State of the Second

State of the Second hosts Kaylee and John sit down with Eddie from Elite Tactical Systems (ETS) for an episode that runs from magazine engineering into the maze of laws gun owners face when they travel across state lines. Eddie has worked in the firearms industry for about 20 years, including stints at Remington, AOB, Timney, and Crimson Trace, and he explains why he left big companies for a small...

In this episode of State of the Second, hosts John and Kaylee sit down with Keebler and Seth from KCI USA, the magazine manufacturer working to rebuild a brand that once carried a rough reputation. KCI makes magazines for AK, Glock, 1911, AR and more, runs a family-owned factory in South Korea, and quietly produces magazines for about 25 OEMs that you would never know made the mag. The guests are...

Faxon Firearms didn't set out to build guns. Bob Faxon explains that the company came out of a manufacturing family that had been machining since he and his brother were teenagers, and it pivoted toward firearms only after work dried up about twelve years ago. Bob's first trip to SHOT Show humbled him out of the AR15 plan. Months later, watching a Discovery Channel top-ten battle rifles...

Elijah from Infinite Defense joins John and Kaylee to tell the story behind Infinity Targets, the self-healing rubber targets he started building as a college engineering student. He couldn't afford the $500 rubber-dummy setups on the market, so he ran his own material testing out in the desert, figured out a manufacturing process, and taught himself business off Google. After shutting down d...

John and Kaylee sit down with Alan, VP of Public Relations and Brand Management at GunBroker, for a tour through the guns that Hollywood turned into legends and the real-world market that forms around them. GunBroker is a broker, not a maker or a seller. As Alan puts it, the company connects the buyer and seller, which means staggering inventory passes through the site, from commodity Glock 19s, P...

John and Kaylee sit down with Chris from Krate Tactical for an episode that runs from knife history to the grassroots fight for the Second Amendment. Chris has been in the firearms and self-defense industry for five years, most recently at the US Concealed Carry Association before joining Krate in October 2024. He walks through the company's origin: founders Mark and John started Krate Tactic...

State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee sit down with Brian from Caliber Coffee, the coffee brand that now sits under Tactical Eats and shares ownership with Palmetto State Armory through JJE Capital. The conversation opens loose, with rapid-fire coffee questions, brewing-method debates, and a long, funny detour into 90s snacks, kids, and impulse buys. Then it turns to the real reason Caliber ex...

The Armed Attorneys join host John on GOA's State of the Second to walk through what actually happens after a self-defense shooting, and why so many lawful gun owners end up in handcuffs. Emily and Richard are firearms attorneys in Texas and former felony prosecutors for Galveston County. They explain that self-defense is a justification that excuses what would otherwise be a crime, which mea...

Adam, the founder of GoonTape, joins host John on GOA's State of the Second to explain how a heat-resistant athletic tape became a brand with a community behind it. The product started during COVID. Adam was doing enterprise software sales, commuting four hours a day, and hated it. He trained at the Executive Protection Institute, ran black-tie security gigs in New York City, then watched tha...

State of the Second host John welcomes the crew behind Whiskey & Windage, the cigar-smoking, bourbon-drinking trio of Adam, Mike, and Matt Brass. The conversation opens with a Blackout Coffee rapid-fire round (time travel, aliens, firearms movies, what they're binge watching, and current EDCs) before settling into the real subject: what their show is and why they do it. Mike, the founder,...

Cameron Hillman, president and CEO of Devil Dog Concepts, joins hosts John and Kaylee on State of the Second to tell the story of a company he calls an accident. A former Marine who served as an MP and canine handler, he went into law enforcement and spent about five years on a SWAT team in New York. He got sick of fighting with the standard AR charging handle while running failure drills in glove...

United Patriot Coin's Chad Burge and Clay join host John on State of the Second for a plain-spoken primer on buying gold and silver. The company was started by brothers Scott and Glenn Hynen, farmers in the agriculture industry in Kansas who had bought precious metals for years and made the same mistakes a lot of first-time buyers make. They built an education-first company around helping cus...

