In this week’s episode Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a retired US Army Ranger and psychology professor known for his expertise in violence and crime psychology joins me to discuss the current state of crime and violence, emphasizing the need for individuals to be prepared and armed, both physically and mentally. Listen in as we also touch on topics such as hunting, gun laws, media influence, and the impact of sleep deprivation on societal problems.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is an internationally recognized scholar, author, soldier, and speaker who is one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of human aggression and the roots of violence and violent crime.
Col. Grossman is a former West Point psychology professor, Professor of Military Science, and an Army Ranger who has combined his experiences to become the founder of a new field of scientific endeavor, which has been termed “killology.” In this new field Col. Grossman has made revolutionary new contributions to our understanding of killing in war, the psychological costs of war, the root causes of the current “virus” of violent crime that is raging around the world, and the process of healing the victims of violence, in war and peace.
Today Col. Grossman is the director of Grossman On Truth, LLC (www.GrossmanOnTruth.com). In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he has written and spoken extensively on the terrorist threat, with articles published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Civil Policy and many leading law enforcement journals, and he has been inducted as a “Life Diplomate” by the American Board for Certification in Homeland Security, and a “Life Member” of the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute.
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Now here’s your host, Marcus Aurelius Anderson. Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson and my guest today truly embodies that phrase.
00:59
Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman is the Director of Grossman on Truth LLC. He is a U.S. Army Ranger, paratrooper, and a former West Point psychology professor. Since his retirement from the U.S. Army in 1998, he has been traveling full-time as one of the nation’s leading trainers for the military, law enforcement, and mental health practitioners and providers of school safety organizations. This man’s work has been influential in my entire life.
01:25
His area of expertise is tremendous as the psychology of the violence of crime. And his books on killing was groundbreaking on this subject, including his other books on hunting, on spiritual combat and assassination generation. Lieutenant Colonel, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. It’s truly an honor to have you. Thank you. Aurelius. It is my pleasure. I’m a fan of what you’re doing. You know, and something right up front to tell you, I got my grad degree in route to go teach at West Point. You know, I’m a, I’m your basic BDI.
01:54
infantry soldier, you know, and I get to go to grad school and teach at West Point. I came up through the ranks. I’m an OCS grad. I love that place. But I had this amazing professor who would in developmental psych, we took a graduate class on post formal operations and PRJ sort of developmental psychologists. And he talked about formal operations where most adults are. But what’s the next step in post formal operations? And we did some reading.
02:21
and post-formal operations. And one was a Martin Luther King compiled reading, which is truly post-formal ops. And a man whose reading needs to be studied intensely and applied. But we also studied Marcus Aurelius’ medications. And he truly was an example of post-formal operations. was stoicism, classic stoicism, it was just, it transcended normal human beings and a person functioning at the next level.
02:51
A man who truly is about deeds, not words. Marcus Aurelius, you know, an emperor in the front lines. Just, just an amazing dynamic. And it pleases me to come full cycle back to Marcus Aurelius Anderson and your great work and the neat things that are going on there. So it’s, it’s a lot of fun. Well, I’m, I’m honored by your words. I’m humbled by that. And again, Marcus Aurelius was an emperor at the time. He was
03:17
almost like a god, could do whatever he wanted, yet he still deployed empathy, still deployed this capacity to try to look from the other person’s perspective. Again, on the dramatic lines, in the front, trying to lead, showing what needs to be done. Again, the last true great emperor of that time. So, you know, I told you, maybe we’ll start with a few examples of deeds not words. And one is, I have a name of Mike Neal in Arkansas, who was a fishing game officer.
03:45
And two white supremacists had murdered two cops in West Memphis, Arkansas. There was this dragnet of cops coming from every direction. And Mike Neal, the Game and Fish officer from 90 miles away, 100 miles an hour, is going to West Memphis. Part of this dragnet is going in. had to, you know, be on the lookout for their vehicle and who they were. And he pulls into the Walmart in West Memphis, Arkansas.
04:13
And these two idiots, a father and son, had murdered two cops at traffic stop. They just murdered these two cops and got on with their lives and went Walmart and went shopping. And the sheriff who was caught unarmed, the sheriff was a destroyed human being. He didn’t even run for reelection. The sheriff was crouching down behind their police car with the deputy beside him. And here’s an example of the sheriff caught without even having a gun. He was a destroyed human being.
04:41
deeds, not words. It’s a lifetime of preparation. It doesn’t just happen. It happens because you carry the gun, because you’ve done the training, because you’ve got the skills, because you thought through what you’re going to do. So Mike Neal, calls the local dispatch and says, I found your bad guys. got two of your cops pinned down behind a ground Vic in their Walmart parking lot. And they said, who are you? You know, they didn’t believe him. didn’t. And he said, I don’t have time for this. And his,
05:10
police truck, his game and fish truck is in the National Law Enforcement Museum. And the video was there to kind of see what happened from the Walmart parking lot of video. And he just floors it and he slams into the back of their van. And then he’s got his own AR, his own rifle, and he had his own rounds. He had selected his own rounds. He wanted the penetrator rounds. Yes, because he knew if he was going to shoot, he’d be shooting very often through vehicles.
05:39
And so he slams into this vehicle, he grabs the AR shooting through the windshield and through their vehicle and just a hail of bullets and they’re shooting back. And his windshield is just spider web with bullet holes. And there’s one cluster of holes right in the middle where he’s shooting out and another cluster. So he kills the one, he kills the other and they’re shooting back. There’s just this constellation of bullet holes. And he killed them both.
06:07
An amazing thing he was said, it was a law enforcement officer of the year, but he said something interesting that he told me shortly after the incident. He said, I’m the kind of cop other cops make fun of. He said, they don’t make fun of me no more. They don’t make fun of me no more. Things are coming unglued. Things are bad. Things are desperately bad. And we need Mike Neil. Now Mike Neil is a sheriff. He got elected to sheriff. He’s been in several other shootings, shot more bad guys than the flu vaccine.
06:37
Leads from the front a real Marcus Aurelius. He’s you know, here he is a sheriff but he’s out on calls and running and gunning and beloved by his people and wherever the action is there he is. Remarkable man, but those words. I’m the kind of cop other cops make fun of. They don’t make fun of me no more. So the motto is be that kind of person. Be that person. I’ll give you one little example. I’ve never done much in my life. You know our war was a cold war.
07:06
Our great achievement was Russia never came across that border. I’ve never done much, but I’ve, I’ve interviewed more people who’ve been in combat than anybody in human history. I’ve interviewed more people that are killed in combat than anybody in human history. mean, all my, all my work that I did for on killing came out while I was still in the army, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interviews. And then I’ve been on the road for over 25 years now over 200 days a year now in 22 years of war was still in Iraq and Afghanistan.
07:36
and these incredibly violent times and teaching military and law enforcement and every day for 25 years, somebody comes up more than one person comes up and gives me case studies and examples. And here’s what happened to me. Here’s what it was like for me. It’s this constant interactive feedback loop in which I teach and they, give this background, but my little example of these outwards was in Ranger school. And when we were doing Ranger school, the Fort Benning phase was quite lengthy.
08:05
And then they went to do on the desert phase and then back again. And it’s always hard. It’s always crazy. But we were at the end of the Fort Benning phase. We were exhausted. We’ve been sleep deprived. We’ve been food deprived. We’re just a bunch of zombies sitting around. We made it through the first phase of Ranger school and we got this big, tall Marine lieutenant. He was in the outhouse and he’s got field uniform.
08:35
He pocket by your thigh and he had his map in the cargo pocket and his map fell into the outhouse. And it was, he couldn’t reach it. It was way down there. At the end of the patrol, if you don’t turn your map in, if you’ve lost your map, you’re a no go. I mean, that is just the ultimate, you’re done ranger. You’re out of here. And he couldn’t get to his map and he’s in this pile of crap out of this outhouse, you know? And he comes staggering back and says, oh.
09:03
I dropped my map in the outhouse. need somebody to hold my legs. Well, they all kind of sat there like a bunch of zombies, you know? And I just, I just got mad. I said, you bunch of stinking Bravo Fox, you bunch of stinking dirtbags. He’s not asking you to dip in the shit with him. He’s just asking to hold his legs. Just hold him out. And my Ranger buddy, and I both come from the 82nd airborne together, Jim Boyle.
