaker B:They are not an ffl.
Speaker B:They do not sell guns.
Speaker B:They do not do anything ATF regulated.
Speaker B:The underwriter literally is requiring that we prove that they don't sell guns.
Speaker B:Well, how do you want us to do that?
Speaker B:They don't sell guns.
Speaker B:They don't sell anything.
Speaker B:Regulated by the atf.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So you have these people that are doing these reviews, and they're looking at this documentation.
Speaker B:They just don't understand what they're looking at.
Speaker B:And then their biases take over.
Speaker B:Oh, this is tactical.
Speaker B:Must be bad.
Speaker B:And it definitely has to be guns because it has the word tactical in it.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And that's literally what we're dealing with.
Speaker B:You know, it's kind of like the people who think the, you know, the fully automatic, semi automatic.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:It's the same thing.
Speaker A:Well, we talked to Matador Arms a few weeks back, and they were talking about how they had.
Speaker A:They were.
Speaker A:They had orders getting skimmed.
Speaker A:So, like, people were putting in orders for them, and some they would show up, but the money would be taking from the banks would be holding that order until it came up to about $14,000 that the bank refused to give to them because they were holding it because they sold what they deemed as dangerous goods.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So that's.
Speaker B:Without knowing the full context of that scenario, I couldn't speak directly to that.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:But what I can tell you is this, that.
Speaker B:There's a lot of fraud with credit cards.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And so the banks have these automated fraud detection triggers.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And these automated fraud detection triggers, what they do is cause funds to go on hold because the banks and it's weird.
Speaker B:It's not the banks, it's actually the cards, right?
Speaker B:Because you've got the banks as a function, as an intermediary.
Speaker B:It's the Card Brands, Visa, MasterCard, Amex.
Speaker B:Excuse me.
Speaker B:So, so what happens is that fraud trigger alert hits.
Speaker B:They freeze and hold that money because what the bank is actually worried about is a potential chargeback.
Speaker B:So you commit the fraud.
Speaker B:It's your credit card, you, you call the bank and say, this isn't my purchase.
Speaker B:Then what happens is you're gonna hold that money from me because if I didn't verify that this person was who they were, I then have to give that money back to that person.
Speaker B:Because the cards work for the cardholder, they don't work for the merchant.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:The cards, customers, the card brand's customers are the people that hold the card, not the merchants that are taking the transaction, even though they're taking our money on the transaction, not the custom customers, right?
Speaker B:So you would think if they're taking our money that we would be the customer, but that's just not the way it works.
Speaker B:So what we do though is we, rather than leaving the merchant to fend for themselves and, and figure that out, right?
Speaker B:There's people on our team that when those types of problems come up, they call us and then we deal with the bank for them.
Speaker B:And that's one, that's another thing that makes us a little unique also with respect to the card processing piece, right?
Speaker B:So even with these questionnaires that I just told you about that they just rolled out with the questionnaires, even with those, we are the guys that go to, we know how to articulate to these underwriters, we know how to put pressure on them.
Speaker B:And it's interesting because you can have a bank that's like, yes, we underwrite firearms, we will do high risk transactions.
Speaker B:High risk, right?
Speaker B:But you have this underwriter whose job is to not open up accounts if they don't meet all the criteria, right?
Speaker B:So literally there are times where we escalate well above the underwriter's head.
Speaker B:It gets pushed back down from the top and then we get the accounts open, right?
Speaker B:So even though the banking institution supports it, they might have an employee that doesn't.
Speaker B:And that employee becomes the roadblock.
Speaker B:So it's very weird, right?
Speaker B:There's all these like little nuancey complexities with this whole process and it's not as straight, as streamlined as most people think.
Speaker B:It's, you know, there's five layers in a transaction.
Speaker B:You've got the gateway, you've got the card brands, you have the processor, you have the underwriting bank.
Speaker B:And then you have the agency like us that open the account on behalf of the customer.
Speaker B:There's five layers that are happening right.
Speaker A:There with all these card brands doing these merchant codes and things like that.
Speaker A:Do you see more stores or more requests from customers to these stores asking for ACH or direct from the bank?
Speaker B:We wouldn't see that.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:That would be something that's happening at the store level.
Speaker B:But even ACH is still a transaction that is recorded, right?
Speaker B:Cash is not.
Speaker B:I mean, that's really what it is.
Speaker B:I will tell you that.
Speaker B:We started working on a project last year before the, I can't remember the name of the.
Speaker B:The big crypto trade exchange that went bankrupt.
Speaker B:What was it?
Speaker A:I know what you're talking about.
Speaker B:Anyway.
Speaker B:Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker B:I can't remember the name of the company.
Speaker B:It's just slipping my mind.
Speaker B:Anyway, we were actually working on building a crypto payment gateway.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:And we built it, we completely built it.
Speaker B:And we were working with a couple of partners in order to make it work.
Speaker B:And one of the partners was going to, we were going to use what's called usdc.
Speaker B:US dollar coin.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:It tracks one to one with US currency.
Speaker B:So if you bought a thousand dollar rifle and you paid with usdc, what happens is when you go to take your money out, you're getting US$1,000.
Speaker B:Because regardless of the value of crypto in that whole crypto thing, you know, that was always the risk with crypto.
Speaker B:If I use bitcoin today, I could have more money than what they actually bought it for, or today I could have less money than what the customer bought it for.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:So that's the risk that you won with crypto.
Speaker B:So we built this whole gateway and this whole debacle happens.
Speaker B:The company that runs USDC was the sec, filed a lawsuit against them.
Speaker B:And so basically the whole thing shut down before we were actually able to bring the full product to market.
