Episode 46
This Issue Affects More Than Just Law Enforcement (ft. Task Force 70 Foundation)
State of the Second hosts Kaylee and John sit down with John "Chappie" Chapman, founder of the Task Force 70 Foundation. Chapman has been a law enforcement officer since 1992 and has spent most of that career as a SWAT operator and a trainer. He started his first civilian training company around 1998 after noticing there was not much actual force application training going on beyond the square range. Task Force 70 began about three years ago and went public roughly four months before this recording. Its mission is to train the small-town cops who get little or no training, the officers who make up the 70% of American law enforcement working for agencies that serve fewer than 10,000 people, often 12 officers or less. The foundation takes no government money, partners with GOA and Hillsdale College, and runs on private donations.
The conversation gets into why the gap exists. Chapman walks through the three levels of police training and explains that the large departments have gotten better at training over the last 20 years while the bottom 70% rely on second- or third-hand material with no full-time training guy. He draws a hard line between qualification and training: qualification is a standardized test that a person can safely manipulate a firearm and accurately hit a target, while real police shootings turn on decision making, prudence, legal understanding, and contextual processing. Shooting, he says, is only maybe 10% of gunfighting. The foundation teaches five topics, and the first is constitutional judgment, because officers are taught case law and amendments rather than the Constitution itself, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, and the original meaning behind the Second Amendment's "well regulated."
The episode also speaks directly to armed citizens. Chapman's advice for a traffic stop is plain: be polite, keep your hands where the officer can see them, and comply. The roadside is not the place to argue an unreasonable order; that fight belongs at the Article 3 level, in front of a judge. He tells CCW holders that having a permit is not training and urges them to seek contextual instruction, a force-on-force class, or a ride-along. He closes on trust between communities and their police, the idea that authority is responsibility rather than power, and a call for support at tf70.org/donate, where $20 a month funds training and enters donors in a monthly Bravo Company rifle giveaway.
Questions this episode answers
What is the Task Force 70 Foundation and why was it created?
It is a privately funded nonprofit founded by John "Chappie" Chapman to train small-town police officers who get little or no training. It targets the 70% of American law enforcement working for agencies that serve fewer than 10,000 people, often with 12 officers or less.
Why do most small-town police officers receive so little training?
Large departments have improved their training over the last 20 years, but the bottom 70% rely on second- or third-hand material and have no full-time training staff. Most small agencies lack the resources for the kind of contextual instruction officers actually need.
What is the difference between firearms qualification and real training?
Qualification is a standardized test that proves a person can safely manipulate a firearm and accurately hit a target. Real police shootings turn on decision making, prudence, legal understanding, and reading context, and Chapman says shooting is only about 10% of gunfighting.
How should an armed citizen handle a traffic stop or police interaction?
Chapman's advice is to be polite, keep your hands where the officer can see them, and comply. The roadside is not the place to argue an unreasonable order; that fight belongs in front of a judge at the Article 3 level.
Why does the foundation teach the Constitution instead of just case law and amendments?
Officers are usually taught case law and amendments rather than the Constitution itself, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, and the original meaning behind the Second Amendment's "well regulated." The foundation's first of five topics is constitutional judgment, which builds that missing foundation.
Is a concealed carry permit the same as being trained?
No. Chapman tells concealed carry holders that having a permit is not training and urges them to seek contextual instruction, a force-on-force class, or a ride-along.
Why does Task Force 70 refuse government funding?
The foundation takes no government money and runs entirely on private donations, partnering with Gun Owners of America and Hillsdale College. This keeps its training independent of government influence.
How can people support the foundation and what do donors receive?
Supporters can give at tf70.org/donate, where $20 a month funds officer training. Each monthly donation also enters the donor in a monthly Bravo Company rifle giveaway.
Chapters
- 00:00 — Welcome and guest intro: John Chapman of Task Force 70
- 00:10 — Rapid fire: EDC pick, training gaps, home defense
- 02:53 — Who is Chappie and what is Task Force 70
- 06:37 — The three levels of police training and the bottom 70%
- 09:11 — Qualification vs. training: shooting is 10% of gunfighting
- 11:53 — The two-headed snake: citizen and officer interactions
- 16:02 — A permit is not training: get contextual instruction
- 20:10 — How to handle a traffic stop: be polite and comply
- 27:51 — Officers mirror your behavior: driving the interaction
- 29:30 — Soapbox: constitutional judgment and the missing curriculum
- 35:03 — Primary Arms sponsor read
- 35:29 — Trust, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers
- 44:34 — Faction, the republic, and educating every generation
- 45:29 — Where to find Task Force 70 and how to support it
About the guest
John "Chappie" Chapman is the founder of the Task Force 70 Foundation. He has been a law enforcement officer since 1992, going back and forth between full time and part time, and has spent most of his career as a SWAT operator and a trainer. He has been in the firearms industry since he was a teenager, working mostly on technical expertise for product development, and started civilian training in about 1998. He has worked for a long time with Bravo Company as a gunfighter. He started Task Force 70 about three years ago and went public roughly four months before this recording; the foundation partners with GOA and Hillsdale College, where Dr. Regan is his mentor. He is now a detective after years in patrol.