09:29
We’ve been through OCS and infantry officer base together and kind of big guy. I said, come on, Jimbo, let’s dip this Marine in the ship. And I told everybody, watch a bunch of stinkin’ dirt. And I didn’t care. I didn’t care. was just, I was angry. And so we grabbed this Marine, you know, and there’s this hatch in the back of the outhouse and he climbs in the hatch. We got him by the legs and he’s gagging a puke and he reached it down and
09:59
He gets his map and we haul him back out, you know, and he slaps it against the grass and we pour our canteens on it and slap it some more, you know? And so it comes time to turn the map in and he turns this map into the Ranger Sergeant. We all watch it. The Ranger Sergeant looks at it like, what is this? know, throws it away. And so then we did our peer of alts and everybody in the platoon peers everybody else. Who’s the best guy? Who’s the worst guy? And, and I thought I’m going to get peered out.
10:29
Everybody’s they’re going to, they’re going to crash me. told them what a bunch of losers they were. told them what a of dirt bags they were. They put a bunch of buddy Fox trucks and I don’t care. I’m done with these guys. And so we did our peer of vowels and about a half hour later, the captain who’s the tactical officer that follows us all the way through Rangers school, the tech officer calls me and he said, uh, Ranger girlsman. He said, uh, I’m going to have to split you and Ranger boil up on the.
10:58
on the next rotation and we’ll go to the mountains. Well, first I’m just glad I was going to go. You know, I thought I was out. I thought I’d been cleared out. That’s all. Why sir? Well, everybody in platoon tiered you and Boyle number one and number two. And we can’t have two such strong leaders together. got to split you up. It was the missed opportunity of a lifetime.
11:22
If I had just said, Oh, sir, that’s, that’s just cause we’d get our Marine in the outhouse. When we go to the mountains, we’ll just be another couple of drones. It was just an artifact of reason, but, but I didn’t think to say that, you know, it would have been legendary. It would have been legendary. But the lesson I learned there was when things are bad and Marcus things are very bad. Things are coming unglued in every direction. Crime.
11:50
Is it levels we never dreamed of? And it’s important to talk about that. Absolutely. Safety is an illusion, but it’s even more so today. Orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve ever seen. Crime is at levels we’ve never seen before. When things go bad and everything’s falling apart, it’s that the mic kneel, you know, that I’m the kind of cop other cops make fun of. They don’t make fun of me no more. It’s the Dave Grossman. It is moment of truth. You just the one shining insight that when things are going to hell,
12:19
People look up to that. What at other times you mock, what at other times you laugh at. But things come unglued. These are the times when the Marcus Aurelius is rising to the front. And these are those times. So let me lay a foundation for your listeners here on just how bad the situation is. I teach cops in all 50 states. I think I might be the only law enforcement trainer.
12:47
ever to be post certified in all 50 states. I’ve turned over federal agency, over a hundred universities and colleges. And there’s something going on out there that drives me insane. And what we do is we keep track of crime with the murder rate. All right. You know, there’s so many people murdered year by year per capita murder rate, but the murder rate is being held down by medical technology.
13:14
In the military, that’s why there’s so much transfer of our military skills into what’s happening in civilian life. In the military, we know that medical technology, know, a wound that nine out of 10 times would have killed you in World War II on the modern battlefield, nine out of 10 times is, well, the same thing is true in our streets. Tourniquets alone. 20 years ago, nobody carried a tourniquet. Today, every cop, every EMS, every firefighter, many citizens like you and I, we carry tourniquets everywhere.
13:44
So slap on a tourniquet, save a crime victim’s life, you’ve prevented a murder. And tourniquets alone have doubled the survival rate on the modern battlefield. And tourniquets alone have probably cut the murder rate in half. So imagine if somebody said, your grandpa made 25 cents an hour. You make $25 an hour. You’re a hundred times better off than your grandpa. Well, where’s the lie there? We all know about inflation. We all understand immediately.
14:14
But when they say, well, yeah, violence exploded in 2020, but it’s still not quite as bad as the 1960s. That’s your BS meter going off. Because comparing the murder rate between now and the 1960s completely breaks down. So we got one good data point. We got a UMass Harvard study came out in the year 2002 in a peer reviewed journal homicide that said between the 1960s and the 1990s.
14:43
medical technology had cut the murder rate to a third or a quarter would otherwise be. That is to compare the murders between the 90s and the 60s. Take the murders in the 90s and multiply by a factor of three or four to make a fair comparison. And the leaps and bounds, and even if they’re off by an order of magnitude, just say double the number of murders in the 90s to compare to the 60s and double it again to compare between the 90s and today.
15:13
We’ve been lied to. And you get it in one sentence, the number of dead people being held down by the medical technology, the murder rate misrepresents the problem. Boom, you get it in one sentence. The entire field of criminology, the entire field of criminal justice, the entire law enforcement community, they’re lying to us. Year after year after year, nobody wants to confront the reality of just how desperately bad it is.
15:43
You know, it went down in the 90s. No, it didn’t. It didn’t go up as much when we allow for medical technology. But we had what was called the Ferguson effect in 2015, 2016. The Ferguson riots is this twisted narrative that the cops are the bad guys. Please, any good listeners out there, we know the media lies. We know how twisted and distorted the media representation is. Please don’t buy into this narrative that the cops are out of control.
16:12
It is a sick, twisted, destructive narrative. The cops are the bad guys and the criminals are the good guys. That’s what you’re seeing in San Francisco. Whoa, whoa, whoa. They’re just stealing bread to feed their family, you know? Just let them take it and they’ll be happy. If we give them all a minimum income, are you happy with what you’ve got? Do you want more? Are you happy with what you’ve got? And this narrative that the cops are the bad guys, the criminals are the good guys, no civilization can
16:41
endure when a sizable portion of the civilization believes that the law is illegitimate and that criminals are the good guys. And the shoplifters are out there all Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread to feed their family. know, the guy that was elected senator in Pennsylvania, he said, you don’t understand in the prison, they’re all Morgan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption. They’re all Morgan Freeman. He believes that.
17:07
And cops, they’re all Denzel Washington in training day. It’s all training day. And the thing to understand is when we’re two, three, four, five, six years old, movies and television and dreams and real life are all jumbled together. It’s all real. You know, my son’s, you know, in his late forties, he asked my wife a little while back, he said, did I tell you that or did I just dream it?
17:35
She said, you must have dreamed it. I don’t remember it. So as adults, most of us maybe been there at some time or another, but with children, when they saw Shawshank Redemption and they were six years old, it was real. When they saw Denzel, maybe the most evil movie ever made, the most beloved black actor is a corrupt, violent cop. When they saw Denzel in Training Day and they were five years old, it was real. It actually happened to them.
18:01
And so they’ve got this belief that the law and order is bad and the criminals are, they’re all Morgan Freeman and cops are all Denzel Washington. And so this twisted image. And so that was the narrative of the Ferguson riots. But then the Minneapolis effect. In 2020, we have never seen more than a 12 % annual increase in homicides.
18:31
And that was one year in the 1960s. And then in 2020, there was a 30 % annual increase. But if we allow for medical technology, it actually is orders of magnitude worse than anything we have ever seen before. If 2021 had stayed the same, it’d be bad. But 2021, it’s up another 4%. And this twisted narrative in the movies, in the television, in the news now, by all these reporters,
19:01
They were five years old. watched, they watched training day. They watched Shawshank Redemption and it was real. And we got this whole population telling us the criminals are the good guys and the cops are the bad guys. And this is a cancer that eats at the very fabric of our civilization. Nobody can endure it. So just understand this crime is at levels never seen before. The entire field of criminal justice is lying, deceiving.
19:29
Did you tell them this? Oh, medical technology is holding down the murder rate. Why don’t we allow for that? Oh, yeah, well, you’re right. You’re right. We need to do that. And then it goes down the memory hole. Nobody wants to go there. It’s bad, Marcus. is orders of magnitude worse than we know. It is time to circle the wagons. Keep your powder dry. Train yourself. Arm yourself. Prepare yourself. We have never seen anything remotely like what’s happening. And there is no end state in sight.
