The Everyday Marksman

People often think old weapons are automatically obsolete, and don't have much place in your safe as anything other than a collectors item. In today's episode, which is admittedly a little bit of a rant, I'm going to make the case why "obsolete" weapons might still have a real world role to play.

Too many people are looking for the easy out, as if finding the one perfect piece of gear, or just the right training technique, will take them to the next level of capability. But that's not true. Success and failure are lagging indicators of our choice to make deposits or take withdrawals from our internal investment account.

I sat down with a few of our community members who recently competed in events put on by Waco Tactical Fitness. I'll be doing a similar tactical biathlon event later next month, and I was curious about equipment, training, and lessons learned from the events.

While reading through some of Coach Dan John's work, I came across a philosophy for breaking your annual training cycles. It's impossible to do everything well all of the time- something must give. Instead, we should think of our training, all of our training, from two perspectives: the bus bench, and the park bench.

Like many enthusiast topics, we've got a problem with flex culture. What is that? Today we're talking about it, how it manifests, why its a problem, and what you can do to combat it.

Everyone loves talking about optimization. Entire industries spend huge amounts of money convincing you that their new whiz bang gadget or service will take you to the next level with no additional skill required. Today I'm putting a stake in the ground to tell you that optimum is a myth, and our constant pursuit of it only detracts us from focusing on what's actually important for our success.

To start of 2023, I wanted to take a moment to look over where we've been over the last eight years, some of the impactful decisions I've made along the way, and how that's affecting where were going next in 2023 and beyond. Thanks for being a part of it!

In this episode, I once again talk to my very first guest: John Simpson. We dig deeper into the fundamentals of learning good marksmanship, past Army programs, the importance of learning the right lessons in training, and more.

The first handgun purchase is usually a daunting decision, because there's a lot of technicality mixed in with personal preferences of the individual giving the advice. This is my attempt to simplify it down a bit and focus on the most important things.

This week I sat down again with Ilya, the Dark Lord of Optics, to answer some lingering questions I've got about prism optics. I wanted to understand how they work relative to traditional rifle scopes, and some of the tradeoffs required when designing them. During the conversation, we also wandered over how rifle scopes work in general, reticle color selection, durability, engineering tradeoffs, a...

Today we're defining the Everyday Marksman minimum rifle standards. This is a two-part test of both speed and marksmanship fundamentals. I want to outline the test itself, why I defined this requirements, but also what I left out.

In this episode, we build on the concept of the minimum capable citizen caught in Scenario X by talking about medical. Both what you need to know, and what you should always expect to carry. I also discuss some of my favorite first aid kit pouches for good measure.

A series of recent events reminded me of the importance of actually checking your gear for fit, function, and purpose. It doesn't have to take long, and it pays dividends when you actually have to use your stuff for competition, personal defense, or worse. Unfortunately, many people just don't know where to start, so they begin and end with mounting pouches on their kit, snapping a few photos, and...

Today we continue on our Scenario-X series by touching on fitness. It's a core pillar of The Everyday Marksman philosophy, and in this episode I'm giving three domains where it really makes a difference. Only one of them actually has to do with accomplishing the mission at hand.

Gear articles are among the most popular on the site, so it shouldn't surprise you that I get a lot of questions about what chest rig to buy, how to set up belts, or whether or not someone really needs a set of plates and night vision. When just starting out, an aspiring prepared citizen is easily overwhelmed by the myriad of choices out there, not to mention the cost of actually acquiring it all....

When we start talking about bad situations and what we think we're going to do, most people in the shooting world immediately think of firefights and raids. But that's not reality. There are far more mundane concerns that we're going to spend our time worrying about. Int his post, I'm proposing a system for quickly communicating defensive posture to yourself and the world.

I've been having a lot of conversations lately about the right mixture of skills, equipment, communications, and other elements of a theoretical emergency situation. With that, it's time to revisit Scenario-X, our fictional disaster first introduced in the load carriage series. In this post, I want to build out my thoughts a bit more and discuss some of the nuances and reasoning behind it. Why? We...

I dislike the whole New Year's resolution ritual, but that doesn't mean I don't do some self evaluation and pick some new things to focus on. In this episode, Allison and I discuss my primary focus areas for 2022, how they will affect the site, and why you should probably consider focusing on these things too.

The Tactical Games are part of a growing trend with combining physical fitness with marksmanship in competition. I've seen them talked about quite a bit over time, and I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Green and his wife Pascale to talk about how the games started and what to look out four while you prepare.

In this podcast episode, I'm posted the edited down audio from my stream with Jeff Gurwitch and Ilya Koshkin. We focus on the best uses for BDC reticles against MRAD-based reticles at less than 500 yards.

There's been an idea rolling around in my head for a long time: fun is allowed. You see, in today's short episode, I'm discussing what I hope becomes a recurring theme on the site for a while. Have you ever gotten the sense that we, the people of the gun, take things just a little too seriously?

In this episode, I'm reposting the audio from the first half of my livestream session with Ilya Koshkin last week. In it, we discussed the utility of LPVO optics with offset red dot sights. Jacob, the Pro-Gun Millennial, also joins us for the fun.

In this episode I'm talking to Jeff Gurwitch again. He recently put up a video on his YouTube channel that caught my attention. Why? Well, because on the surface it contradicts my own advice of, "Let the mission dictate the configuration."

I recently competed in my first PRS Rimfire match, and it was a great time. I also came away with several observations and lessons learned. Let's dig into what I would do different for next time and what you might consider for your first match.

This episode expands on my last post about the future of The Everyday Marksman. I'm ready to talk a bit more about where we've been, where we're going, and the role you can play in it.