Key quotes
"Police shootings have very little to do with marksmanship." — John Chapman
"Having a permit is not training." — John Chapman
"The police don't work for the government." — John Chapman
"The first question should be, is that endangering me or the public?" — John Chapman
"It is not power in our constitutional form of government." — John Chapman
Transcript
Welcome to Gun Owners of America State of the second podcast.
Speaker A:I'm Kayleigh.
Speaker B:And I'm John.
Speaker B:And today we're joined by John Chapman from Task Force 70.
Speaker B:John, how are you today, my friend?
Speaker C:How are you guys?
Speaker B:Good.
Speaker B:Well, we're going to start off with our rapid fire questions.
Speaker B:We're going to ask you five questions ahead and answer them for us.
Speaker B:What is your top firearm choice?
Speaker C:For what purpose?
Speaker C:I hate to be pedantic.
Speaker B:Oh, let's go.
Speaker B:Let's start with EDC.
Speaker C:Glock 19.
Speaker A:If there is one area that you feel like the everyday gun owner lacks in training, what area would you recommend?
Speaker C:I would recommend police interaction and not just for my background and what I do now, but it's the number one issue that we see, especially when they are not involved in a violent encounter, just a normal interaction with the police.
Speaker C:We get some really sideways interactions with otherwise completely great Americans who happen to be carrying guns, but they don't know what to do when they encounter us.
Speaker B:What is better for training, a shoot house or live fire just at the range?
Speaker C:I think dry fire in a shoot house is the most effective and useful training that a armed citizen can get.
Speaker C:They can practice on the square range anytime, but it creates a compounding artificiality as you do it.
Speaker C:Live fire square range does.
Speaker A:What would be your advice to someone who is interested in a law enforcement career?
Speaker C:Get educated first.
Speaker C:Not necessarily having to go get a college degree, but understand what a law enforcement officer actually does and the intellectual information necessary to do the job correctly.
Speaker C:Do that first.
Speaker C:That, I have found tends to become a self filter for people who turns out aren't very interested in it because there aren't.
Speaker C:They aren't interested in the intellectual side.
Speaker C:They want to kick doors and beat people up and make arrests and that's great, but that's not what our job actually is.
Speaker B:And the last question, what is the most overlooked thing when people do their home defense plan?
Speaker C:The most overlooked thing is probably how to prevent the person from getting in the house in the first place.
Speaker C:The physical security and surveillance and the preventative measures that could be taken outside the house to prevent them from getting in in the first place.
Speaker B:Well, that wraps up our rapid fire question segment.
Speaker B:We're going to go ahead and dive into this.
Speaker B:Give the folks a little bit who you are.
Speaker B:What is Task Force 70, how you got in the industry, all that stuff.
Speaker C:Sure.
Speaker C:So my name's John Chapman.
Speaker C:Everybody calls me Chappie.
Speaker C: law enforcement officer since: Speaker C:Going back and forth between full time and part time.
Speaker C:The GWAT was a thing and kept me pretty busy in support and operational functions.
Speaker C:I've been in the firearms industry since I was a teenager.
Speaker C:Involved in mostly technical expertise for product development in helping engineers not over engineer.
Speaker C:It doesn't usually work most of the time but giving them some education about how this product is actually going to be used and how to set it up most effectively for use by people who actually need it and use it whether it's on the civilian side, the law enforcement side.
Speaker C:I've been a SWAT guy most of my law enforcement career and a trainer most of my law enforcement career.
Speaker C: ian side of training in about: Speaker C:Noticed that there wasn't a lot of actual force application training going on at the time.
Speaker C:It was all square range which is awesome.
Speaker C:It was necessary but that's the foundational skill necessary to be able to actually do something with a gun.
Speaker C:So when it's necessary.
Speaker C:So started my first training company then to do that and then in and out of different firearms manufacturing organizations and training organizations.
Speaker C:Since started Task Force 70 about three years ago.
Speaker C:We haven't been.
Speaker C:We've only been public about four months because we're trying to set it up as a actual nonprofit not a let's buy our kids a Porsche and take some, some, some sweet, sweet Soros money.
Speaker C:So in order to do that correctly, as you guys know, GOA is one of the most ethically organized non profits because I've done a lot of study on it.
Speaker C:I've obviously participated in GOA for a long time for that reason.
Speaker C:But using GOA and Hillsdale Colleges.
Speaker C:Who is our partner to understand the landscape of true non profits first.
Speaker C:We had the idea, the mission for a long time but learning getting myself educated on how to do it correctly was the difficult part.
Speaker C:Task 470 foundation exists to.
Speaker C:To train the small town cops who don't get any training right now or barely any.
Speaker C:Probably the five most consequential skills that officers have to have in order to have a shot at actually fulfilling the constitutional mandate that the founders gave to police.
Speaker C:So that's why Task Force 70 exists.
Speaker C:The officers can't afford to do it.
Speaker C:So that's why it's a nonprofit.
Speaker A:Obviously when you're talking about training anybody, any group of people, the first question is the well what exists now and and why is what you're doing better?