19:57
that the culture continues to teach our people that the cops are evil and the criminals are the good guys. The shoplifter is the good guy and the store owner is the bad guy because he won’t let them steal stuff. And when they close stores in inner cities, they’re evil. They’re closing down these stores in these inner cities. They can’t make a living. They can’t pay their wages because people walk in and steal everything. And so the inner cities…
20:24
our civilization is being destroyed by this narrative, bottom line. It’s bad. It’s really bad. And safety is an illusion. And you must arm yourself, train yourself, prepare yourself for these definitely bad times. it is time for action, not words, deeds, not words. is time. I couldn’t agree more. And as you were saying, I know a lot of people that are armed that carry weapons, blades, extra ammo, but they do not carry
20:53
the tourniquet, they did not carry that extra cup of situational awareness. And those things alone are going to be the things that get you in a place where now you’re not going to be victimized. Now you’re aware of what’s going on. The way that we conduct ourselves in the face of adversity is an indication of how we will do everything else. So if you’re willing to go boldly forward with that idea, stop waiting for somebody else to do something. Guess what? You’re somebody. Step in, take action. Guess what? That emboldens everybody else. That’s what a leader does. They don’t look for a title. A leader leads. He steps in.
21:23
If you want to make a difference, don’t wait for anybody else. Don’t wait for a politician. Don’t wait for anybody. You step up and guess what? The people around you would do the same. Let me give you a couple of examples. know, I was in the airport in Atlanta. I spent my life in airports. was a million, two million miler on all the airlines. And there’s these big long escalators in Atlanta going down from the main terminal down to the rate the trains. Anybody ever been Atlanta knows these big long escalators go down. Well, I’m walking past and they’re screaming.
21:53
turn it off, turn it off, help, turn it off. And there’s like this balcony that looks down onto the escalator on three sides of it, you know, on two sides of it, and then one goes down. I mean, masses of people are looking down there. Masses of people are craning and watching and somebody’s gotten caught in the escalator down at the bottom of it, you know, and they’re screaming. And I’m the only one that walks up and hits the red button and turns it off.
22:21
You know, we pass that red button every time we’ve been up and down an escalator. We’ve always thought about what would it be like to turn it off? How would I do it? How am I going to go about it? You know, we pass a fire alarm. We always think about how would I go about it? What’s going to be involved with having to do it? But then I thought, now I got a flight to make and I’m out of here. You know, that was it. We’re out of here. Just another quick example. So I’m in Grand Island, Nebraska.
22:47
a state trooper picked me up in Omaha, Nebraska. We’re going down to IED, one o’clock in the morning, 120 miles an hour. And I get to my hotel room, one o’clock, and I crash. I got to train a bunch of cops there the next morning. And about an hour later, two o’clock in the morning or so, there’s just screaming and howling in the hallway. I stagger out my flannel pajamas, my little ranger t-shirt, and I open the door and say, what the hell’s going on?
23:17
And there’s a man and a woman wrestling with this guy. And this guy’s cream of bloody murder. And the woman says, we’re cops call 9-1-1. So I stagger into the telephone and pick up the phone. I dial operator said, call 9-1-1, two plain clothes cops wrestling with the suspect in front of room 222. I call 9-1-1. Okay. Boom. Then I stagger back out and I said, they’re calling help us on the way. And this entire corridor, 50 rooms.
23:46
Not one single person shoves their head out the door. Not one single person says what’s going on. know, at least if they tend to peeking out, slamming the door shut and double locking from the inside, you know? And I said, cops are on the way and she looks up and says, who are you? I said, well, I’m Colonel Grossman. I’m speaking in the conference tomorrow. She says, wow, I’m a big fan. I said, I said, cool. You want some help? She said, please. I dive onto this guy and this guy’s huge.
24:14
And her partner has got him in a headlock, they’re kind of head to head, both splayed out on their bellies. They’re both splayed out in opposite directions, head to head. He’s got the guy in the headlock. She’s got one arm and he’s waving around. He’s on his belly and he’s waving around with one arm and just slamming her back and forth with one arm. She’s kind of riding this arm like a bull ride, you know? And she says, she’s got my cuffs on its other hand.
24:37
and he’s got his hand tucked under his stomach, right? So I reach under his stomach, I grab the hand, I slam it in the small of his back. She brings the other arm around, I help her, boom, cuss, boom, we’re done. The guy just kind of, deflates, you know? And two uniformed cops coming down the hallway, and I said, I’m outta here. So I went back to my room, went back to sleep. So about a year later, I’m having lunch with a prosecuting attorney at Grand Island, Nebraska.
25:05
I just happened to be having lunch. told her about what happened. She said, I remember that incident. I remember that case. nobody mentioned you. She said, you had an away game. I said, an away game? What’s that? She said, that’s where you have all the fun and none of the paperwork.
25:28
You know, you don’t want to hang around and be part of the court case. You know, don’t want to hang around and make witness statement. Yeah. You don’t want to do any of that. And you get out of there. So, you know, there’s a lot of ways to go about this thing, but you you stand up and then maybe get on out of there. You know, you know, I always tell my cops, you know, at the end of the day, when you take a bad guy off the street, you know, just on your way home, park your vehicle on the overpass, step out of your vehicle for a minute, walk up to the bridge rail, look out on your city.
25:58
and let your teeth blow in the wind and feel damn good about who you are and what you do. then get out of there before they think you’re a jumper. But you know that we’re there for the moment of truth. We’re not there for the glory. We’re not there for anything but the fun. And this is what we live for. This is what we prepared for for a lifetime. We thought it through. You know, I’m a reserve cop. I’m always armed. But when I’m in airports, I’m doing my thing. I can’t be armed. But what do I do?
26:27
if somebody’s opening fire. Well, bad guys have tunnel vision too. Tunnel vision is almost the universal state of combat. And I have a plan. I travel with a leather vest and I’m gonna charge him with swinging that vest over my head. And as soon as he looks at me, gonna throw the vest, sidestep and charge again. And they’re gonna pull my belt off and swing that. And if he orients on me, I’m gonna throw the belt, sidestep and charge again. The act of sidestepping.
26:55
literally takes you off their radar screen. And the third one is to throw my cell phone and sidestep and charge. You know, I’ve got, I’ve got a plan, but, and I’ve rehearsed it in my mind. I’ve rehearsed it physically. Do you have a plan? Have you rehearsed it? Do you have it in your mind? What’s going to do? Have you ever thought what’s it to be like to turn off the off button on the escalator? You know, what’s it going to be like to pull the fire alarm? What’s going to be like? A friend of mine, Gavin De Becker, wrote the book, The Gift of Fear. And he’s got the, he does
27:23
He does personal security for, you know, Gavin the Becker and associates for richest people in the world. And he’s got this little thing. He said, you’re going to like this. So we had this little training site and they got a mock-up of a jet and they got the door there and you’re able to take the door in and throw it out. How many times have you thought, what would it be like? What would it be like to take that door off? How heavy is it going to be? I like to sit at the exit seat. I like my window exit seat. I never get tired of looking out.
27:53
but I want to be the guy who gets that door open. And my plan is to stand right there and help people out until the last one’s gone. But I’ve got a plan. And now I actually have had the chance to pick that door up and see what it’s going to be like, you know, whether they tell you to throw it out or put it on the seat or whether the new ones have, but the opportunity to have rehearsed these things, not just in your mind, but when you physically get that opportunity to do it, prepare for that moment of truth and live.
28:22
so that at the moment of truth, your deeds will speak louder than your words. It’s so true. And a lot of people, like you say, they have a plan, but they don’t understand that that plan has to be practiced because one, the practice puts it into our memory, our muscle memory, so to speak. But more importantly, that a plan is just an idea. So if we attempt it and then we go, wait a minute, this actually wasn’t the best idea. This wasn’t the best plan. It’s better to do that now than in the heat of battle because with that adrenaline dumps in our body and we think we’re going to have this higher cognition function.
28:52
Guys, it’s done. You were way out of there. Like you said, we’re just on that. We’re on that lizard mindset and we’re trying to just do this thing. Our motor skills are gone and our everything is going to be slowed down. So until you train yourself and prepare yourself, you’re literally setting yourself up. What do they say if you don’t rise to the challenge, you sink to the level of your training. There it is. That’s exactly it. And so that’s why we have to do that consistently all the time. And that’s, you know, it’s in my book on combat and listeners out there. I’m glad you liked on killing.
