We hope you’re having a meaningful Memorial Day today.
Last week we participated in our first mainstream TV piece, for UK television of all things. The result was this Channel 4 piece, “Gun sales in United States highest since records began amid coronavirus”.
A few takeaways:
It’s certainly not gun-rights-friendly, and does have an undertone of “Oh those crazy Americans”, but for a mass-market news report on the second-most widely watched channel in the UK, it let the gun rights folks have a real voice.
We didn’t get a name drop! We’re careful to be very vanilla with “normie” audiences, and we don’t match the stereotype of gun owners, and we did the whole thing over Zoom. So none of that makes great TV. That’s fine, because for this first mainstream press piece, we were optimizing for just learning how it works and not making any big mistakes. But they did mention that folks are doing gun training online, and they used an OSD office hours session as B-roll and interviewed Paul, one of our office hours attendees. (Btw, book your own office hours session here.)
It takes work to be effective when talking to media. We use Notion as our company wiki, and we have a page there where we iterate on our answers to common media questions. We’ve almost never heard a question from a journalist where we haven’t already thought about the question, written down our ideal answer, and then discussed the answer until we can’t improve it any further. The hard questions are easy to predict. So predict them, and give yourself the time and space to really think. Think about it like this: every sentence you say to media is an opportunity to say something memorable.
Make it a great week, gang.
This week’s links
Prosecutor to dismiss charges against Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker
Kenneth had been charged with attempted murder after shooting Louisville, KY police who he thought were home invaders. Breonna was killed by the police in that shootout, which had started during a 1 a.m. raid of Breonna’s apartment.
California police conduct a dozen raids of people who failed ammo background checks
The context on this one: California recently started requiring background checks for ammo purchases. In principle, people who fail those background checks have histories that would also make it illegal for them to possess firearms. So the state Department of Justice used people’s failed background checks as an implicit suggestion that those people possessed firearms, and then conduct raids at least partly on that basis. It’s unclear right now what other evidence, if any, was required to trigger a raid, and it would also be important to know what the false positive rate on the background checks is. But an interesting development to keep an eye on.
Post Malone continues to be our spirit animal
Here he is in Utah open carrying a Glock with a Flux brace.
Shout out to Under Siege for putting in realistically loud suppressed gunshots all the way back in 1992
Although those room-clearing tactics … leave something to be desired.
@2Aupdates digs through old court records on the various reasons that NYPD has rejected applications for a permit to possess a handgun
“2001: Target pistol license denied because the applicant didn't show participation at a range in NYC. Judge says the rules only require the applicant to show participation at a range in New York. Bonus: NYC tried to change their reason for denial partway through the appeal.”
Zach’s gun rants compilation
~44 minutes of assorted funny gun rants.
If you’re a new gun owner, thinking about becoming one, or know someone who is, click here to come to OSD Office Hours. You get a 30-minute video call with an OSD team member to ask any and all questions you have, in a friendly, non-judgmental space. For free. So come on by!
If you like this newsletter, you can donate to OSD instantly on our Buy Me a Coffee page. Donations aren’t our biggest funding mechanism, but they are a dead-simple way to kick in a few bucks to help us keep growing like crazy.