Host John sits down with Alex Costa, owner and CEO of ANR Design, the New Hampshire shop behind Kydex holsters, mag carriers, a farmed-out nylon line, and the ANVL aluminum optic-mount and gun-parts brand. Alex walks through how the company grew from a broke college grad pressing Kydex in a basement into an 11-person manufacturer making white-label holsters for PSA, HK, SIG, FN, Beretta, and other...

Michael Cox of Cox Arms USA joins host John on GOA's State of the Second to explain why he left a brick-and-mortar dealership of about 15 years in Queen Creek, Arizona to build his own AR-15s. The breaking point was COVID. As prices climbed, the quality of the rifles he could get fell, and some would, in his words, fall apart in a box. He decided he could do it better and give the customer wh...

State of the Second host John sits down with Dave from Hi-Point Firearms, the man some industry circles call "Handsome Dave" and the voice behind the Yeet Cannon. Dave has worked with Hi-Point for about 15 years and walks through what most people get wrong about the brand. Hi-Point isn't a single company. It's a brand built on several outfits: MKS Supply handles marketing and d...

In this episode of State of the Second, host John sits down with Ton Jones, Director of Operations and Marketing Director at Firebird Targets and a film and television veteran who has worked on shows like Auction Hunters, Man vs Wild, Ink Master, and Shark Week since 1996. After a Rapid Fire round that covers pineapple on pizza, Bigfoot, and a Ruger PCC Ton bought at 9:30 the morning of the record...

Jordan from Gideon Optics joins John on State of the Second to talk about why innovation in the optics and firearms space is harder than the crowd thinks. Jordan started in the industry about 11 years ago selling parts at gun shows and online, with JSD Supply as his original business and brand, then moved into optics after the laws around privately made firearm parts started to change. He wanted a...

Season two of State of the Second opens with Palmetto State Armory's Cameron, the company's Director of Branding and Product Management, who started at PSA nine years ago as a compliance manager in manufacturing and worked his way up through corporate compliance, quality control, and running the manufacturing floor as plant manager. PSA is the season's sponsor, and the conversation...

John Crump of AmmoLand joins State of the Second to talk about the time the ATF tried to silence him. Crump writes about laws, court cases, and government leaks, reporting on anyone who wants to infringe on the right to bear arms. He breaks down the auto keycard case, where the ATF prosecuted two people over a card with an outline of a lightning link on it. The dimensions were not even correct, th...

State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee sit down with Trey, a precious metals expert with more than 30 years in the business who has run three of the largest retail precious metals companies in the country. The conversation connects two things that look unrelated at first: guns and gold. Trey's argument is that both come down to protecting your freedom. Just as the Second Amendment guards y...

In State of the Second 1x68, hosts John and Kaylee sit down with 2A content creator Katie Stone, who runs Stone Second and focuses almost entirely on short-form video. The episode opens loose and personal, with a rapid-fire round covering Katie's bucket-list gun (a tank), her zombie-apocalypse loadout, and a long, funny detour into pizza and chili. From there Katie tells the story of how she...

Cheryl Todd joins hosts Kaylee and John on Gun Owners of America's State of the Second to make the case that gun-free college campuses leave students unprotected for no good reason. Todd wears many hats. She co-hosts Gun Freedom Radio with her husband, serves as Arizona State Director for Women for Gun Rights, is vice president of the AZCDL and president of the AZCDL Foundation, and sits on t...

Jeremy Dedmon of XTech Tactical joins hosts John and Kaylee for a conversation that starts personal and ends political. Jeremy didn't grow up around guns. His family came from public service, and his late grandfather, a former police chief and city manager, believed civilians didn't need modern firearms. Jeremy entered the industry almost by accident, taking over an injection-molding acc...

John welcomes Jeremiah, the founder and inventor behind Slide Fire and the bump stock, for a different kind of State of the Second episode recorded from John's home studio. Jeremiah lays out his origin story: a retired Air Force veteran who grew up as a dirt farmer in West Texas, he created Slide Fire Solutions in 2010 with a goal of selling 500 units in the first year. He put a couple of vid...

Ben and Will from Forge Relations, the marketing agency behind the Gundies, join State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee to trace how a fun idea built around The Office's Dundees grew into a black-tie award show in a Las Vegas theater. They walk through the arc: year one was meant to be a simple, fun award show, then COVID forced an evolution into a range day, a drive-tank experience, and a...