29:21
You go to Google scholars, scholar.google.com. Look up any published work, any published paper, any book, any article, and see how many times it has been cited in scholarly works. I was at an academic thing, there was an academic professor retiring, and they said his writings have been cited over 200 times in scholarly works. I thought, that’s pretty cool. How do you find that out? I found about, you
29:50
Google scholars, scholar.google.com. I looked up on killing and on killing last I checked it been cited over 3,400 times. And that’s really very unusual, extremely rare. There are those, know, you know, I looked up, you know, guns, germs and steel, which is like this, you know, this book we’ve all seen. And it really tops out the list at like, you know, 9,000 times or something, but it’s extraordinarily rare to get more than 3000.
30:17
So it’s been a great book and academically it’s important, but what’s really important is my book on combat. And I thought, what was it that heart of combat was the act of killing? And I wrote my book on killing. But then I found out that for those who fully prepared themselves, for those who are using deadly force in a legitimate situation, the act of killing is not really that big a deal. It’s everything that revolves around it.
30:44
tunnel vision, auditory occlusion, slow motion time. And then the aftermath when you re-experience an event, a re-experience in the event is not PTSD, it’s normal. How you deal with that will decide whether or not it becomes PTSD and you’ve got to separate the memory from the emotion. And the great tool that we found as you begin to re-experience the event, you go into sympathetic nervous system arousal, the way to stop it is a big swig of water.
31:13
And the big swig of water sends a message to the body that says we’re safe and it pulls you from fight or flight to feed and breed from sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous reactions. So all of that goes in my book on combat. My son’s got nine combat tours now. I literally wrote for my kid going to his first combat tour and it talks about tunnel vision and all these other things that we need. The bad guys have tunnel vision too. And that means explosive.
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lateral movement. When I teach, I’ve got a black belt in the jujitsu, the martial art of the firearm. I love the shoot. It’s my hobby. love to teach it. And part of the jujitsu, one of the drills you do is a sidestep and draw and shoot an explosive sidestep. And I tell people every draw should have a sidestep built into it just just explosively off the X explosive lateral movement. But it’s not going to happen unless you rehearse it.
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And that brings us back again, that quote from on combat. You don’t rise to the challenge. You sink to the level of your training. If you’re listeners again, and the book, what’s really fun on combat became a best seller during the pandemic in the medical community. did a podcast for emergency room doc, England’s ER docs, New York city’s ER doc. The book was embraced by the medical community and the height of the stress of the pandemic. And one doc said, you know, if it works in combat.
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It works in the stress of a hospital in a pandemic. so, forget listeners, you the one thing that allows us to shape our deeds and to shape our thoughts is good reading. And that’s the one I recommended, to understand the threat and understand the magnitude of the threat. Assassination generates. I invited to the White House as part of President Trump’s round table on violent video games, had a chance to give the president one book. This is the book, slid it across the table to him.
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I was invited to brief the vice president, Pence, very gracious, impressive man. I had just given one book, this is the book. It talks about how these crimes had never happened in human history, children committing mass murders, and now they’re everywhere, they’re worldwide. What is the new factor in these, and the media dynamics and the video games and people, oh, I played those video games, I’m not a killer. But when I was a kid, I’d never buckle my seatbelt, I’m just fine. Not every…
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kid with a seatbelt on buckle died, but most of the time had that seatbelt on buckle. Let every kid to play the game became a killer, but all the killers played the games. This is the new factor. Think like a scientist, think like a detective. Oh, it’s psychotropic drugs. Is that what’s happening in Mexico? When I teach, I teach this is global, that this is global. What’s happening in Mexico right now? What’s happening around the world? This is, this is worldwide. And so assassination generation, my most recent book, I’ve been wanting to do this book forever.
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is on hunting. And really, the single best way to prepare for combat is to hunt. And if you want to shape yourself and focus yourself, auditory exclusion, hunters know you don’t hear the shot and your ears don’t ring. Only other place where that happens is in combat. Soldiers learned that. and first off, how could we have had 500 years of gunpowder combat and not let people know the shots get muted in combat?
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How could we have had 50,000 years of hunting and never let people know, hey, the shots are going to get muted in combat? Why don’t we capture these things? so hunting is a great way to tap into the skills. You can’t understand combat. You can’t understand killing until you understand hunting, where it fits into who we are and what we do. But I’ll give you an angle on hunting. My little grandson, Aitso Little-Lemoy is in the Army now. My grandson,
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was seven years old and he went to deer camp with us one fall. He got out of school for a week. He’s grubby and dirty. He’s in deer camp for a week, running around with some of the other kids. That’s what deer camp is, yeah. Oh yeah. And he comes home and his mom said, what did you like the best? He said, gutting the deer. For a seven-year-old boy, just gutting that deer and all this stuff falls out.
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And this is the liver and these are the kidneys and this is the stomach and this is the heart and these are the lungs. And every living creature has this and every living creature smells like this on the inside. And we’re right there. We took the backstrap off and threw it on the grill and it meant food in your stomach right now. And everybody should have that experience. If the first time you experience what’s inside a living creature, some terrible crime scene, some terrible war zone, some horrible accident scene.
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You’ve set yourself up for failure. You should have confronted these things in the normal healthy cycle. Go harvest your own protein, go out there and harvest your own protein and bring it back and cook it and put it on the table and become part of the cycle of nature and become one with it. And the book on hunting in many ways, maybe the most powerful book I’ve written so far to really immerse yourself into this ideal of who we are and what we become. If you don’t hunt,
36:24
read the book. you do hunt, read the book. It will guide you on paths of where you come next to set the foundation to be a person of actions, not words. And it begins with how you spend your time and how you harvest your own protein and become part of the cycle of life and inherently who we are. We say in the book, we don’t, you know, there’s evolutionary or creation aspect. We just want to open it to everybody. We say, if you take it from an evolutionary standpoint,
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If our species been in existence for 24 hours, right up until the last six minutes, all we ever did was hunt. It’s all we’ve ever done. It’s who we are. It’s what we do. And we were given the forward set eyes of a predator and the gripping fangs of a predator. But we were also given the chiseled teeth of a rabbit and the grinding molars of a grass eater. We have always been in the middle of the food chain and happiness.
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is being at the top of the food chain. One person, and I’ll give you an angle on this now, we talk about gangs and gang membership and gang crime has exploded. There is a biological need in every human being to be part of a larger group. One person alone in the jungle is cat food. 10 people with spears is the alpha predator anywhere on the planet.
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And so our group is our nation. stand for the national anthem. We say the Pledge of Allegiance. This is our group. And what’s happened is when we dishonor the flag and we dishonor the anthem, when it’s cool to be unpatriotic, if you’re told our nation is inherently evil, then who will fill that gap? The gangs will fill that gap and they’ll blink for nine. The gangs are their nation. And that’s scary, because when your nation tells you to kill people, you do.
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We don’t understand that when it’s cool to be unpatriotic, when overpaid athletes dishonor the flag, dishonor the anthem, if it’s cool to be unpatriotic, then who will fill that gap? And the gangs that fill in that gap, the gangs of the nation, and the nation has ordered them to kill. And that’s desperately scary. We don’t understand how these gangs are rising up to replace our nation as their higher group.
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And the bad stuff that comes with that, another whole angle of the breakdown of our civilization and the media is feeding this destructive narrative that nobody can survive. So that brings us back though to the fact that, you know, 10 people spear is the alpha predator anywhere on the planet. We’ve been in the middle of the food chain and we don’t like being prey. It’s no fun being prey. We want to be predator. And that’s when we are most satisfying.
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And we see it throughout life when we talk about the rat race and we talk about, you know, the getting the lion share, there’s all kinds of hunting aspects of what we do throughout history and throughout a civilization. So for those of you that are listening, you how do I turn my words into deeds? How do I how do I become a person of action? It starts by how you spend your time, time at the range. You carry a pistol. Do you shoot it? You you shoot, you carry gun and carry your shooting gun. I shoot a full size weapon. I carry a full size weapon.
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You know, I don’t carry a little bitty gun around and then shoot a big gun in the range. know what? I got my back on the jiu-jitsu with this race gun, you see? No, no, no. Shoot, you carry gun and carry your shooting gun and have your hobby reinforce your survival skills and hunting. Just about one of the best ways you could do that. I agree. These are all warriors characteristics that overlap beautifully in Dovetail into who we are. Again, we talk about being present when I was on safari in South Africa, like
40:08
You had to be entirely present. You weren’t worried about your phone. You were worried about the smell. You worried about the change in direction of wind. You didn’t sit in a tree and wait for the, or a deer to walk under. You had to walk where you were going. You had to stalk that thing because first, if you’re not looking, you are prey. You’re not the top of the food chain. Second of all, if you don’t pay attention to everything else that’s going on, that dynamic, then again, you’re, you’re out, you’re a step behind. And when you’re hunting, if you feel like you’re one step behind, you’re not, you’re actually two or three, just like in combat, right?