Speaker A:So walk us through kind of what is the status quo and and why does that status quo need to change and and what is the outcome of the project?
Speaker C:Sure.
Speaker C:So right now there's kind of three levels to law enforcement training.
Speaker C:There's the state mandated level, that's the level.
Speaker C:All 50 states have different standards, but they're somewhat similar of what an officer needs to possess in order to work to.
Speaker C:It's a credentialing program.
Speaker C:What's your basic academy?
Speaker C:What, what of the pieces of the job do you have to be trained on?
Speaker C:And then what's your field training program?
Speaker C:Every department is different.
Speaker C:But as with all training mechanisms in law enforcement, the big picture is always the large departments who as a rule over the last 20 years have actually gotten better at training.
Speaker C:The large departments have because an entire generation of the instructors retired and the younger people were allowed to develop new curriculum, maximize the minimum amount of training time they had in large departments.
Speaker C:That problem isn't fixed, but it's greatly advanced.
Speaker C:What's been left behind is the bottom 70%.
Speaker C:And I don't mean bottom is not as good.
Speaker C:I mean 70% of the law enforcement officers in the United States work for agencies that serve less than 10,000 people.
Speaker C:So that means 12 officers or less.
Speaker C:None of those departments have a full time training guy.
Speaker C:None of them have a clear mechanism of training standards or training methodologies.
Speaker C:So they're relying on second or third hand training material to provide the field training, which is kind of the second portion of a training program for a law enforcement officer.
Speaker C:And the third leg of law enforcement training is the continuing education portion.
Speaker C:That's.
Speaker C:Most states have a mandate every year they have to have a certain number of training hours in certain types of subjects.
Speaker C:And it's all very canned.
Speaker C:It's all provided by the state.
Speaker C:Generally those officers aren't being trained.
Speaker C:They're recertifying on sex abuse and domestic violence investigations and things that are necessary.
Speaker C:There's 206 patrol skills and they're getting the highlight two hour blocks of four or five of those at the bottom 70% of departments.
Speaker C:That's all they get on average.
Speaker C:In preparing for the foundation we did a, a firearms training study.
Speaker C:The it's been held for, for over 80 years now that training and qualification are different.
Speaker C:Qualification is a standardized test to make sure that the person can safely manipulate the firearm.
Speaker C:They can accurately hit the target well enough, but there's no stress induced, excuse me, and there's no actual training of circumstantial factors which drive police shootings.
Speaker C:Police shootings have very little to do with marksmanship.
Speaker C:I work, have worked for a long, long time with with Bravo Company as a gunfighter for them.
Speaker C:And one of the factors that we push there is shooting is only maybe 10% of gunfighting.
Speaker C:The vast majority of gunfighting is decision making and prudence and legal understanding and contextual processing.
Speaker C:Those are the things that are far more important.
Speaker C:And those are the pieces that all law enforcement, but most particularly small town law enforcement, just don't get.
Speaker C:Nobody's doing it.
Speaker C:So we started the foundation because there were kind of two ways to do it.
Speaker C:We could go to the Department of Justice and encourage a training program that was centrally funded.
Speaker C:The problem is that always turns into a bureaucratic check the box and it further federalizes the local police.
Speaker C:And the whole point of having local police is that they are not controlled by the federal government kind of on purpose.
Speaker C:And in.
Speaker C:The Federalist papers and Federalist 17, Hamilton lays out very clearly who the police belong to and that's to the states.
Speaker C:And the more we allow ourselves to be federalized, the poorer the training becomes and the more dispassionate the officers become about their local community.
Speaker C:We, we exist to support the community that we actually work for.
Speaker C:So the other mechanism was the mechanism that we decided to take, which is completely privately funded through donation.
Speaker C:We don't take any federal money.
Speaker C:We don't take, we don't take government money to do it because that, as you guys know, always has strings.
Speaker C:So that's why the foundation exists and it's why we exist in the form that we do.
Speaker A:When you're, when you're looking at, you know, what the training exists, you let in the rapid fire question with individual interaction with police and the training that civilians have, as far as, you know, saying hey, you know, I'm consil carrying or whatever those steps are for the, the situation that they're in and then you know, the, the police response to that.
Speaker A:So walk us through the, the disconnect that exists there and what specialized training that you guys are kind of dealing with in those scenarios.
Speaker C:Sure.
Speaker C:So there's a two headed snake to this problem.
Speaker C:One side is the citizenry who I'm, I am a firm beyond firm believer in the purpose of the second amendment is that every American citizen is part of the militia, which means protecting their own community in addition to their family.
Speaker C:That requires a fairly high level of training on the part of the individual citizen for that to work.
Speaker C:And that process has gotten significantly better over the last 50 years.
Speaker C:CCW training has come leaps and bounds since, since that first kind of became a thing.
Speaker C:The challenge is the introduction of social Media learning has driven the worst impulses of people who are already upset at the government.
Speaker C:Your local police officers are not your enemy generally.
Speaker C:Now some of them are, but that was usually because they were trained to be that way.
