Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best in premium seating at stadiums, arenas, and amphitheaters nationwide. With Sweet Hop's 100% ticket guarantee, no hidden fees, and the personal high-level service you expect with a premium purchase, you can relax knowing you'll receive the luxury experience you deserve. Visit SweetHop.com today to book your premium tickets to your favorite teams, artists, and all the must-see live events to Sweet Hop around LA.

It's more than just a ticket. Here at Radical Personal Finance, we love to take topics that most people won't touch with a 10-foot pole and pull them apart and use them for personal knowledge and personal insight, but also to use them as lessons to study other related topics. And today we're going to do that with the subject of guns.

Quite frankly, a gun can be a wonderful, wonderful investment. In fact, it's actually very hard to lose money with the purchase of a gun, unless you do it the wrong way. I'm going to tell you today some ideas on how you can do it in an intelligent and practical way.

In the world of investing, people frequently talk about things that have intrinsic value. This often comes up when talking about monetary theory. Many people get frustrated with fiat currencies like the US dollar and like the euro, like basically every modern currency around the world and say, "Well, it doesn't have any intrinsic value." And so they like to compare that to something like a gold or silver coin and say, "Well, at least the gold and silver coin has an intrinsic value, a value of the metal." And although I will concede that a gold or silver coin has a little bit more intrinsic value than something like a $20 bill, I don't actually buy that argument because I can't do a lot with a gold or silver coin.

I don't know what intrinsic value means, but I can say it doesn't have much practical value. That gold or silver coin serves no purpose other than to sit there. Now of course, my friends in the hard money camp will quickly say, "Well, Joshua, you can make a beautiful piece of jewelry with gold." That's true.

Or, "You can use silver in industrial purposes." That's true, but it can't do that for me. I don't take coins and turn them into jewelry. I don't take silver coins and turn them into electric doodads or electronic doodads. I can't do anything with it. It doesn't help me in any way.

So really, it doesn't have that much intrinsic value to me. If I'm starving and I've got a gold coin, well, guess what? I'll get rid of the gold coin and buy some food. If I'm thirsty and I have no water, I'll get rid of the gold coin and I'll trade it for water to save my life.

It doesn't have that much intrinsic value. On the other hand, a functional firearm actually does have intrinsic value because it does something really, really important and really, really valuable. And this is the case with many tools that we face in our life. A tool that can be used, a shovel has intrinsic value.

It can perform the function of digging a hole. A hammer has an intrinsic value. It can perform the function of banging in a nail. A chainsaw has intrinsic value. It can perform the function of cutting down wood. A car has intrinsic value. It can perform the function of transporting you and your goods from one place to another.

But most of those things are not quite regulated the way that a gun is. And most of those things are not quite so portable as a gun is. And most of those things don't quite perform the same functional value that a gun does. So a gun is something that has true intrinsic value.

Now you better think ahead and recognize that if you don't have any ammunition to load into that gun, it doesn't have that much value. But still, ammunition is much easier to come by than guns. And so they're a really, really good and interesting investment. Now there are downsides to guns, of course.

They are, in many countries of the world, heavily regulated. It's hard to get them across a national border. There are other assets that have many benefits that are superior to guns in that regard. You can load up some Bitcoin in a digital wallet, memorize all of your security keys, and that Bitcoin can be carried across any border in the world for you to use.

That's what's so valuable about something like a cryptocurrency. So a gun is hard to get across a national border, but it's actually maybe not that hard. The US government and the Mexicans seem to have a good deal of sending some back and forth from one party to the other across our southern Mexican border.

So you should be able to figure that out if you ever had to figure that out. One of the benefits of a gun in terms of its monetary value, it's durable, relatively small, it can be stored without any significant trouble. You can tuck it aside and stick it away for a long time.

As long as it's stored properly, it doesn't fall apart, it doesn't stop working, it doesn't pose any danger to anybody if it's stored away. So that's a benefit. A disadvantage is, of course, that a gun is very subject to political risk. And in this case, it shares the stage in terms of political risk with most other assets.

The president of your country can start talking about new tariffs and all of a sudden your investments can plummet in value. It's called political risk. The president of your country or the prime minister or the great leader of your country can declare gold coins illegal, like the US government did about 70 something years ago or so, and say that they are forbidden for you to have.

Because after all, one day they're fine, but another day they're not fine. You just can't have them. That's what happens with gold coins. And of course, there are other things that can happen. Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies face similar political risk. And guns face that exact same political risk. Because after all, the government of your country or your state might wake up someday and decide, "You know what?

A standard capacity magazine for your firearm that you have plenty of that's very useful to you and sits locked in your safe, well, it's built from the factory to take 30 cartridges within it. But we've decided that 30 cartridges is too many and nobody needs 30 cartridges. So we're going to outlaw that 30 cartridge magazine and make you a criminal because you own such a device, as has happened in various US American states in the past few years." Or as the state of California recently came out with, "We've decided that the functional way that your firearm operates is not satisfactory.

We're going to require you to completely change the design to minimize its function, and if not, you're a criminal." So of course, you are subject to political risk. It's a major problem with guns, but that also can be a major benefit. If you want to see the value of your investments go up, just hope that the government starts making noise about outlawing your investments.