Speaker B:We had it tested, it was functioning, it was running.
Speaker B:This was at shot show last year.
Speaker B:So we actually had, we actually had T shirts that said we make crypto work for the firearms industry.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Because we did.
Speaker B:We literally built the software that would allow a gun store to sell a gun for a thousand dollars and get a thousand dollars without the worry of, you know, the volatility.
Speaker B:So it's still sitting back there on the back burner.
Speaker B:We're kind of sitting, watching and Waiting to see what happens with it.
Speaker B:But yeah, that's where it is.
Speaker C:So let's kind of go back to, let's go back to the security aspect because I know that that is something that you guys have really been pushing as far as protecting the individual as much as humanly possible through the transaction process.
Speaker C:Obviously you guys don't control what Discover, Visa, MasterCard, American Express do.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:But versus a couple years ago, one of the credit card processors gave a list of customers to the atf.
Speaker C:And I know that you guys are very much against that kind of go in, go into that.
Speaker B:I mean there's nothing we can do about that.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:That list would be completely out of our hands.
Speaker B:The type of stuff that we do is we make sure.
Speaker B:So I'll give you an example.
Speaker B:On an e commerce site, WooCommerce, there's a couple of big platforms, right?
Speaker B:WooCommerce is an open source built on WordPress.
Speaker B:It's very good.
Speaker B:There's a bunch of great stuff.
Speaker B:BigCommerce is good, right?
Speaker B:We like BigCommerce, we like Drupal Commerce, we like Magento.
Speaker B:And the key is we're not going out to sell any one of these systems.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:We will work with the customer to identify which one of those systems makes the most sense for them based on their current operations.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So one of the ways that we work on the security side is to ensure that like WordPress for example is.
Speaker B:It is a fact that I read a report about a year ago that WordPress is responsible for 90% of all Internet hacks.
Speaker B:Well, there's two reasons for that.
Speaker B:Number one, WordPress is the most prolific content framework existing on the Internet.
Speaker B:And number two, it's the most ill maintained by the people who are implementing it.
Speaker B:So it's not that WordPress itself.
Speaker B:And I have this debate with some, I had this debate recently with another tech guy.
Speaker B:I'm like, come on man.
Speaker B:It's not that WordPress is not secure, it's that it's not maintained.
Speaker B:So if you maintain WordPress security with its protocol, with its security releases, rather it's a completely secure platform.
Speaker B:So from a technical standpoint, we are working to just make sure that that type of information is not accessible.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:When it comes to whether or not a bank or a, or a gateway or a card brand wants to give up info, it's completely out of our hands.
Speaker B:And that's a beautiful thing about crypto actually.
Speaker B:And I didn't think we'd talk about crypto on this, but it's Kind of.
Speaker B:It's still, it's still a fascinating a element of our society that few people really understand.
Speaker B:But one of the fascinating things about crypto is we've referred to it as pseudo anonymous.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Some people have tried to say it's anonymous, but it's not.
Speaker B:It's pseudo anonymous.
Speaker B:You can see that somebody conducted a transaction on the blockchain.
Speaker B:You cannot see who that person was.
Speaker B:You cannot see what they bought.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And so because of that, if somebody wanted to get a warrant, they'd have to get a warrant to find out what that transaction was.
Speaker B:For a single transaction, you'd have to have a warrant for that transaction in order to be able to figure out who that person was.
Speaker B:You're able to, but you still couldn't figure out what they bought.
Speaker B:It's part of the power of it.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:So yeah, now being in this firearm space, marketing can be hard.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:We see all the social media platforms kind of going after us.
Speaker A:How is, how important are the few things?
Speaker A:I'm going to put them in order.
Speaker A:How I see them as important, first off is content on your website and.
Speaker A:Or content in general.
Speaker A:So that being video content, blogs, things like that, things that live on your website.
Speaker A:Two, I would say is your email list because it's huge.
Speaker A:And then three would be your SEO.
Speaker A:Now I put those in those orders because I do believe education is always key.
Speaker A:And if you can educate your customers, bring them in through videos and blogs and then your email list is.
Speaker A:If you build a big enough email list, you could.
Speaker A:You do good things.
Speaker A:How do you.
Speaker A:They kind of all connect.
Speaker B:They do, but most does not, by the way.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So how do you.
Speaker A:How do you prioritize what as a company?
Speaker A:Let's just say you're starting off in the two way space.
Speaker A:Where do you prioritize your focus at first?
Speaker A:Is it building emails?
Speaker A:Is it building content, is it building SEO?
Speaker A:Is it a combination of all?
Speaker A:Because personally I see, and this is what I've argued with a lot of people about, this is that YouTube and video content is just a giant search engine that you need to make sure that all your videos are SEO, that they meet the SEO.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker A:So people have.
Speaker A:What do you mean by that?
Speaker A:I'm like YouTube is the second largest search engine.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker A:Next to Google.
Speaker B:Correct.
Speaker B:So bigger than Bing, Binger than Yahoo, Bigger than all of them.
Speaker A:So how do you prioritize what's what and how?
Speaker A:What would you like suggest?
Speaker B:I love this question, but everything.
Speaker B:Marketing is my favorite.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So I'VE been doing tech for 20 over 20 years, right.
Speaker B:I have an MBA in marketing.
Speaker B:I like to tell people I'm an educated redneck.
Speaker B:There's only three of us in the country.
Speaker B:But first of all, if you're running anything ecom, right, you have to have email.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:So when you get into email, and that's the simplest.
Speaker B:So there's no reason not to, right?
Speaker B:But it's.
Speaker B:People miss it still.