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become the prey. You go from being the predator to the prey. You know, something you’ll like in this book, you’ll love it on hunting. We talk about the fact that hunting is the future of protecting the wilderness. And we use Kenya versus Namibia. Now Kenya has banned all trophy hunting, and they’re being slaughtered. That the game is being slaughtered. They’re called bush hunting. They’re out there.
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killing them for food. The poacher has become a hero locally, kind of the Robin Hood type character, you know, and they’re whacking them for food and their poachers and there’s no protection. They haven’t got the money of the resource detective. Namibia, on the other hand, has drawn a circle around every village and said everything that circle belongs to you. So that crazy American who will pay $100,000 to shoot that line, and by the way,
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That lion is at the end of the life cycle. And death by old age in nature is a slow, hideous, horrible death. If you don’t have a predator in nature to give you a quick death, death by old age means you’re eaten alive by insects and rodents for days. by the way, predators have no problem eating you while you’re still suffering. Only humanity really provides a humane death.
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And so that crazy American will pay $100,000 to shoot that lion who’s at the end of his life cycle anyway, will pay for the game wardens and the security. So Namibia is thriving. The game is flourishing and the population is thriving and only hunters have the money. You’re not going to pay $100,000 to go do a photo safari. You’re not going to pay $100,000
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to go and to watch nature. Only hunters have these deep pockets and these deep resources in America. You know, we don’t understand that those hunting licenses, millions of hunting license, you pay for your hunting license. You ever think what’s happened when millions of people send that money in and where that money goes? It goes to the preservation of wildlife. goes to the Department of Natural Resources, to fish and game, to all those other things that are out there.
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Only hunters are putting their money where their mouth is. The anti-hunters are contributing nothing. The people who aren’t hunting contribute nothing. It’s the hunters who have ducks unlimited in these vast wildlife areas being preserved. They pool their resources. They’re tipping in. When we buy that deer tag, we buy that elk tag, it is huge amounts of money that are going in. And all of a sudden, I drove down a
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piece of road in Pennsylvania a couple years back with the Pennsylvania State Trooper running down a piece of interstate and we were never out of sight of roadkill deer. There was always a roadkill deer within sight, know, in front of us, behind us. And he said, you know, the deer populations exploded. And all of a sudden when they’re outy and they’re bobo gets wiped out by a deer, all of a sudden when the deer eat their azaleas, all of a sudden
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They’re good with deer hunting. And reality has struck them and they realize there’s gotta be a balance in nature against these. And that’s what the hunter does. You’re gonna love the book on hunting as it taps into hunters as really the answer, not just to our personal wellness, to our spiritual wellness, to our wellness as a civilization, but also to the preservation of the wilderness in our hearts and in our land.
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the wildness within us and within nature. So you talked about being on safari. Most people can’t understand the economics and dynamics. And when you whack a critter, you might get the horns, you might get the head, but they get the meat and they get the hide and they get everything that comes from that. And everybody thrives because of that hunter. And the anti-hunters are doing nothing of value. They contribute nothing but harm to this global.
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dynamic that is that it’s really putting vast amounts of money into the into the ecology. Yeah, it’s so true. And we were talking also about this idea, like you’re saying about having laws or having certain legislations. look at what’s going on now, especially with violence in the United States, for example, and we see that people think we need more gun laws. They think that we need more of these things to protect us allegedly, but they don’t understand what’s really going on. If you look at the statistics, if you look at the places that have the highest amount of
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gun laws, there is also the highest amount of violence with guns. So can you explain to our listeners who may not understand what really happens if you try to lawfully stop people from carrying weapons that should lawfully have them? know, it’s funny when I present, I put a chart up, go to intentional homicide, go to Wikipedia, look up intentional homicide rates worldwide, and scroll down, and you’ll find a list of homicide rates worldwide.
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and it’s organized alphabetically. But click on rate, click again to get most violent nations on the top. And you will see, and it’s really the algorithm takes in new data on a daily basis and recomputes it. And you will see in real time, the most violent nations on the planet. And you know, it’s amazing the ones that float to the top and usually in the top 10 is Mexico. And I say, how those gun laws working out for Mexico?
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There’s one gun store in the entire nation. And when we look at all these violent nations, with very few exceptions, Brazil has limited gun rights. A few others that usually end up on the top 20 or so have limited gun rights. But when you look at all these nations, what you’re looking at is citizens who have been denied the right to protect themselves. Just look at the most violent nations on the planet. What they all have in common are these gun laws. How’s those gun laws working out for Mexico? When you
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outlaw guns, then the outlaws are the only ones with guns. And that’s really what’s happening. How the gun laws working in Mexico? Have they shut down the cartels? Have they shut up? No, they have done just the opposite. The answer is not take away rights. The answer is to give them more rights. And Switzerland is one great example held up. Israel is another example with armed civilization with extraordinarily low. And when we look at our homicide rates, we’re in the middle of the pack.
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We really have a lot more in common with Mexico than we do with Canada and ever more so. We’re really in the middle of the pack. People are like, oh, we’re the most violent nation. No, we’re not. Where’d you get that from? You know, we’re about number 80 out of 200 is the last time I checked. Take a look at the data and understand. But here’s what’s really happening. The media has this blood on their hands. The media has vilified law enforcement. They have turned criminals into heroes.
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They have fed these evil narratives to our children. They have fed these murder simulators to our children. The state of California, and this is, you like this, an assassination generation. In 2005, the state of California overwhelmingly voted to regulate children’s access to violent video games. Homo Hollywood, Homo Silicon Valley overwhelmingly voted to regulate, brain scan data.
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When kids play violent video games, they go on a fight or flight mode. We got the brain scan data. Boom. No doubt, no debate. Entire state of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, Arnold signed the law, and the video game industry fought all the way to the Supreme Court. They said, we have a constitutional first amendment right to sell any game to any kid at any age.
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You cannot stop us. You cannot regulate us any way, shape or form. Oh, regulate the guns, but don’t regulate the video. And it went to the Supreme Court and they conned seven old men that never played pong in their life. They conned seven Supreme Court justices in the overturning the California law. And they lied. They flat out lied. And it’s all in the book. But you understand they have this blood on their hands. Turning these killers into celebrities is one of the most evil things that media does.
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New Zealand had these mosque massacres. A guy livestreamed massacres in two different mosques. The Prime Minister of New Zealand said, this man did what he did for notoriety. We will not give it to him. She said, we will never show his picture. We will never say his name. New Zealand will not even give him his name. Boom! Finally somebody gets it. Turn him into nothing. Turn him into nobody.
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And the media is feeding these crimes. Look at the one we just had in this mall in Texas. Oh, what’s his past? What’s his history? What’s his background? What’s his beliefs? Show us this picture. Tell us his background. Oh, he’s kicked out of the army after, you know. Every loser on the planet knows if I commit some terrible crime, I will be famous and I will be immortal and everybody will see me.
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and they will know my name. And look what’s happened to this killer in Parkland, Florida. He wasn’t given the death penalty, which is just an abomination. There’s an online list of people who have been convicted of murder who went on to murder more. A list of all the victims. It’s pages, thousands and thousands and thousands of names. He’s put in jail for life. So he murders people in jail. What’s he got to lose? He put in jail for murder.
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He escapes and murders people. What’s he got to lose? And the list goes on and on and on of people who are murdered, who should have been executed, who they went on to murder more people. And that blood is on the hands of the people who failed to execute this person. now we see this killer in Florida, a lifetime of him. We can say his name. We can show you his picture. We all know him. won’t do it. In Canada, in Canada, it is against the law.
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to put the name and the image of a juvenile offender in the media. So every couple of years, some kid in Canada commits one of these crimes and rediscovers, oh, if I do this in Canada, I’d become nothing. I’d become nobody. It becomes against the law to even say my name and boom, it shuts it down. I do a lot of work in Canada. I tell my Canadians, the media hates that law. The media will not accept any restraint. They hate that law.