Speaker C:So if we are in an, if we are in an, in an interaction on the citizen side, the vast majority of citizens that I encounter and throughout my career have encountered who have a gun are normal people.
Speaker C:They're usually scared to death.
Speaker C:Like they, oh my God, I have a gun and I'm getting stopped.
Speaker C:And I've seen something on the Internet where the police go buck wild on somebody because they have a gun.
Speaker C:That's not the case.
Speaker C:That's not how it's supposed to work.
Speaker C:But if you get that person interacting with a police officer who's been inadequately trained on how to deal with that circumstance, then you introduce fear and emotion into the police officers decision cycle, if that makes sense.
Speaker C:So I have no control as, as a police officer over how the citizen who is armed is going to act.
Speaker C:What I have control over is how I can mentor and train the officers.
Speaker C:So teaching them, first and foremost the fact that there's a gun at the call, whether it's a traffic stop or a call.
Speaker C:You go to a domestic violence call and somebody has a gun inside their house.
Speaker C:Yeah, it's, it's America, bro.
Speaker C:Like, calm down.
Speaker C:And getting them to realize that everywhere we go there's a gun.
Speaker C:So relax.
Speaker C:Like, the first question should not be is that illegal?
Speaker C:The first question should be, is that endangering me or the public?
Speaker C:That's the first question.
Speaker C:The fact that this person has a gun is immaterial.
Speaker C:What's material is, is this person out of control?
Speaker C:Are they having some sort of obvious psychiatric problem?
Speaker C:Are they intoxicated?
Speaker C:Have they just beaten the brakes off of their spouse?
Speaker C:Like, those are the kinds of things I need to be looking for.
Speaker C:Unfortunately, officers, when they are trained on it, are trained to immediately disarm everyone, run all the guns, make sure nothing's stolen, the look for dope like, use it as a predicate to conduct a further investigation.
Speaker C:The, the presence of a firearm is not a, in and of itself a predicate of a crime.
Speaker C:And that is something that officers have been in some jurisdictions.
Speaker C:Not every jurisdiction is this way.
Speaker C:Obviously, officers have been in places, have been inculcated with the, the philosophy that if they have a gun, they're a dirtbag.
Speaker C:And that is not the case that the vast majority of people who carry guns are carrying them for their personal protection and especially in the modern age, they go to church, they go to the grocery store.
Speaker C:Where do all the big violent events that they hear about occur?
Speaker C:It's in those places.
Speaker C:I as a cop want them to be armed, but I want them to have some training and education as well.
Speaker C:It's not my job to jam them up because they have a gun.
Speaker B:With the rise of concealed carry permit holders and constitutional carry, we've seen states like Ohio go to constitutional carry, we've seen the crime drop.
Speaker B:What kind of advice can you give?
Speaker B:Because a lot of people take a simple concealed carry class or something like that where it's just basic safety.
Speaker B:What kind of advice can you give to people who are carrying or on the fringe of wanting to carry to get them more involved in not only the training side, but some of these interactions that they may have with, with an officer?
Speaker C:Sure.
Speaker C:The number one thing I can say is they need to read the second Amendment in the original meaning of the language.
Speaker C:So a well regulated militia, what that means in the language of the day, and it's laid out pretty well in the Federalist papers, well regulated means trained.
Speaker C:Having a permit is not training.
Speaker C:CCW training is great, it's necessary.
Speaker C:The vast majority of them do a great job in teaching the members of the class what their do's and don'ts are, what the laws and their local jurisdiction is.
Speaker C:That's all necessary and good.
Speaker C:What most CCW holders lack in my interaction with them in the real world is contextual training.
Speaker C:They don't need to go.
Speaker C:It would in a perfect world, South Narc would be copied and pasted across the country and every CCW holder would have to take his class before they could carry a gun.
Speaker C:Because that's gun fighting.
Speaker C:Like that's why you're carrying a gun is the context that comes with that.
Speaker C:It's not necessarily possible, but the individual has to pick up the mantle of responsibility of taking more than the absolute minimum level of training.
Speaker C:So go take a marksmanship class, take a force on force class, go do a ride along with the cops.
Speaker C:If you want to have your eyes opened about how policing works, go on a ride along at any department, preferably the department whose jurisdiction you live in, to just see not what they're dealing with, but what the public does, how, how we actually work.
Speaker C:So the number one piece of advice I can give to folks is don't stop training after they get their ccw.
Speaker C:You have to go get contextualized training.
Speaker C:And that doesn't have to be Navy Seal, Delta Ninja, LURP doing barrel Rolls and you know, if everybody went to South Nark or Darcy or, or whatever, that would be amazing.
Speaker C:That would be awesome.
Speaker C:We'd be a much safer country.
Speaker C:But that's not realistic for most folks.
Speaker C:We also at the same time don't want to deincentivize people from carrying guns who have physical handicaps or they're not in the best shape.
Speaker C:I still want them carrying a gun if they're a responsible American.
Speaker C:But it's on them to not become a loot drop like they have to do some level of training.
Speaker C:The well regulated part is of the second amendment is on us as individuals for regulating ourselves.
Speaker C:Well regulated does not mean well, well governed, it means well trained.