Speaker B:It's amazing that people will still.
Speaker B:Or some people will say, ah, well, nobody looks at email anymore.
Speaker B:I'm like, well, we can show you that they do, right?
Speaker B:So then email gets complicated because email can be something as simple as sending out a text blast to 5,000 people, or you can set up complete automation sequences, right?
Speaker B:So that depending on what person entered your website and did what action, they enter a particular funnel within your marketing strategy, right?
Speaker B:And they're now segmented based on what they were looking at.
Speaker B:And you can then schedule or automate your correspondence with that particular user based on that very specific thing they were looking for, right?
Speaker B:So email can get very complex.
Speaker B:So you could go from, you know, a $40 a month email service all the way up to spending, you know, 5, 6, $7,000 just on your email marketing, right?
Speaker B:Social is very interesting, and I think a lot of people get frustrated with social.
Speaker B:And I think part of it is because they don't couple it with something like search.
Speaker B:And I can explain with social, you.
Speaker B:I like to use the.
Speaker B:I told you I was in the music industry before, right?
Speaker B:And I like to use this analogy for the.
Speaker B:For this very specific thing.
Speaker B:When you have a song that comes out at the beginning of the summer, right?
Speaker B:It's the summer hit.
Speaker B:It blows up and everybody's rocking out to this song.
Speaker B:And by the end of the summer, the song kind of starts to sunset on the backside of the hill.
Speaker B:And then next summer it'll occasionally make it into a rotation, and then the following summer it makes it a little less into the rotation and so on and so forth, right?
Speaker B:And then 15, 20 years down the road, it becomes a classic and everybody's listening to it again, right?
Speaker B:Social content, in my opinion, is exactly the same way.
Speaker B:You can pick any major social influencer and they'll put a video out and everybody will watch it and you will see this massive spike hit your website.
Speaker B:And then all of a sudden it does this.
Speaker B:I can show you this over and over in analytics with.
Speaker B:With our search optimization tracking software.
Speaker B:I can show you four different ways from Sunday, exactly this trend and every time.
Speaker B:So you spend all this money on that marketing initiative, which is good money spent, by the way.
Speaker B:I'm not saying not to do it.
Speaker B:What I'm saying is, is that you're missing the long tail from that.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So if you couple that with a search strategy or a landing page tracking strategy where we can then move that customer through that journey, collect that email address, collect that cell phone number, right.
Speaker B:And all the messaging funnels directly through so that we can identify whether or not that video was effective beyond just somebody coming and looking at your website.
Speaker B:Then all of a sudden you have a very powerful integrated funnel, you have an integrated campaign, you've got your social working, you've got your search working, and you've got your email working.
Speaker B:Now all those three things are connected.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Or what happens when you watch a YouTube video and you didn't click the link below.
Speaker B:But like, because you got busy, your kids started screaming in the kitchen, you went to break up a fight and you completely forgot about it.
Speaker B:And three weeks later, or two weeks or one week later, you're sitting there at work and you're like, oh man, I'm going check out that new gun.
Speaker B:And you think of the gun.
Speaker B:You don't remember the video, but you remember a key term associated with that video.
Speaker B:If your site is not supporting that key term associated with that video, it's not going to rank, right?
Speaker B:So they go to Google and they go to look for it.
Speaker B:And you spent all this money on a marketing campaign that was very effective up and down the backside of the hill.
Speaker B:They're not going to go back and look for that video.
Speaker B:They're going to try to find that product.
Speaker B:Well, that's where search comes in.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So then you're collecting people based on that specific video messaging, Right?
Speaker B:So all messaging has to connect.
Speaker B:All the marketing continuity has to, from, from first touch to that customer journey all the way through.
Speaker B:So that's where, like when you start coupling these strategies, particularly digital, when you start coupling together, you get a very, very powerful outcome.
Speaker B:I would even suggest that, like something that's very big and it dramatically impacts search is affiliate marketing.
Speaker B:You know, affiliate marketing is very expensive marketing.
Speaker B:I would argue that it's probably some of the most expensive marketing that we can do in the gun space, but it's incredibly valuable.
Speaker B:It gives you backlinks.
Speaker B:So, like you have inbound links, and when Google sees a link linking back to you, it raises what's called site authority.
Speaker B:So then Google goes, oh, there's a bunch of people Linking to this, it must be important.
Speaker B:So when you search for this term, let's return this website.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:That's how that works.
Speaker B:So then with affiliate marketing, you get that customer to come through.
Speaker B:They buy something, the affiliate partner gets paid.
Speaker B:You sold your product, you just captured customer data.
Speaker B:They're now in your email marketing list and now you are directly marketing to that customer for a much lower dollar amount.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Well, that's why I love, personally, I love affiliate marketing.
Speaker A:I've.
Speaker A:I'm a big, I do too.
Speaker A:Proponent of it.
Speaker A:I'm a big proponent of content marketing.
Speaker A:I want, like I said, the customer journey is very important to combine everything you want your customer to go, I'm going to go to XYZ Gun shop because I know that I can get educated, I can get the product I want, I can get this.
Speaker A:And then they see your affiliate marketing.
Speaker A:So hey, big time YouTuber supports them or big time.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:And affiliate marketing is expensive.
Speaker B:It is.
Speaker A:And, and that's kind of the world we live in.
Speaker A:Because a lot of people, an average video or YouTube video, I say this because I, there's a, I've had this long deep conversation with these content creators is your average YouTube video is going to cost them about $3,000 if you add in their time and their effort and everything like that.
Speaker B:Minimum.
Speaker A:Minimum.
Speaker A:And they have to make their ROI on it.