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want to get a change. And I tell my Canadians, don’t you let them change that law. It’s saving lives every day, but they can’t accept any restraint. They want to take your gun the way they want to restrict guns, but they will not accept the slightest restraint. I’ll give you an example too. In the 1970s and the 80s, we had cluster suicides. A kid commits suicide. We talked about it in the newspaper. We talked in the news and there’s more suicide. Talk about those. And there is no doubt.
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the media coverage of juvenile suicides creates more suicides. So the most cowardly thing the media has ever done is they got together in secret and they said, okay, we’re not gonna report juvenile suicides anymore. But they didn’t report on that. They didn’t report on the biggest news that they admit that they’re doing harm, that they admit that they have to restrain it. They will not talk about it. They have censored one of the biggest media stories they think.
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Howard’s in private said, okay, we’re not gonna do this anymore, but we won’t report on it. We won’t admit it. And we won’t tell anybody we’re doing it. The media has this blood on their hands and they desperately have to point the finger somewhere else. You’ve got to understand their motive. The whole gun thing is about them trying to point the finger somewhere else. And you will never understand that.
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until you understand the harm that they’re doing. They have the blood on their hands. They are the guilty ones. They are the ones that need to be. We don’t say that a child should be able to buy a gun and a child should not be able to certain video games. But you know, and the crazy part is when I, when I present, I say, what about those high capacity, some automatic military guns? No, we should have one of those. I threw it on a picture of M1 carbine, M1 carbine, 30 ground magazine, six million.
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were manufacturing World War II. They flooded the market. In 1948, any eight-year-old could walk in the hardware store, buy an M1 carbine, and be legal. Up until 1968, any kid in America could order a gun from the Montgomery Ward’s catalog, and the US mail would deliver it to their house. Now, that’s not the case anymore. We’re good with that. Kids can’t buy guns. We’re all good with that. We all agree on that.
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But what they’re saying is you have no restrictions on children. The most evil movies, most evil video games, the most sick, the minted misrepresentation. You cannot protect children. They can’t have guns and they can’t have automobiles or alcohol or pornography, but they can have this and you can’t stop them. And so this twisted evil media has got to point the finger somewhere else. And that’s what you’re seeing is them trying to deflect the blame and all your listeners out there.
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You’ve got to understand the deeper picture and the big picture of what’s going on out there. We’re in the middle of desperately evil times. And I’ll tell you what’s coming next. I pray that I’m wrong, but what’s the next terrible crime that’s going to make you famous? Well, daycare massacres. Belgium had a daycare massacre, completely media-inspired daycare massacre. China’s had repeated daycare massacres. Three weeks ago,
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Brazil had a daycare master. Guy got in a daycare in Brazil with an axe. Hacked four dead kids in a daycare in Brazil with an axe just three weeks ago. I pray that I’m wrong. But when that daycare massacre happens, know that in China they’re doing it with knives and axes and hatchets and daycares. Know that in Belgium, the guy got in a daycare with a butcher knife and hacked and stabbed over dozen babies to death. And when it happens, it’s not about the gun.
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It’s about them committing the next evil act. What’s left? Another elementary school massacre been done three times. What’s left to make you famous? What’s left? A daycare master since school bus massacres, a bus full of dead kids, a daycare full of dead kids. The media feeds this. We’re on a descent into evil. And you’ve got to commit ever more evil crimes and ever greater body count in order to get the fame that they desire. I really…
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I had the honor to write the forward to book called mass killers. By the way, stop calling them shooters. You’re a shooter. I’m a shooter. They’re killers. They’re murderers. It should make you angry every time they call a massacre a shooting. Shooting is an Olympic sport. Shooting is a constitutional and protected right. Shooting basket shooting shooting basketball makes you millions of dollars. Shooting a movie, shooting a TV show wins Emmys and Oscars.
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And every other context, shooting is an honorable thing. We’re taking these evil murders, massacres. When would we stop using the word massacre? And every time they use the word shooting for a murder, it should enrage you. a retired Secret Service agent, Mike Rock, came to me, said, Dave, I want you to write the forward of my book, Mass Killers. I said, Mike, you got me just because you didn’t call them shooters, right?
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He talks about the fame element in all these things, how they all have spreadsheets of all these crimes, how they want to get a body count and they want to be famous. And when the first one figures out, I’ll go to a daycare, I’ll wipe out a busload of kids. Uh, and we’ll say, they’ll blame it on the gun, whatever gun they use to commit their crime. That daycare master could have been done with an axe. It has been done with an axe repeatedly. It’s not about the gun. It’s not about what’s in their hand, it’s about what’s in their head and their heart.
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And the media feeding this dissent and ever greater acts of evil so that then they’ll be able to be famous. And so the media has his blood on their hands. Please understand the motive behind it. They got to point the finger somewhere else. It’s all about the guns. And it’s just this, this religious belief that we’ll pass a law and make the guns go in. don’t work that way. No, we’ve passed laws to make drugs illegal yet they’re everywhere. The black market explodes. can’t bring, you know, once we ring the bell, we cannot unring the bell once we’re there. So.
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How do we protect our children? How do we protect the schools? How do we protect these places? What can we do? Well, you know, I teach school safety, world one. And a couple of things that’s interesting. Number one, a juvenile committing a multiple homicide in their school never happened in human history. And now they’re everywhere. The first one was in Canada, a double homicide of the 1970s in Brampton, Canada, by a juvenile in the school. Now people will tell, what about this one?
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Listen to me, a juvenile in the school committing multiple homicide never happened in human history. Now they’re everywhere. First one was in Canada, like said, but this crime and it’s worldwide has never happened in a private faith-based school. The best thing you can do is statistically speaking is put your kid in a private school. I’m not saying that public schools are out or we should shut down public schools, but statistically speaking.
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Now outside threats see themselves getting double points for hitting that faith-based school. And that’s what we saw in covenant school in Nashville recently. And the outside, they’ve been given permission to hate people of faith. They’ve been given permission. These evil people are forbidding me from, having a double mastectomy when I’m six, you know, these evil people are preventing me from having my uterus taken out when I’m 12. You know, these, these evil people are stopping me from doing these terrible
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And so they’ve been given permission to hate people of faith and church massacres and church school massacres and church daycare massacres. But we’ve got to understand how to protect them. And regardless where there’s public or schools, another good factor. Nobody can keep track of all the solo homicides. But I think I have tracked on every multiple homicide in a school in America and most of the ones worldwide.
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And there has never been a multiple homicide in a school in America.
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with two exceptions. There has never been a multiple homicide in a school in America when there was an armed cop present in the building. Now the two exceptions were Santa Fe, Texas and Oxford, Michigan. In both cases, when the cop got there, not another kid died. Statistically speaking, the very best thing you can do is have somebody in that school who can shoot back. Now it’s more complex than that. If they decide to attack anyway, they’ll try to kill the cop first.
01:00:15
Right. And we need to understand that. But another thing that we’re doing worldwide is arming educators. Israel has had this model for half a century. You don’t take away rights, you give them more rights. You know, the first one to die in Sandy Hook Elementary School was the principal, Dawn Hochsprung, an unarmed woman who just charged the killer. What did she think she was going to do in this Covenant School massacre?
01:00:42
The first one to die was the principal, unarmed women just charged in the killer. I had an elementary principal tell me, she said, I will die for my children tomorrow. Give me something besides my keys in my hand when that day comes. And across America, we’re arming educators. 85 % of all the counties in Ohio have some armed educators.
01:01:09
They’ve been doing it for a decade with 100 % success. Now it’s hard to prove a negative, but if there’d been a massacre in a school with armed educators, you’d have heard about it. They were armed teachers and it didn’t do any good. 85 % of all the schools in Ohio had armed educators with 100 % success. Just about a year ago, a judge said they are not receiving sufficient training. They’re not qualified. So the state of Ohio shoved the law through that said, yes, they are qualified.
01:01:39
how the media reported, lowers the standards to be armed in the classroom. Did they report? Now, let me tell you about this Ohio model. It’s a three-day class. It sounds bizarrely small, but you have to be nominated by your fellow teachers. You have to arrive with entrepreneurship skills. You qualify at the end of it with a law enforcement qualification at the minimum standard for law enforcement, which is…
01:02:06
which is a very low standard. hope we’re all aiming for a higher standard than that. You know, we don’t want the minimum standard. want, we want to max it. But a reporter from the London times came and participated in the training. And he said in the London times on page five, buried and never mentioned again by anybody. said, I never thought I would say this after having participated in the training.
