State of the Second

State of the Second hosts Kaylee and John sit down with Chris from Ballistic Dummy Lab, the company behind the human-form ballistic dummies that have become a fixture in firearms YouTube. Chris explains the origin: he and his wife came from a special effects makeup background in film, and about 15 years ago a show called Deadliest Warrior asked them to build a ballistic dummy. It stayed a side pro...

YouTuber and recent Gundy Award winner Liberty Doll joins State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee in Myrtle Beach to talk about how she went from a Massachusetts gun owner who felt like she had to keep a secret identity to a full-time creator in free America. She traces her start to a Facebook page and blog, built because her family called her a terrorist when she got into gun rights, then a You...

John and Kaylee sit down with Frank and Perry from Right to Bear, the self-defense legal protection program born out of a conversation with Palmetto State Armory. Both guests are insurance agents by trade, 36 years in the business, and they explain how a question they asked PSA about protecting its own customer base turned into a company. They started Right to Bear as an insurance product, scrappe...

State of the Second sits down with Jason, the CEO of Watchtower Firearms, to answer a simple question with a complicated answer: does American made still matter? Jason traces his path from small-town Moss Bluff, Louisiana, through the Marines and a recon battalion, to work in Washington on foreign military sales and the Pentagon, then an executive role at Raytheon. When what he calls the wokeness...

This episode of State of the Second brings on Jake from TN Tactical, a budget-focused firearms YouTuber from East Tennessee, to talk through the ATF's private sales final rule and what it could mean for everyday gun owners and small creators. Jake started his channel in August 2021 to make content that's about half entertainment and half information, built around budget-friendly firearms...

John Lovell, founder of Warrior Poet Society, joins State of the Second to make a direct case that the fights gun owners care about are being lost upstream, in the culture, before they ever reach politics. He describes Warrior Poet Society as a values based community of people committed to defending others, built around two archetypes: the warrior and the poet. He explains why he started capturing...

Freedom Ordnance's Josh joins John and Kaylee to talk about the new product the company brought to SHOT Show: a trigger actuating grip that works on the same principle as a Gatling gun. Josh walks through why the launch stalled. They had 1,000 units on the shelf with parts to make 5,000 and planned to launch around Black Friday, then found their insurance policy excluded the product. Digging...

Dead Air's Mike Pappas joins State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee to clear up what most people get wrong about suppressors, starting with the Hollywood myth that they make a gun whisper-quiet. As Pappas puts it, that sound is "a made up sound effect." He walks through the real tradeoffs of owning a can, the added length, weight, heat, cost, and the wait time, and explains why t...

State of the Second host Kaylee and her co-host sit down with Ben, the CEO and founder of Otter Waiver, to talk through one of the quieter fights in the firearms industry: getting a marketing message to land at all. Ben explains how his company grew from a digital waiver tool into Otter Technologies, adding Otter Text after gun ranges and retailers kept getting kicked off mainstream texting platfo...

State of the Second sits down with Jordan from Kill Flash Photography, an engineer turned firearms content creator who built a marketing business out of taking photos of guns. Jordan came up in the defense contracting world, decided he was being too technically minded, and bought a camera. He started an Instagram he never expected to run, since he hated Facebook and didn't even have a persona...

Ari from Primary Weapon Systems and Lone Wolf joins State of the Second for a wide-ranging conversation about the human side of the firearms industry. Ari opens with a backstory he says he was once too ashamed to share. He dropped out of high school at 16 to help his family after his stepfather left and his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. He ran the family business importing goods from th...

John and Kaylee sit down at SHOT Show with Josh from AR15.com (arfcom) for a candid look at how the largest gun forum online came to be and what it does now. Josh walks through the full history. Before social media, everything lived in forums, and arfcom started as a group of friends who liked owning ARs. It grew out of an email list of roughly a thousand people doing group buys with companies lik...

John and Kaylee sit down at SHOT Show with Ken Ross of Primary Arms for a conversation that starts with optics and ends up somewhere bigger. Ken walks through his path into the industry: born in Michigan, he started as an instructor about ten or eleven years ago, realized he didn't know what he was doing, took classes from a number of talented people, then worked for Athlon Outdoors magazine...