Speaker A:And a lot of people are like, well, they're being shills for these companies or doing this or doing that.
Speaker A:They kind of make money.
Speaker A:They're not going to do the video unless they know they're going to get the ROI on it.
Speaker B:Yep.
Speaker A:And we see a lot of people go after these content creators because they're going, well, they're shilling for this company or they're doing this.
Speaker A:Well, they also believe in the product and they also do that.
Speaker B:I totally listen.
Speaker B:I.
Speaker B:How many, we know a lot of content creators, Right.
Speaker B:And how many of them, probably everyone that I know won't pick up a product that they don't believe in.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker B:It would hurt them, it would hurt their own personal brand if they were to do that.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:You know, there's a bunch of haters everywhere.
Speaker B:You know, I just did a video.
Speaker B:So we, we have a promotional giveaway platform also that we run and usually we just do it for our customers.
Speaker B:It's a lot of fun.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:It's called tacticalfresh.com so I literally just did a video where I come running out of my room, I'm in my flip flops, And I pull this gun out of a bag and I get a comment that says, you know, everything in that book, in that video is textbook except the flip flops.
Speaker B:And I wrote, oh, you mean because I was going to have my range day boots on when a bad guy come driving up my driveway in the middle of Florida.
Speaker A:What do you mean?
Speaker B:The flip flops were intentional, dude.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:But some.
Speaker B:You're always going to have those people, they're going to say they're the influencers, are chilling you, you don't know what you're doing or, you know, I mean, we haters are gonna hate.
Speaker A:We've gotten some.
Speaker A:Oh, well, I'm not gonna go on that.
Speaker B:Oh, no, maybe we should.
Speaker A:I mean, it's up to, it's up to the wall.
Speaker C:Listen,.
Speaker B:It's, hey, listen, we need to hate on the haters.
Speaker C:Yeah, I mean, listen, I am totally fine with people making fun of me.
Speaker C:That's fine.
Speaker B:Who cares?
Speaker A:I do anything on the Internet.
Speaker C:Don't say that.
Speaker C:Don't ever say that comment below.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker C:But I do wanna.
Speaker C:I know we spent a lot of time on the marketing side and I think that's incredibly important because a lot of people don't realize how the industry works, how the back end of the industry works.
Speaker C:And it is a necessary piece of the puzzle.
Speaker C:One of the things that you have been doing through two A Commerce is simplification, simplifying how things operate to help the mom and pop gun stores, to help the industry combat a big tech world that ultimately doesn't want us to exist.
Speaker C:They want to, whether you call it shadow banning or outright banning, delisting, you demonetize, like all of those aspects show where they are.
Speaker C:I think, you know, Elon Musk has done a tremendous job of exposing those biases in big tech and bringing to light a lot of those issues.
Speaker C:From your experience as 2A commerce as A marketing firm, how does that work?
Speaker B:Well, the way we deal with it is that 100% of our part, our vendors, we vet them.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:I'm going to just say there's probably a ton of people that are listening to this right now that use mailchimp.
Speaker B:Mailchimp is statedly anti firearm.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:There are companies in the gun space that are still on Shopify and they're like, well, we're not selling guns.
Speaker B:I'm like, I know, but you're working with the enemy.
Speaker B:You're working with the very people that is against every freaking value that you have.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So the way that we do it is we put Our money where our mouth is, and we are able to go to our clients and say, your email list will not be shut down, your server will not be shut down.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:We're not a host provider.
Speaker B:That's not what we do.
Speaker B:But the host provider that we partner with, we maintain our servers, they don't maintain our service for us.
Speaker B:But they are completely fine with the firearms website being hosted on their servers.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:The payment processors that we use are okay with firearms transacting.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:For firearms transactions.
Speaker B:The email providers that we use are okay with emails going out related to firearms.
Speaker B:So that's the way that we do that.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And then of course, just being who we are, our clients are completely safe to talk to us and, you know, ask us, you know, this is what I want to do.
Speaker B:How can we do this?
Speaker B:And you know, we all understand each other, right?
Speaker B:So that's how we do that.
Speaker C:So how does the political side start changing how you do business?
Speaker C:How do you prepare for things like when the Safer Banking act is introduced and section 10 has all of these ramifications for the firearms industry?
Speaker C:How do you as a company look at this and go, okay, well, you know, here's how we're going to have to pivot.
Speaker C:Here's, you know, obviously we're fighting that and we're getting people on board and commenting and if you haven't already, please, you know, go out to our website and comment, let your voice be known on these issues.
Speaker C:But how do you prepare for the political attack as well as the for profit attack from this credit card processing standpoint?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:With profound frustration where it starts.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:The real answer is that I don't know that anyone could honestly tell you how to prepare for something that's not fully in place yet.
Speaker B:And you know, every time these rules come down and you know, they're not even voted by Congress, a lot of these rules, right, they're just, they're the administrative state that's been placed over us unelected officials that are creating these rules that we now have to live by.
Speaker B:They don't represent us, but they're forcing these rules on us.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And when these rules come out, they're so complex, right, that nobody can really anticipate or prepare for what's going to happen until we know what the final ruling is.
Speaker B:And so that's the challenging part, right?
Speaker B:And so you end up dealing with all of these things.
Speaker B: o step up Just like we did in: Speaker B:We're not going to use the FDIC insurance.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:There's a really.
Speaker B:There's a really cool company I like, they're called X Insurance.
Speaker B:These guys will underwrite anything.
Speaker B:And the reason why they're able to do that is because they did it with all of their own money.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So I think what has to happen is that we have to get off the federal government dole.