01:02:33
after having seen the people who are taking the training, and now support armed educators in American schools. Yeah, London Times, buried on page five and never mentioned again. So across America, where armed educators, Utah has had armed educators in almost every school in Utah since Columbine. You many armed educators in Utah, nobody knows, because it’s completely decentralized. The individual principal has the authority.
01:03:00
They believe there’s one or two people in every school that ought to be carrying a gun. If they don’t have somebody who ought to be, they send them to training and get somebody in every school. And they’ve been doing it for 20 years with 100 % success. Across America, there were two school districts in California with armed educators, been doing it for a decade, and California passed a law to stop them from doing it. I trained a school district in a major liberal New England state. They asked me not even say what state it was.
01:03:29
The superintendent was retired spec ops. Elementary school principal, was a military police officer with two combat tours and reserve cop. And it was just a no-brainer for her to be carrying a gun. It was a no-brainer for the superintendent to be carrying a gun. Superintendent told me, he said, I have the authority to authorize myself and my elementary school principal to be carrying a gun. But if they knew I was doing it, they would shut me down right now.
01:03:58
So this is happening across America, most of Florida, chunk of Texas. We’re doing this. And we just need to understand we’re being lied to. Every time they talk about armed indicators, it’s like some weird, wild, crazy thing. Utah’s done it for decades. Ohio’s done it for well over a decade with 100 % success. It cost nothing, nothing, nothing. So armed cops in the school, armed indicators in the school, these are things we can do right now. I had a police chief tell me.
01:04:27
He said, during the school day, he’s a small town in Heartland, America. He said, during the school day, a quarter of my city’s population is in that school. And they gathered from all around and come to the school in town. It’s a K through 12 school in the town. He said, if a quarter of my population was in a street festival, I’d have a cops all over. If a quarter of my most precious, vulnerable citizens is in one place.
01:04:56
and I can’t find a cop to be in that school, then they need to find another chief. And that says it all. Our law enforcement has got to understand that they have the tools to protect our children, and having somebody that can shoot back is as close to a guarantee as possible. Private schooling is also a guarantee, but remember the outside attackers that see them as getting double points. One of the things we’ve got to do, I was just in Texas, and we’ve got to put laminate film.
01:05:26
on a truly bulletproof, shatterproof laminate film on every door and the window next to the door. Definitely good luck to the door if you can shoot out the glass and reach and open the door. Everybody watched the Covenant School massacre. They watched the killer shoot out the glass and crawl in. Okay, we need laminate film. So Texas passed the law and provided the funding to put laminate film on all the glass on the door, interior door, exterior door.
01:05:55
or beside the door where you can shoot out the glass from region and open the door. But what’s happened is there’s this, this eight mil three M instead of, we’ll put window tinning on it and you throw a rock through it. You can kick it out. It’s, it’s, it’s a little bit of protection, but they’re all going for the minimum standard. Oh yeah. Okay. Three M will put this window tinning on. And I watched a demo where the guy threw a rock through this eight mil window then kicked it.
01:06:22
and then reach in and open the door. It was just only a tiny bit better than nothing. But so here’s the minimum standard. the doors locked, interior doors, exterior doors. And in Uvalde it was a perfect storm. Exterior door unlocked, interior door couldn’t be unlocked. Here we are after decades of school massacres, we can’t get them keep the doors locked. Well, you got to make it the law. Half the cost of this school building goes into fire code. Half the cost of building goes into fire code.
01:06:51
And the fire sprinkler system under pressure of the light on the building, electricity brought the fire code, fireproof material versus cheapest alternative. Half the cost of building a fire code is too much trouble to the classroom doors locked. Too much trouble to keep the exterior doors locked. What I tell people is this, and I share this with my chiefs nationwide, my mom loved her five kids, but she never buckled us up until it became the law. It became the law, boom, buckle up kids.
01:07:20
And until you make it the law, they’re not going to lock those classroom doors. It’s just like Seabed. And now they’re doing that across America. They’re making a state law to keep the doors locked. If you block the fire exit, oh, you block the fire exit. Well, why is that important? Because they’ll fine you. And then they’ll fine you again. And then they’ll shut down your building. You get the third violation of the fire code, they’ll shut down your building. And that’s the way it needs to be in the schools. You make them lock the door, they’re safe for a day. You make it the law, they’re safe from now on.
01:07:49
Half the cost of building goes in a fire code. It’s burned into our soul. And yet we won’t keep the stink of doors locked. So, you there’s things that we can do. One of the things we got to do is teach our kids and there’s evidence that run, hide, fight really does work. And I’ve given case models and examples, but we all remember stop, drop and roll, right? Stop, drop and roll. What are you doing? You caught on fire. Oh, stop, drop and roll. And we rehearse it, right? When they first started doing stop, drop and roll.
01:08:17
People said, you can’t teach that to kindergartners. have nightmares about catching on fire. No, they don’t have nightmares. Even if they did, it’s just not that big a deal. We all learn stop, drop, and roll. We learn what to do if we catch on fire. On the same way, we got to teach run, And we got to work right through what to do. So the simple things we can do that cost virtually nothing. The good laminate film on any glass on the door, beside the door, interior doors, exterior doors, this is chump change.
01:08:45
keeping the doors locked, make it city ordinance, make it county ordinance, and they’ll do it. Having somebody in that school that can shoot back, armed educators cost nothing. Our problem is not money. Our problem is denial. And the media doesn’t help by saying, we’ll fix this problem by banning guns. It’s not gonna help. The media, oh, we’ll fix this problem, just ban guns. The laws to lock the doors, to put laminate film that’ll do the job on the glass, the law to have somebody in the school that can shoot back, they’re not interested in that.
01:09:15
They have got to point the finger somewhere else. And it’s all about the evil guns. How about a law that stopped them from turning these killers into celebrities? Okay, for the first week, show us their picture, tell us their name, and then after one week, they become nothing. They become nobody. We never again, or we know who he is, we know his background, boom, now he’s done. He’s nobody, he’s nothing. And if they did that, we would bring these crimes to a screeching halt, boom, right now.
01:09:42
They have the power to end these crimes. All they’ve got to do is stop turning these killers into celebrities. And they won’t even admit there’s a problem. They won’t even admit the capacity for them to be helping to contribute. Their only answer is, oh, lock up your guns. Give away your guns. They won’t restrict their own rights in the least little bit to turn these killers into celebrities, to feed these mass murders. It’s bad. Things are crazy bad.
01:10:07
And it’s just going to keep getting worse. There’s light at the of the tunnel, but it’s going to take a generation to turn it around. It is. takes us to actually have actions and not words. And we were mentioning before how sleep deprivation is something that is just deleterious. And then if we combine it with cell phone use, right? Imagine like that’s the perfect storm of global epidemic of sleep deprivation. Tell us about all these things. And it’s the addictive video games. Now they don’t care that they kill people.
01:10:37
It is the cell phones being fed to children and they don’t care. It’s been watching TV shows, Netflix. Now get this. Netflix says their competitor is sleep. Their corporate policies deal your sleep. Now, now here’s the key. Sleep deprivation makes you stupid. 18 hours without sleep and you have impaired judgment equal to 0.08 legally drunk. 24 hours without sleep and you have impaired judgment equal to 0.10 above legally drunk.
01:11:06
Sleep deprived people do stupid stuff. And the ultimate stupid thing is suicide. You make a bad decision, never get a chance to rethink it. Alcohol and suicide have always been closely related. To intentionally take your life is extraordinarily difficult. I put you on top of a building and say, jump off and die. You will fight desperately to save your life. To intentionally take your life, you have to have profoundly impaired judgment. And alcohol,
01:11:36
and suicide have always been related. creates impaired judgment. You make a bad decision. But the most pervasive form of impaired judgment is sleep deprivation. a sleep deprived person, the military research tells us a sleep deprived person is up to five times more likely to take their life. Sleep deprivation is one of the greatest predictors of suicide. And we don’t even know the link. We don’t even know what’s there. One of the best meta studies on suicide says not only is sleep
01:12:06
deprivation, a key factor in suicide, it’s the most remediable factor. If we gave a damn about suicide, we gave a about teen suicides, if we gave a who-in-the-hell about suicide, the first thing we would do is address sleep deprivation. A cop came up to me during a break from one of my presentations. And we were talking about teen suicides and twin-agers, 10, 11, 12-year-old, twin-aged girls’ suicide rate has tripled per capita in just the last decade.