Speaker C:You have a responsibility to be part of the civil defense of your community.
Speaker B:Do you think that there's a lack of, of knowledge or fear mongering of interaction of gun owners with police officers and what are the steps that they should as a concealed carry holder or as a, in a constitutional case state?
Speaker B:What are the steps they should be looking at if they have an interaction with a police officer?
Speaker B:Because I've had personal interactions with the police officer.
Speaker B:Valkyrie went very smoothly.
Speaker B:The officer was really great.
Speaker B:But sometimes, you know, you're very nervous because you're like oh no, I pulled right?
Speaker B:I have a gun, I gotta let them know, right?
Speaker B:So what are the steps that as a, as in a constitutional carry state or as a CCW holder do I need to take to make sure that the interaction goes well?
Speaker C:So that is not a complex thing.
Speaker C:Number one, be polite.
Speaker C:You're interacting with somebody who has been trained from the first day of the academy that every car stop is the time that you're going to get killed.
Speaker C:So there's some validity to that, but a lot of it comes from an unhealthy place, training wise.
Speaker C:But we can't change that.
Speaker C:I can't control every law enforcement academy's curriculum or, or philosophy.
Speaker C:What I can do is keep my hands where the officer can see them comply.
Speaker C:The number one, having done a fairly deep study on this and watching body cam footage, thousands and thousands of traffic stops and participated in thousands of traffic stops.
Speaker C:As soon as you refuse to comply, in no matter how small of a way that you're refusing to comply, you have opened a door that you no longer have control over.
Speaker C:If the officer is asking you to do something unreasonable, one of you two, you or the officer has to remain calm.
Speaker C:So if the officer's not doing that, it should be you.
Speaker C:There's a very famous recent one gentleman Was pulled over.
Speaker C:He told the he did everything right, put his hands on the wheel.
Speaker C:Officer, I'm legally.
Speaker C:I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was functionally, I'm legally carrying a gun.
Speaker C:No problem.
Speaker C:The officer asked him to step out.
Speaker C:An officer can remove you from your car on a traffic stop 100% of the time.
Speaker C:That is not a thing to people.
Speaker C:Watch Internet videos of people cracking their window and saying, I don't have to roll down my window.
Speaker C:I don't have to get out.
Speaker C:That's all nonsense.
Speaker C:There's Supreme Court precedents twice that A traffic stop is a temporary detention.
Speaker C:Officers don't want to pull you out of your car, but if we feel it's necessary, we're going to.
Speaker C:And if you don't want to go, we don't care.
Speaker C:So how about we just make this go smoother?
Speaker C:Get out of the car when you're asked to.
Speaker C:If you're carrying a gun.
Speaker C:Excuse me, when we're asked to get out of the car, we should probably just do it because otherwise it's going to be forced upon you and that's going to be a very uncomfortable situation.
Speaker C:So for you, not for the officers.
Speaker C:So do what they ask you to do.
Speaker C:The vast majority of officers, especially in states where CCW is common, you're not going to be asked to.
Speaker C:To step out.
Speaker C:They're just going to ask you to keep your hands where they can see them.
Speaker C:That's a reasonable ask.
Speaker C:If they ask you to get out of the car, get out of the car.
Speaker C:The video that I referenced earlier showed the gentleman do everything right.
Speaker C:He stepped out, told them where the gun was, an uneducated officer, then shot him with his own gun trying to remove it from his body.
Speaker C:So the all of that boils down to calm is infectious and comply.
Speaker C:That's all we're asking you to do, is just comply.
Speaker C:Don't argue.
Speaker C:If we ask for documents, it's not because we're trying to take a picture of your photo and steal your identity.
Speaker C:I promise we don't need your money, so.
Speaker C:Well, we do, but in different ways.
Speaker C:Just comply.
Speaker C:Especially the younger the officer, the more recently he went through the academy.
Speaker C:There's a growth factor that hasn't taken place yet.
Speaker C:You may be the first traffic stop he does where the person he stopped is armed.
Speaker C:So just keep that in mind.
Speaker C:Have some grace.
Speaker C:Follow their instructions.
Speaker C:If they ask you something unreasonable, the time to argue that is not on the side of the road, you are going to lose that fight 100% of the time.
Speaker C:The time to fight.
Speaker C:That is in the Article three power.
Speaker C:The police are the article two power.
Speaker C:The executive, the judge is the Article three power.
Speaker C:And those two things are equal, but the judge will always win.
Speaker C:So if an officer asked you to do something unreasonable and you did it and it led to an arrest, you have a very valid defense.
Speaker C:That's why the Constitution exists.
Speaker C:The time to fight.
Speaker C:That is not based on your ego during the traffic stop.
Speaker C:That is.
Speaker C:That is how people get hurt.
Speaker C:It's not necessarily their fault, but it's still going to happen.
Speaker C:And.
Speaker C:And becoming injured in something that wasn't your fault, you're still injured.
Speaker C:So the goal is to not have any citizens injured in those interactions unless they choose to be injured by resisting us actively.
Speaker B:Yeah, my interaction was.