Speaker B:And the way that we prepare for it is by building the alternative.
Speaker B:And I certainly have some ideas on that, but I'm not the person that can do it himself.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:That's why we built that crypto gateway.
Speaker B:We're like, we're going to go build the alternative.
Speaker B:So I think the preparation is not necessarily something that we develop a strategy as a reactionary component of some new policy that we don't even know what's going to be there in its conclusion.
Speaker B:I think the real preparation is that a couple of really smart people need to come together and say, it's finally time to be done with this.
Speaker B:And there's people who are out there.
Speaker B:There's gotta be people who are willing to say, just like we did, you know, don't go into the firearms industry.
Speaker B:It's high risk.
Speaker B:And I looked at them and said, I'm going into the firearms industry because somebody has to do something about this.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Like, literally that's what has to happen.
Speaker B:That's how we prepare.
Speaker B:We have to find, identify those people.
Speaker B:We need to come together.
Speaker B:Great minds need to come together, and we develop strategies and solutions that are outside of whatever vein.
Speaker B:I would argue evil people are trying to do, to manipulate and control our freedoms and liberties.
Speaker B:I think that's really it.
Speaker B:You know, I don't know who those people are, but I'd like to meet them.
Speaker A:I agree.
Speaker A:I feel like we need to create something where that as people in the 2A community, we know where to shop, we know where to buy, we know who is behind us.
Speaker A:And if we can create that, there is a way.
Speaker A:I mean, there's 30, 40 million of us now.
Speaker A:How hurt would Big Box Store A be?
Speaker B:Oh, yeah.
Speaker A:If we go Big Box Store B really supports us and we're going to go and we're going to shop at.
Speaker B:Big Box or be.
Speaker C:I think you're getting to something that we've seen on different issues as of recently within different movements where people are really understanding the value of your second vote.
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:You vote at the ballot box.
Speaker C:And yes, those have tremendous ramifications on who's elected and what kind of bills get introduced.
Speaker C:And you should never discount the authority you have in the ballot box.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker C:On the flip side of that, you have a second vote and that vote is with your dollar.
Speaker C:And then arguably you have a third vote and that vote is with your feet.
Speaker C:You can move out of a location that is radically anti gun.
Speaker C:You can vote with your dollar and spend money at people who tremendously support you.
Speaker C:There are so many options when it comes to I am going to do X, Y and Z. Yeah.
Speaker B:I think that people fail to live by their own convictions.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Maybe it's as much of an individual problem as it is a societal one.
Speaker B:We just hired a developer and my partner goes, hey, there's this new job board company called Red Balloon and it's focused exclusively on conservative minded people.
Speaker B:I'm like, I'm not posting the job anywhere else but there.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Found a great developer.
Speaker B:Even LinkedIn.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:LinkedIn is very left leaning.
Speaker B:So yeah, I don't know, it's complicated.
Speaker B:I think you're right that the second vote really, really matters.
Speaker B:You know, getting your feet to move.
Speaker B:That goes back to really what I was just saying that a couple people have to be brave and step up and actually do something actionable, not just geographically, but also, you know.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:And listen, I have seen firsthand the valiant people who stand up and fight impossible battles.
Speaker C:And this kind of goes back to goa's philosophy of ensuring that your voice is heard, whether that's through sending a postcard, sending an email, calling your representative, attending a town hall, letting your voice on an issue be heard and be amplified by people in your community.
Speaker C:We have seen people who are anti gun miss votes because they know that so many people were against them that, you know, magically they were, they were out that day.
Speaker C:We have seen people who were considered moderate actually take and vote the right way on an issue because they realize that if they didn't, they were not going to get reelected because so many people were against their noted stance on something.
Speaker B:On that note, I will tell you this, that every single time I get a notice from GOA about an action alert to take, I 100% send my comments in.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So I suppose I would like everybody to know that we should all be doing this.
Speaker B:And if, you know, you support the GOA or if you're listening to this podcast, that's like one little simple thing that somebody can do that you're talking about.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Make that voice known.
Speaker C:Absolutely.
Speaker C:Well, thank you for doing that.
Speaker A:Well, you said about moving your feet, and we've seen this mass exodus and that's the best way to call it from California because people are.
Speaker B:And Illinois.
Speaker A:And Illinois and all these.
Speaker A:The problem is, is if you're gonna move your feet and you were tired.
Speaker C:Of the policies, don't vote for those policies.
Speaker A:Don't vote for those policies.
Speaker B:Well, that's the problem.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Look at, look at what's happening in Austin, Texas.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:You know, everybody left California, went to the amazing Austin, Texas, and Texas is great.
Speaker B:And now all of a sudden, Austin is like a liberal island on a conservative.
Speaker A:See, we're seeing the same thing in Arizona.
Speaker A:Yeah, same exact.
Speaker B:Yeah, same exact thing in Arizona.
Speaker A:And we.
Speaker B:We're still protected in Florida.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:We yell at them when they come.
Speaker B:We started yelling at them, you're not welcome here.
Speaker A:It's not working.
Speaker C:I will say, you know, when we look, when we look at what's happened in the firearms industry as a whole and all of these companies moving to Tennessee, moving to Florida, moving to states that want them to do business in their state, you see that the attacks are.
Speaker C:I don't want to rephrase this.
Speaker C:People are going to go where they can accomplish what they need to accomplish.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker C:And what an amazing country we live in where you can pick and choose and, and move and go to a place that has what you're looking for.
Speaker C:And I don't think that that should be ever underestimated.
Speaker C:And you should never feel, whether you live in California or New York or New Jersey, you have a hard, a hard fight ahead of you if you stay.