01:12:36
And, uh, and it’s true worldwide, every demographic, every ethnic group around the world, with the exception of the Amish, we’re seeing an explosion of suicides and it’s sleep deprivation. It’s a new factor in the equation. So a came up during a break in one of my presentations. said, I had a good girl. He said she was an age student. She said, dad, it’s embarrassing. You don’t have to take my cell phone every night. You can trust me. They said, okay. You know, family policy, cell phone with a charger and go to bed. Okay. Keep your cell phone. I trust you.
01:13:06
He said, a little while later, she took her life. said, my little girl, look at that. And we never knew the hell she was living in until we looked at the text messages on her cell phone night after night of ceaseless, relentless, vicious bullying. And he can’t just ignore that. We’re not wired that way. You see, it was heartrending to see her up all night long, night after night, trying to defend herself, trying to find somebody.
01:13:35
this centipede said, I understood my little girl was bullied to death. What I didn’t understand until now, she was sleep deprived, tormented and bullied to death in front of my eyes. And I let it happen. He said, I can’t ignore that text message in the middle of the night. How can we expect our kids to? He said, the one thing in an earth, I didn’t know for my little girl was take her cell phone every night and let her turn off all the bad stuff in this room. But then I’m going to tell you about this link.
01:14:05
between video games and cell phones and binge watching TV shows and suicide. And we’d, why did she do it? Why did she do it? There was no note. Was she sleep deprived? Oh yeah, she was on social media all night long. Was he sleep deprived? Oh, he played the new video game for the last week every night. And we start looking for sleep, boom, boom, boom. There it is. So sleep deprivation is a key factor in a global explosion, the new factor. And global explosion, suicides, teen suicides, twinage suicides around the planet.
01:14:33
Sleep deprivation is a key factor in traffic deaths. Decade after decade, we brought traffic deaths down. Airbags, seat belts, medical technology. Now, for the last decade, around the planet, everywhere, traffic deaths have exploded. Pedestrian deaths. Just people who wander into traffic and get whacked. Pedestrian deaths have exploded. Traffic deaths. Well, it’s sleep deprivation is the new factor. And we don’t understand what we’re doing. And then the opiate overdoses.
01:15:02
Why opiates? Prescription opiates have always been there. Why are opiates suddenly the drug of choice? Sleep deprivation creates chronic pain. You don’t get sleep. The tendons and muscles never fully relax. They get chronic pain. Like I heard all the time, give me a pill to fix. Don’t need a pill. You need more sleep. And he got to knock off the caffeine after lunch that stopped you from getting deep cycle sleep. Sleep deprivation is a key factor in Alzheimer’s and dementia.
01:15:31
overwhelming, irrefutable data. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. We have a decade of Alzheimer’s for sheet idiot. And so this global epidemic of sleep deprivation, the video game industry is never going to say you’ve been playing this game for 24 hours, time to get some sleep now. They don’t ever do that. Social media will never say you’ve been online for 36 hours, get some sleep now. Netflix will never say you’ve been binge watching shows for the last 38 hours, time to get some sleep now. They’ll never do that.
01:16:01
So my dad in 1941 was five years old when he first started smoking. He plunked a nickel on the counter, a, he couldn’t even look, he couldn’t even look over the counter, plunked a nickel on the counter at the local general store, bought a pack of boulder and tobacco and rolling, started smoking at five. Hey, candy rots your teeth, right? Cigarettes are for you. They believe that. Cigarettes are good for you. Cause here’s a Viceroy ad says, as your dentist, I’ve them in viceroys.
01:16:30
More doctors smoke Pamels and you know the cigarette, you know, so cigarettes are good for you. It’s his money He wants my cigarettes. Oh my god, and and and they didn’t care that they were killing kids All they wanted to do was sell their product. We didn’t ban tobacco We said we stopped selling this stuff to children and admit that it can do harm We don’t want to ban these things All we’re saying is is let people know the harm that is doing Apple will never tell you that cell phone has a very high possibility of killing your kid
01:16:58
But they’ll try to drive with it. They’ll be sleep deprived with it, suicide and traffic deaths. And I’ll tell you that. And your kid needs a cell phone when they’re eight years old. Your kid needs a cell phone when they’re five years old. They don’t care about the harm that’s been done. They just want to sell their product. And so we’re in the middle of this epidemic of sleep deprivation and the very people we depend on for information are centering the news. Do an online search for suicide and sleep deprivation. Boom, come right up. Online search for suicide and…
01:17:28
for traffic deaths, boom, irrefutable data. And then look at online search for pain and sleep deprivation, and then make the link to the opiate epidemic. Think like a detective, think like a scientist. What is the new factor? So again, the media is contributing factor. And what’s their answer? Oh, get rid of guns. Suicides up, get rid of all the guns, and then you won’t have gun suicide.
01:17:53
Their answer is one simple answer is the great lie, say it long enough and loud enough and people won’t believe it, is the big lie. We get rid of the guns, that’ll fix suicide. We get rid of the guns, that’ll stop the mass murders. And it’s the big lie. But they have this blood on their hands. They are destroying our civilization. They’re destroying our children. They’re destroying childhood. And they don’t care. And so we’ve got to get the information for ourselves. I’ve got a book coming out probably in a year and a half called On Sleep.
01:18:21
the tragic impact of a global epidemic of sleep deprivation. And it may be the most important one I’ve done so far to understand what’s happening. Tragic times in front of us, brother. And we got to rally. You one last thing as we start, one of my most recent books is on spiritual combat. Because in the end, we’re in a battle against forces of evil. And if you are even remotely interested in the spiritual aspect, a faith-based perspective, Christian Book Award finalists, we’ve really been able to touch lives with it.
01:18:50
And then the one that came out the year before that, also Christian Book Award finalist, was a bulletproof marriage, 90-day devotional, sheep, dog, and spouse. And we’ve got over 700 five-star reviews on Amazon. It’s really kind of cool. And the way it’s touching lives and, you know, we can leverage our faith into our relationship as part of our marriage. And we can leverage our faith in our battle against evil. And again, that’s the ultimate level, when we take that spiritual level and we look at that big picture that puts it all in perspective.
01:19:20
It’s so true. And literally every choice that we make either gets us closer to defeating this adversary or further away. And we have to understand that and take that accountability and responsibility. Lieutenant Dave Grossman, Lieutenant Colonel, I could speak to you for hours. We have spoken for a while. I know that I want to be respectful of your time. So where can we find out more about you? Where can we get your books? Where can we see where you’re speaking? Where can we learn more about what you’re doing and your incredible work? My website is grossmanontruth.com. Grossmanontruth.com.
01:19:50
We got our books are available there on Amazon through a couple of things only available new from us that we do get a couple of the things that we do. The opposite of evil is love. Evil is the absence of love, like darkness, absence of life. And we defeat evil with love and we defeat fear with love. We’re not given a spirit of fear, of love. You know, I do a thing, but my presentation is all done on big easels and I write on them with these big markers and.
01:20:17
They become kind of collectibles and we’ve got our love on the website. But I want to show you one other thing that I kind of like. All of these back here were gifts. And framed in the corner there is a little meme that we sell, this little card. It talks about the giving of a weapon. And it talks in brief about how giving a weapon implies your desire for the safety and well-being of the recipient.
01:20:46
It implies your confidence in their wisdom to use it wisely. And it implies your desire to make the world a better place by putting this tool in the hand of a virtuous honorable person. We say, but remember, you are the weapon. Everything else is just a tool.
01:21:11
And so that’s, that’s kind of the dynamic, you know, we’ve got that on our website, you know, Grossman on truth.com, a lot of other angles, so much that we’ve just brushed over here today, but it’s really my honor, brother. It’s iron sharpens iron. To be able to talk to you and to share with all your great listeners out there. And, uh, it is just so cool to be able to do this with you. And like I said, I’m a fan of what you’re doing.
01:21:34
When I saw that name Marcus Aurelius, I asked him, were you born with that? What a great gift to give a child at their youngest age that name. Ah, how cool. It’s an impossible moniker to live up to, but I endeavor to be worthy of it every day. And that’s what it was there for. So I look forward to seeing more of what you’re doing to get your new book when it comes out. I hope to see you speaking somewhere in person so I can shake your hand in person, my friend. I appreciate you for it.
01:21:59
Everything you do. We’ll get back on again and we’ll talk some more about it. I can’t wait. All right. God bless and God bless America. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