Speaker B:I guess it's laughable now, but it makes me.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:It was very smooth.
Speaker B:The officer did a great job.
Speaker B:I had two firearms, one on my hip, one in the.
Speaker B:The center console because I switched guns earlier that day.
Speaker B:And he goes, I need your registration.
Speaker B:I'm like, well, it's in the center console with this other gun.
Speaker B:So he asked me to get out.
Speaker B:And I'm immediately.
Speaker B:Hands where you see.
Speaker B:Why are your hands up?
Speaker B:Where else do you want me?
Speaker B:There's a gun on me, right?
Speaker B:Gun there.
Speaker B:Like, where do you want these to go?
Speaker B:He's just like, why are your hands up?
Speaker B:Because then he goes, are there any more guns?
Speaker B:I'm like, the one I told you about earlier, it's been on my hip the whole time.
Speaker B:So he disarmed me.
Speaker B:I'm like, by the way, be careful.
Speaker C:That is L. Right, right.
Speaker B:So, no, but it, It's.
Speaker B:It is one of those things where education from both sides, from both the officer side and from the.
Speaker B:The concealed carrier side is big and just following the process of.
Speaker B:And I'm hoping that instructors out there are teaching the concealed carry holders, or if you're in a non.
Speaker B:In a constitutional carry state, you.
Speaker B:You educate yourself on these processes of.
Speaker B:Okay, well, this is where.
Speaker B:This is what I have to do to keep myself.
Speaker B:Because there's a lot.
Speaker B:Like you said, there's a lot of videos out there which are showing things in a negative light and bad interactions, but there's also a lot of good interactions that you can have.
Speaker B:My.
Speaker B:My personal favorite interaction was we were shooting at a friend's house just outside of Columbus, and neighbor doesn't like noise,.
Speaker C:So they called the cops, of course,.
Speaker B:And we're talking to the officer and they walk over to the table and they're like, well, that's cool, that's great.
Speaker B:I was like, do you want to shoot for it?
Speaker B:But it's those things where they're.
Speaker B:You just have to have that mental mindset that they are human and you're having an interaction with another human being.
Speaker C:Exactly.
Speaker C:And keep in mind that officers are mirrors of your behavior.
Speaker C:Good officers are.
Speaker C:The more you escalate emotion, the less a good officer will be emotional and the more direct and confrontational he will become.
Speaker C:If we ask you to do something and you say no, that's not going to end well.
Speaker C:Because through experience we learn the cues of resistance.
Speaker C:And resistance never starts from zero.
Speaker C:Resistance always escalates.
Speaker C:So that's what we're looking for.
Speaker C:When we don't see that, we do things like, hey, those are pretty cool.
Speaker C:That's awesome, right?
Speaker C: a guy carrying a very custom: Speaker C:I know you're surprised.
Speaker C: He was a boomer carrying a: Speaker C:And we ended up spending about 10 minutes on the side of the road talking about his gun.
Speaker C:So because he didn't, he, he, he drove that interaction.
Speaker C:And as a citizen, you always drive the interaction with the officer.
Speaker C:If you're not, if the officer starts pissed off, that's an officer problem.
Speaker C:So at that point you're just trying to get through the stop and deal with it at the Article 3 level if you need to.
Speaker C:The time to argue is not.
Speaker C:Then you're never going to win an argument with a cop.
Speaker C:So it's just not in our nature.
Speaker A:Well, this is the cue for us to go to our next segment, which is my personal favorite and it is from the Soapbox where we dive into some of the more controversial or spicy side of what's going on in, in the conversation and in the two way space at large.
Speaker A:So I know that there's going to be a lot of people that are probably shocked to hear that so many officers are not receiving the adequate training that are not being versed in the Constitution.
Speaker A:And you bring up the Federalist Papers and the roadmap that the founders had.
Speaker A:So what, I guess, what are the ways that you are directly combating that?
Speaker A:And then what are some of the shocking things that is left out of the curriculum as it currently stands because of this massive gap?
Speaker C:I.
Speaker C:And we as a foundation have felt and we educate the employees at the foundation, these people are generally already aligned with us constitutionally.
Speaker C:But just in case we talk about it, we focus on what we can do as individuals.
Speaker C:It's why the foundation only teaches five topics.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Those are the things we're great at and they're the things that are most, that we view hierarchically as being the most important for officers in small towns to know because they don't get the education on them.
Speaker C:And the very first one for a reason is, is called constitutional judgment.
Speaker C:The reason for that is since the, since the Wilson administration, the government has become a technocracy on purpose.
Speaker C:President Wilson.
Speaker C:I won't bore the audience with going through the three hour diatribe that I deliver about that government was transformed starting under Teddy Roosevelt and going and really coming into full fruition under Wilson that the government is run by institutions.
Speaker C:Institutions do not exist constitutionally.
Speaker C:That's not a thing.
Speaker C:The, the people run the government, not the institutions.
Speaker C:What that led to one of the thousands of, of poorly thought out byproducts of that is modern law enforcement training.
Speaker C:Officers are not taught the Constitution.
Speaker C:They are taught case law.
Speaker C:Case law is not a thing constitutionally either.