Speaker C:But don't give up in the fight.
Speaker B:Oh, you're saying that if somebody chooses to stay, make that your battleground.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Oh, yeah.
Speaker C:Don't, don't stay complacent.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Because, you know, we've seen these breeding grounds for bad gun laws, and you'll see it introduced one place and then it catches like wildfire.
Speaker C:But the more people that stand up and say, absolutely not, the more people who are on record and that we can file lawsuits and we can do those things on the, on the flip side of that, and that's not to say that that lawsuits are the end all, be all, it is so much easier to fight something before it is passed than it is to fight with a lawsuit.
Speaker C:I mean, if, just to put it into perspective, you know, there's a bump stock case that is going before the Supreme Court goa had another bump stock case that was in a split decision.
Speaker C:And so we're really excited and we're watching this bump stock case.
Speaker C:But let's not forget how many years ago the bump stock ban was.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker C:Like, these kind of things take such a long time to work through the courts.
Speaker C:And although the bump stock was a.
Speaker C:Was a executive order order, it.
Speaker C:It is so valuable to realize that you have to fight tyranny and you have to fight government overreach at every level that it's happening and you.
Speaker C:We don't have the afforded opportunity to sit on the sidelines or to sit on the fence.
Speaker C:It is our job as gun owners, it is our personal responsibility as gun owners to stay informed, stay educated and stay active.
Speaker A:We got.
Speaker A:They keep moving the goalposts and we keep giving up an inch or, you know, our congressmen will be like, well, we needed this to go through so we could pass this right?
Speaker A:No, no more.
Speaker A:No more.
Speaker A:It's time for us as a community and us as the silent majority to wake up and go, we're done with this nonsense.
Speaker A:And come out and say, we're done with this nonsense.
Speaker B:You know, the moving the goalpost scenario is like, exactly right?
Speaker B:You feel like you, okay, fine, we're going to do this, we're going to deal with this.
Speaker B:And then, oh, wait, wait.
Speaker B:Those aren't the rules anymore, right?
Speaker B:My question, I mean, my question is, like, what goalposts are we setting?
Speaker B:You know, like, how do we flip this thing from, like, when we're no longer reactionary, but we are the action?
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:Well, I think we're seeing that trend starting to happen and I'm very proud of the people who are standing up.
Speaker C:For those of you who might not know or might not stay glued to the GOA website every election cycle, we have the grades of all of the representatives and how they vote.
Speaker B:That has been very valuable for me, by the way, in the past.
Speaker B:Thank you for doing that.
Speaker C:I'll let our Federal affairs team know it's important.
Speaker C:Thankfully, that is not my job.
Speaker B:You'd rather stab your eye out with a pen than do that job, right?
Speaker C:There are some jobs at GOA that I'm like, my goodness, thank you for not putting me in that position.
Speaker C:Our legal team and our.
Speaker C:And our Federal affairs team.
Speaker C:I am so very thankful that I have never been asked to do those things.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker C:Because I don't have whatever that is that they have, but I'm so thankful that they have it.
Speaker C:And so major applause to those teams.
Speaker C:They're amazing people, but.
Speaker B:Setting stakes.
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:We've had people introduce legislation like Mike Lee's senator Lee's Shush act and the Hearing Protection Acts.
Speaker C:We've had people do the Shall Not Be infringe acts and the right to Keep and Bear Arm Acts.
Speaker C:Those, those are the bills that are so valuable that people are introducing that are so valuable that people are co sponsoring that they're willing to put their name on the dotted line for their constituents saying, this is where I stand because I represent you and this is where you stand.
Speaker C:And that is where game time decisions are made.
Speaker C:Because eventually we will have a position where we can pass those things and they can get signed and they can get enacted.
Speaker C:But the problem is, is if the strategy goes and says, you know, we're just going to have this and when we have everything in place, then we'll work on it, you're never going to get to that place.
Speaker C:And so I applaud all of our members of Congress that hear what, what GOA and our members are saying and what you as individuals are saying.
Speaker C:And they're introducing these bills even though they're unpopular or they appear unpopular because in reality we want to see a restoration of the Second Amendment.
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean I would argue that we want to see a restoration of all of our liberties and freedoms.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:It's the Second Amendment.
Speaker B:That's the only thing that's preserving what we still have.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:I mean quite literally.
Speaker B:How about the, how about the, how about all the sheriffs out there, they're telling the feds, you know, to pound sand.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Like they're setting some posts.
Speaker C:Right, Absolutely.
Speaker C:Especially what we saw happen in New Mexico with the sheriff going, yeah, no, that's not.
Speaker B:That was amazing.
Speaker C:Like, absolutely.
Speaker B:Yeah, we will not be enforcing that.
Speaker C:That is.
Speaker B:Sorry, Governor.
Speaker C:Yeah, that is such a powerful, a powerful thing.
Speaker C:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker B:And that's his position.
Speaker B:That's him.
Speaker B:To protect that.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:That's his job to protect that.
Speaker A:I mean, how many in hypothetical.
Speaker A:And we've seen this with other substances and things like that.
Speaker A:How many states does it take to go, no, or we're gonna do this because we can, because we have our state's rights and we've seen it on the.
Speaker A:And again, this is sometimes to some people it's controversial.
Speaker A:To other.
Speaker A:We've seen this with marijuana.
Speaker A:Marijuana has been legalized in states.
Speaker A:When is it going to be states going, no, this is unprotected.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:You're seeing that in two big ways.
Speaker C:The first way I think you're seeing that is through the Second Amendment preservation acts that have been passing and every time we're constantly upping the ante, getting it introduced in more state houses.