Rachel from Night Fision joins State of the Second and clears up the name first: people hear it and assume night vision, but the company makes sights, not night vision optics. Night Fision builds tritium iron sights and optics-ready backup sights, and Rachel argues they make the best sights on the market. She traces the company's roots to Kamenga, which has been around a little over 30 years...

CZ-USA's Daniel joins John and Kaylee to make the case that the Second Amendment was never about hunting, even as hunting becomes one of the strongest on-ramps into gun ownership. With about nine years at CZ, Daniel walks through a product line that covers pistols, competition pistols, rimfire and centerfire rifles, and shotguns, and, after recent acquisitions, AR-platform rifles and revolver...

Print Shoot Repeat, the masked YouTube creator known as PSR, joins State of the Second at Shot Show to talk about how 3D printed firearms became his life's work. He explains that he wasn't an avid gun owner before the pandemic. He owned a skeet-shooting shotgun, then bought home defense guns after a neighbor going through a mental health crisis made threatening comments. Taking apart his...

State of the Second sits down with Kevin from GSL Technology, a Michigan suppressor maker that has been building cans since 1985. Before suppressors, GSL did aerospace machining with titanium and inconel, and Kevin says a couple of components the company built are still on the moon. From its Jackson, Michigan facility west of Ann Arbor, GSL handled all the production for GemTech before Smith and W...

Langdon Tactical's vice president Amy Langdon joins John and Kaylee to talk about the part of gun ownership that does not get enough airtime: the on-ramp. Millions of people have become new gun owners over the last several years, and Amy's view is that the community keeps losing them at the door. She breaks down what inhibited her own concealed carry journey, from being handed a heavy re...

Jamin McCallum, co-founder of Palmetto State Armory, joins State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee to trace PSA from a garage idea into what he calls the number one firearms and accessories website in the world. A CPA by training, Jamin came home from his second deployment with a traumatic brain injury that left him unable to focus on tax work. He quit, told his wife they were going to start a g...

Banks and card networks now have a way to flag who is buying from a gun store. In episode 18 of State of the Second, hosts John and Kaylee sit down with Greg from 2A Commerce to walk through how that happens and what it means for gun owners and gun businesses. Greg traces the pressure back to Operation Choke Point under the Obama administration, when banks began reclassifying firearm transactions...

Mike O'Dell from CMMG joins John and Kaylee for a long-form conversation that runs from the company's roots to the front lines of the fight over gun rights. Mike has been with the CMMG companies for a little over 11 years, with a hire date he never forgets because it landed on 9/11/12. He walks through his path into the industry: a local gun shop where he became assistant manager and the...

State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee sit down with Rapid Fire Rachel, one of the original female gun influencers, for a conversation that runs from machine guns to motherhood. Rachel explains that her social presence started almost by accident. She was against getting an Instagram at first, then posted her family's Mother's Day at the range tradition and woke up to a phone full of n...

John and Kaylee sit down with Ryan from Rix Optics for a conversation that runs in two directions: the politics squeezing hunters and the technology changing how they hunt at night. Rix is a brand under the parent company Visor, which used to be a US distributor for a thermal and night vision manufacturer. The team set that aside to build its own line, launching thermal binoculars about two years...

State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee sit down with Alex Brodsky, a marketing professional who has spent about eight years across the firearms industry, including time working for an 80% company. Born in the former Soviet Union and now living in California, Alex brings a perspective most guests don't. He left right before the Iron Wall came down, and he uses that history to explain what l...

In this episode of Gun Owners of America's State of the Second, hosts Kaylee and John sit down with Mike from Sylvan Arms, a South Carolina manufacturer of firearm parts and accessories. Sylvan is best known for its folding stock adapter, now in its fourth generation, but Mike walks through a much wider catalog: a tool-free QD Picatinny-to-M-LOK rail adapter, a full suppressor line, and new G...