Speaker C:Case precedence from courts is not law.
Speaker C:Law is passed by the legislature and validated by the executive.
Speaker C:The courts exist only to interpret those laws.
Speaker C:Officers have been educated and we're four generations deep into it now that what matters is case law.
Speaker C:Case law is what gives you the permission to do stuff as a cop.
Speaker C:That's not actually a thing.
Speaker C:We've conducted a survey.
Speaker C:Dr. Regan from Hillsdale College is my partner at Hillsdale or he's.
Speaker C:He's my mentor at Hillsdale College.
Speaker C:He and I did a survey teaching a law enforcement Constitution course.
Speaker C:So we go around the country for Hillsdale teaching this course to law enforcement officers.
Speaker C:The vast majority of them have never read the Constitution.
Speaker C:They're not taught the Constitution, they're taught amendments.
Speaker C:They're taught to memorize the First Amendment and the fourth Amendment, which are fairly important, but they are anti federalist concessions that the Federalists made to the Constitution.
Speaker C:It's why the first second Amendment exists, is because the antifederalists were right in that if it's not written down, it will become a monarchical democracy.
Speaker C:So that's why the, the amendments exist.
Speaker C:The officers don't know any of that.
Speaker C:They don't know that it is actually in the Constitution that police officers must, in order to be a police officer, swear their allegiance to the Constitution itself, not to the government.
Speaker C:That's, that's the Constitution says that we must do that and which is important because it completely negates the, the Wilsonian style governmental line of thought which is inculcated into police.
Speaker C:Now in that police work for the government.
Speaker C:The police don't work for the government.
Speaker C:The police work for the people.
Speaker C:They are paid by the government.
Speaker C:But our primary job is not to enforce laws in which the government is the victim.
Speaker C:That is not our primary purpose.
Speaker C:And that is the biggest failing that we have, have been working to strive through.
Speaker C:Or the primary reason that the foundation was started was to fight that and to keep officers alive by giving them some contextual training in the other four things that we teach them.
Speaker C:So it's also why we don't accept government money.
Speaker C:But we need as many small donors as we can possibly get in order to fund it.
Speaker C:That keeps it at the level of the people who are actually responsible for, for the performance of the police.
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Speaker A:I really want to go back to what you're talking about as far as like the constitutional training because just as the training is super lackluster for police officers, I'm afraid that it is also lacking for so many civilians.
Speaker C:It is.
Speaker A:And so do you really, do you feel as if it's a, it's a rising tide for, for all ships as we increase the, the constitutional fortitude of policing and understanding not just a memorization of the amendments as you were saying, but you know, understanding the founders and the intent, intent and the text, history and tradition of, of the Constitution.
Speaker A:Do you feel like that is going to have effects on their local community and that it's kind of a starting line point?
Speaker C:I do.
Speaker C:So trust is the absolutely necessary component to keep the police in their proper form for the, for their local community.
Speaker C:So trust can only exist if both sides understand the context of the conversation.
Speaker C:So we are working hard to teach law enforcement officers what the Constitution actually says.
Speaker C:Authority, excuse me, authority is responsibility.
Speaker C:It is not power in our constitutional form of government.
Speaker C:That is a fundamental misunderstanding that exists on both sides.
Speaker C:And without fixing that fundamental misunderstanding, no trust can exist between a 6,000 person city and their seven man police department.
Speaker C:Those two things can't trust one another.
Speaker C:So that trust is what's necessary for the Constitution to continue.
Speaker C:The Constitution is not a living document.
Speaker C:The Constitution is a frame that is designed to protect the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker C:Lincoln expressed it as the Declaration is an apple of gold and the Constitution is a frame of silver designed to protect it.
Speaker C:So that's why it's amendable.
Speaker C:That's why we can amend the Constitution.
Speaker C:It's meant to form as we progress, but it is not malleable.
Speaker C:So the challenge the, the thing done intentionally to weaken the power of the, of the individual citizen and inversely raise the power of the government is, is the things like only requiring police officers or, or law enforcement officers to memorize the amendments.
Speaker C:That, that's like being given a wonderful dish of Indian food and only eating the basil off the top.
Speaker C:The amendment is the basil understanding of the Articles of the Constitution in addition to the amendments which frame the amendments and the Federalist Papers and the anti Federalist Papers.
Speaker C:To understand the Constitution itself, you have to read the Federal Federalist Papers.
Speaker C:To understand the amendments, you have to read the anti Federalist Papers.
Speaker C:The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were opposed to one another.
Speaker C:They were two different sides of an argument.
Speaker C:And in order to fully understand especially the second Amendment, you have to understand the Federalist and the Anti Federalist and understand why that compromise was so graceful in, in the interaction that that ended up occurring that makes our modern society possible.
Speaker C:And every relief of individual authority in the Constitution strengthens the government authority over the people, which weakens the frame of the Constitution which allows then the Declaration itself to be attacked.
Speaker C:That's the danger we're in right now.
Speaker A:I fully agree.
Speaker A:And I think that, you know, as we look to a roadmap that we want to be on whether that is policing, parenting an individual living in society,.