Speaker C:Chris Stone and Michael Census run our state and local affairs at goa.
Speaker C:This is a big priority for them.
Speaker C:We've gotten most recently the one passed in Wyoming, which is a phenomenal sepa.
Speaker C:In addition to that, I think you're seeing it with constitutional carry, where over 50% of the country has some form of permitless carry.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker C:Are they all perfect?
Speaker C:No.
Speaker C:Are there improvements that should be made?
Speaker C:Absolutely.
Speaker C:And as a Tennessean, we need to address our permitless carry and get a lot more.
Speaker C:It's not perfect.
Speaker C:And we can, we can make it perfect.
Speaker B:As a Floridian, they just recently passed it as well.
Speaker B:It's not perfect.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:You cannot open carry in Florida.
Speaker C:Yeah, but there.
Speaker C:But the fact is that these permitless carry bills did pass.
Speaker C:They did get signed, and it is such a statement, and we have got to continue that improvement.
Speaker B:You know what's interesting about the marijuana thing is that it used to be that.
Speaker B:I mean, at least I felt this way.
Speaker B:Maybe I'm off, but let me know if you think this is kind of how it seems these days.
Speaker B:It used to be like marijuana was telling the feds, we don't care what you say, we're going to pass our rules and we're going to make this a thing for our state.
Speaker B:And at the federal level, at the.
Speaker B:On the, on the gun side, there was a bunch of states that were going after the guns and the way that they were opening up marijuana, but the feds kind of protected it.
Speaker B:So the feds kind of protected our kind of.
Speaker B:Right, that's the functional word.
Speaker B:Kind of protected our.
Speaker B:Yeah, they were kind of the barrier there for a while.
Speaker B:And it's almost like it's flipped.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Like now the feds would probably love to see marijuana legalized so they could tax the daylights out of it and take more of our money.
Speaker B:I mean, not that I particularly care about marijuana, but, you know, you get the idea.
Speaker B:And now, now firearms are just so aggressively attacked at the federal level.
Speaker B:Now you see the states that are starting to pick up the fight on that state level.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think so.
Speaker C:I think there's a few things that have changed as far as the state.
Speaker B:Versus the feds.
Speaker C:Yeah, I guess the state rights movement and the firearms and the.
Speaker C:And the constitutional carries and.
Speaker C:And the SEPAs that have been introduced.
Speaker C:And I think that was something that started with the groundswell.
Speaker C:That was the say so movement.
Speaker C:So in.
Speaker C: See, that would have been: Speaker C:You had the mandatory.
Speaker C:I think it was like, let's see, there was the one gun a month.
Speaker C:There was like a mandatory wait period.
Speaker C:Like all kinds of just.
Speaker C:It went in this gigantic gun control package with all of these bills.
Speaker C:It was a huge fight.
Speaker C:You can tell that I've been doing this for a little while because they're all starting to blend together.
Speaker C:And I'm like, man, I knew we were going to be talking about this.
Speaker C:I would have so prepped better.
Speaker C:But you had all of these gun control packages in Virginia pass, and it was devastating, especially because it's really just controlled by Northern Virginia and Richmond.
Speaker C:And you started to see the say so movement, which were second Amendment sanctuary ordinances, which is where the smallest municipalities and counties got together.
Speaker C:And they said, no, this is unconstitutional and we don't like this and we're going to pass this resolution or we're going to pass this ordinance.
Speaker C:There were two, essentially versions.
Speaker C:And it caught on like wildfire.
Speaker C:And GOA pushed this tremendously.
Speaker C:Again, massive credit to our state and local team.
Speaker C:And we put out.
Speaker C:It's still on our website if you want to go check it out and try to get it passed in your county.
Speaker C:I'm all about the groundswell, but you can download the template and people would take it to their county commissions and people were on the ground.
Speaker C:And this passed all over Virginia.
Speaker C:And what people started doing is they started seeing the groundswell in Virginia and the next thing you know, it started spilling over.
Speaker C:And then all across the country, these say SOS were happening.
Speaker C:Say SOS are what have led us to the SEPAs that we're seeing now start to catch fire at the state and local level.
Speaker C:And what sepa, Second Amendment Preservation Acts.
Speaker C:Sorry for the audience.
Speaker C:I.
Speaker A:You and your acronyms, me and my.
Speaker C:Acronyms, me and my soapbox, we get real acquainted real fast.
Speaker B:Well, you know, it happens.
Speaker B:You know what happens when you live that?
Speaker B:Just like you said, by the way, your.
Speaker B:Your mental capacity to keep all these orders is truly impressive to me.
Speaker B:It's like, I don't think I could do it.
Speaker B:You know, there's like, there's stuff spilling out of my brain constantly.
Speaker B:But yeah, I. I mean, I'm happy to say that St. John's county, my county in Florida, is a, you know, second amendment sanctuary county.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think it's.
Speaker B:And I reap the benefit of that.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:As a gun owner, I live in.
Speaker A:The wild west, so I really don't worry much.
Speaker A:I mean, Arizona's pretty.
Speaker B:You say that Now.
Speaker A:I say it now.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:But we're gonna be okay.
Speaker A:It's fighting.
Speaker B:Let's talk about setting posts and stakes.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker B:Now's the time to get those passed.
Speaker C:No, absolutely.
Speaker C:Because let's look, going back to Tennessee because I, you know, it's my home state.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:I love.
Speaker C:I love being a Tennessee.
Speaker C:And.
Speaker C:But the same governor that signed our permanent permitless carry bill is the same governor to call a special session to pass red flag laws.
Speaker C:As a gun owner, you cannot afford to.