Speaker C:They're all the same problem.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker C:They're just in different forms.
Speaker A:We have to ensure that the educational basis, the understanding of the Constitution, of the second Amendment isn't just surface level.
Speaker A:And it's why that when we look at the massive amounts of bills and regulatory stuff coming out of the bureaucracies and all of these things to weaken the second Amendment.
Speaker A:It takes thousands upon thousands upon thousands of words to cut away at 27.
Speaker A:And it's, it's because the 27 means something.
Speaker A:It is a governmental overreach protection.
Speaker C:Correct.
Speaker A:That our rights are endowed by our Creator.
Speaker A:They're natural rights.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker A:And they, they exist outside of the government recognizing them or not.
Speaker A:It's, it's our job to keep it famously outside of the, the constitutional Convention, they're, they're asked, you know, what kind of government do we have, a republic, if you can keep it.
Speaker C:Correct.
Speaker A:Because it's incumbent upon the citizenry.
Speaker A:It's incumbent upon everyone, whether they're a federal employee, a state employee or an everyday citizen, to keep the republic and to understand those foundings.
Speaker A:And so I applaud you guys for spending so much time and focus to serve the underserved community when it comes to the constitutionality.
Speaker A:I love the optimism that you have as far as, you know, a rising time raising all ships in this area.
Speaker A:And I hope that it will spill down into, to the families and communities so that we can celebrate the Constitution that we have, so that we can right the ship in many ways where we have drastically gone astray.
Speaker A:I loved earlier in the conversation when you said it's very clear that the founders had no intention of the institutions being existing, especially in their current form, the bureaucratic state, the legalese.
Speaker A:That can only change if we are educated as individuals.
Speaker C:Correct.
Speaker C:So General Washington, or I'm sorry, President Washington, when he was president, wrote a lot about the dangers of faction, the dangers of the Federalist and the anti Federalist being two different parties.
Speaker C:Where he viewed that as dangerous is what we have seen come true since Teddy Roosevelt went through the institution where one side captures the Federalist or the anti Federalist captures, in today's parlance, we call them Republicans and Democrats, which isn't really true anymore anyway.
Speaker C:That's a whole nother episode.
Speaker C:But if one of the.
Speaker C:The danger of faction is that if government is allowed to institutionalize, one of those factions will take command of different institutions within that government.
Speaker C:And that's when the abuse of power is possible.
Speaker C:And without the education at the individual citizen level, that is the natural course of government.
Speaker C:That is how governments occur all the time, everywhere, for all of human history.
Speaker C:What makes America special is the fact that the balance or the.
Speaker C:The gate to this institutionalization which allows for factions to take command of different portions of the government is the republic formation or the republic methodology of government.
Speaker C:The, the equal application of power to the monarchical, the aristocracy and the people that Aristotle laid out.
Speaker C:The balancing those three levels or types of power prevents tyranny, oligarchy and democracy, which are the, the negative portions that Paulo that, that he described in his politics.
Speaker C:So that's why the founders were so brilliant and that's why we can damage ourselves so deeply by not understanding what they were saying, because what they were saying is still in effect.
Speaker C:But we have to participate in that Every generation has to learn it and live it.
Speaker B:We appreciate you being on.
Speaker B:And that's a thank you from our good friends over at AACMO Palmetto State Armory.
Speaker B:We will be receiving our gift from our guest.
Speaker B:That's very kind, AAC and Palmetto State army for sponsoring it.
Speaker C:It will get shot by a student.
Speaker B:So before we go, go ahead and shout out where people can find you, how people can get involved, all that stuff.
Speaker C:Sure.
Speaker C:So you can find us at tf70.org tf70.org that stands for Task Force 70.
Speaker C:They can support us and help us support cops and build trust through training by hitting tf70.org donate we don't take government money and we don't take, we don't take dirty money.
Speaker C:So that means that we have to gather money $20 a month at a time.
Speaker C:So we, we could really use the support of the citizenry.
Speaker C:All we ask for is $20 a month.
Speaker C:Just sign it up.
Speaker C:Never think about it again.
Speaker C:It's cheaper than your Netflix and you're helping cops on the ground all the time by helping us out there.
Speaker C:In exchange for that, we will keep you updated on what we're doing.
Speaker C:We're very transparent.
Speaker C:We tell you everything that we're doing every month with your donation.
Speaker C:Of course, in the close I start coughing again.
Speaker C:So we tell you every month what we're doing.
Speaker C:We're very transparent.
Speaker C:And in exchange for this gift to us, we give away, every month we give away a Bravo Company rifle.
Speaker C:Bravo Company USA supports us very deeply.
Speaker C:Blue Force Gear supports us very deeply and a whole bunch of other industry support, both inside the firearms industry, the public safety industry and the industry in general.
Speaker C:And on our website there's a list of our partners and you can go through and click through and help us support us that way using the links on the on our website.
Speaker C:But the primary way that folks can help us is give us a $20 a month donation.
Speaker C:We really appreciate it.
Speaker B:Well, again, we appreciate you being on guys.
Speaker B:Make sure to like share and subscribe.
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