Speaker C:To check out.
Speaker C:You cannot afford to take your foot off the gas.
Speaker C:You have to stay vigilant.
Speaker B:As a business owner.
Speaker B:That's a firearms owner, you cannot afford to check out for the sake of your business.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:As a father with children, I cannot afford, for the sake of my family, to check out of what's.
Speaker B:Knowing what's going on with the Second Amendment.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:I mean, it really correlates to nearly every aspect of life.
Speaker B:It's not just.
Speaker B:It's just not just our gun rights.
Speaker B:It's like, what are the secondary and tertiary implications of taking our gun rights from us?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So, I mean, maybe.
Speaker B:Maybe you own a gun and I mean, how many people own a gun and have a box of ammo in the dresser and they've never fired it?
Speaker B:Probably far too many.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:I'd love to change that.
Speaker B:I try to get people out to shoot with me all the time.
Speaker B:It's like, hey, let's go shoot.
Speaker B:You wanted I meet new people.
Speaker C:What do you do?
Speaker B:Oh, I shoot.
Speaker B:Everybody's intrigued.
Speaker B:Oh, you've shot before.
Speaker B:Come on, let's go do it again.
Speaker B:But my point is that if these people could come to understand that that thing, they value their job or their family, and what's happening with firearms directly correlates to those two things, they might start to pay attention more to what's happening with firearms.
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm gonna do this.
Speaker A:And our audience is here.
Speaker A:I'm gonna do this.
Speaker A:I'm gonna challenge everybody.
Speaker A:And because there's this movement's already happening, so I want to push and challenge everybody every second of every month.
Speaker A:So every second day of every month, I want you to take a new person out to the range or go to the range, I mean, and separate the second on the second.
Speaker A:And I want to encourage everybody to do that because it is.
Speaker A:There is a movement of people who do that, but I want to encourage you.
Speaker A:We, look, get more people involved, get people out on the 2nd.
Speaker A:Let's make the 2nd of the month the 2nd amendment day and go out it should be every day, but let's get them.
Speaker A:Let's get out there and start doing this.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker A:And then we can start growing this movement even.
Speaker A:Even bigger.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:I have very few friends who don't own firearms, but I have a lot of friends that own firearms and shoot.
Speaker B:Maybe once a year, I'm constantly.
Speaker B:Let's go.
Speaker B:Let's go blast some rounds.
Speaker B:Let's go have some fun.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:One of my favorite things to do these days is to launch Bud Light cans and use them as clay targets and shoot them with shotguns.
Speaker A:That's awesome.
Speaker B:It's so much fun.
Speaker B:Something just feels so right about it.
Speaker C: I: Speaker C:Like, we.
Speaker C:Anytime you get to go out on the range, it's a good time.
Speaker C:And I think that the more we can make that a priority in everyday life, the better off we are.
Speaker B:Can I interject here real quick?
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:I'm going to tell you a super cool story that happened to me last night.
Speaker B:I'm flying here to Myrtle beach to do this podcast with you guys.
Speaker B:I sit down next to a pilot who's catching a flight home because he was done with this shift.
Speaker B:We get to talking, and naturally, I talk to everybody on the plane about guns every time I fly, which is a lot.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Come to find out this guy has never been hunting.
Speaker B:And I turned and looked at him and I said, hey, man, I'm gonna give you my business card, and if you actually want to go hunting, you need to call me and I'm going to take you and teach you how to harvest your own food.
Speaker B:And I looked at him, I said, I make these kind of offers to people all the time, and most of them don't follow up, but I'm dead serious.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Anyway, I forgot about this until you just were saying, we need to all go do this.
Speaker B:Like, literally, I did this last night.
Speaker B:You know, I hope he calls me.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:No.
Speaker C:I think that when someone shows an interest, even if it's a faint interest in something related to the Second Amendment, how you engage that conversation in those few minutes can radically change a person's perspective and their willingness to get involved.
Speaker C:You have so much tremendous power as an individual, and you don't have to have a platform.
Speaker C:You don't have to be an influencer to influence people.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker C:And get involved in the Second Amendment.
Speaker B:It's everyday people engaging in everyday life.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Like, it has to be there on your lips.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:So obviously, you have tremendous knowledge in marketing and SEO and credit card processing.
Speaker C:You're a true advocate for the Second Amendment, we've been talking about all of the things that are important as far as what is happening, happening on the state level, on the federal level, when it comes to making business happen.
Speaker C:So would you mind plugging your website, your socials, everything to close us out?
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:We're 2A commerce.com 2A for the Second Amendment.
Speaker B:We have a marketing platform called tacticalfresh.com that's a lot of fun.
Speaker B:You know, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram.
Speaker B:And I always tell people phone calls are free.
Speaker B:I mean, for the most part these days.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So, you know, if anybody had a question about any of the things that we talked about related to marketing or payments or tech, I'd love to talk to them.
Speaker B:You know, so I'd encourage them.
Speaker B:Just hit us up with the web form and you know, we have a 24 hour rule minimum.
Speaker B:So we're going to call you back and.
Speaker B:Yeah, and if there's a couple brave people out there that want to get together and start building the alternate infrastructure, I'm completely down.
Speaker C:Very nice.
Speaker A:Perfect.
Speaker C:Very nice.
Speaker C:Well, thank you for joining.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker B:Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker B:This is great.
Speaker C:Awesome.
Speaker C:That was fun.
Speaker B:How'd I do?
Speaker A:Oh, my God.
Speaker A:If Kaylee didn't stop me, we would have been nerding out for an hour.
Speaker B:Well, I'm kind of glad you did because.