They go up quickly. You can sell a gun more in the inner city of a big... Sell a gun for substantially more in the inner city of any major city in the United States of America than you can going out in the countryside because of the change of laws.

A disadvantage of guns is an investment. They, of course, don't create dividends. This is a major problem, same problem that we face with an asset class like raw land or gold coins. They're not really productive. They're not creating an income. So that's a problem. Guns aren't really fungible the way that other things are, but gun components, of course, could be.

Fungibility is the property whereby one part or quantity of something can be replaced by another part or quantity of something else. If you have a $20 bill and you give that $20 bill to person A, and then person B gives you a $20 bill, those $20 bills are fungible.

They're fully interchangeable. And of course, guns lack that a little bit. They're not fully fungible. But many of the parts and components actually can be. So it's an interesting thought market to apply to it. Guns do have a broad marketability. In fact, much broader than something like a gold or silver coin, in my opinion.

But that marketability is not unlimited. You always face the challenge of who will buy this asset from me if I want to sell it. You can sell that gold coin and you know right where to go. Many more people would be interested in buying a gun, but it's hard to know how to start that conversation with them.

And guns have the benefit of they can be sold quickly, but not necessarily immediately, at least not for the highest of prices. And so they don't have quite the same marketability as currency does. You can take a $20 bill and you can sell it to anybody, anywhere in the world for $20.

Currency is the most marketable commodity that exists. Everything else has certain disadvantages. And so there's a very valuable case to be made for guns as a quality investment item. But of course, the value of guns goes far beyond that. Both the personal benefit and also the personal risk. A gun is one of those things where if you need it, you really need it.

And if you have it in your hand when you really need it, you probably wouldn't part with it for any amount of money. On the other hand, it is something that you have to take great care with because it poses certain inherent dangers, certain inherent characteristics that can cause you great harm, cause your family great harm, cause others great harm.

So I want to give you some thoughtful analysis and advice. And my hope is that this show will be helpful to you if you are not a gun owner to give you basically a track to run on. I hope that this show will be helpful to you if you are a gun owner that you can pass along as some practical advice to other people.

I'm just going to give it to you from my own perspective and my own analysis of the market. It's important that you know first off that I don't really consider myself much of a gun guy or a gun nut. That's just not really me. I enjoy, it's always fun to shoot guns, but I'm not one who obsesses about all of the details and characteristics.

I have a broad generalized knowledge, but it's not that big of an interest for me nor is it that big a part of my life. So I probably approach the subject in a more practical way than a lot of other people do. And I am however firmly convinced of the value of guns for you, for you to own.

And let me give you just a few pieces of our way to articulate that. The time at which you have to think about getting a gun is not when you need it, because when you need it, it'll be too late. And the value is hard to say exactly when.

In just a moment I'm going to go into the purposes for guns, what are the actual purposes for them, because once you understand your purpose for the gun, you'll understand what to get, how to get it, etc. But sometimes those things are hard to predict. I'll give you just one story by way of example.

I know a guy who lived in the southern Philippines. And one of the interesting things about the Philippines, it's a very fractured nation geographically, made up of I think thousands, at least hundreds of individual islands, only some of which are occupied and some are not. But my friend was down in the south.

And in the Philippines, there is a strong Muslim population in the south and many hardcore Muslims who are very focused on building a Muslim culture and a Muslim society. And they are in a war of sorts with the central government. They're the rebels in the local area. Well, my friend had a business on one of these Philippine islands and there was a terrorist attack in the local area and it wound up destroying his business.

Several dozen people were massacred in the town. The town then quickly cleared out and my friend's business collapsed. He ran out of money, his business collapsed, and he was in a very difficult place. Well, what wound up happening was as he was trying to put his life back together, he was in a situation where he was leaving to go to another place to try to earn money, but he wasn't able to take his entire family with him.

But one of the things that was valuable for him was he bought the safety of his family as he was leaving with an old handgun that he had, which the local rebel leader wanted. And so he was able to trade and barter his handgun for the protection and the safety of his family in exchange for the local rebel leader's guarantee that no, he wouldn't actually come after him and he wouldn't kill and persecute his family.

So that's a scenario that's impossible to predict specifically. It's easy to predict if you just look around the world. You see this happen every day, all day, all around the world, but it's hard to predict specifically that that would happen to you. But the point was they were in an economy, a very heavily gun-controlled economy and lots of laws and whatnot in the Philippines, but they were in an economy where the money had less value than the tools.

So just one story and I'll share more stories in today's show. Let's talk about what are the purposes for guns. I see three basic purposes, self-defense, offensive uses, and personal enjoyment. In terms of self-defense, the first one, which will be either important or unimportant depending on where you are, is self-defense against animals, against non-human animals.

This is something that many people who live in an urban environment don't think about. It's just not a part of their daily life. The only thing they know of in terms of animal danger is the neighbor's dog that comes out and barks at them from the front yard on their morning run.

This is, of course, something that many in the rural environment certainly think about frequently. And there are many people throughout the United States and throughout the world who would never venture away from their house, property, or vehicle without a significantly sized handgun on their hip for protection against bears or wolves or similar types of animals.

So animal self-defense. Animal self-defense is very hard to – it's very specific to what you're concerned about. If you're concerned about snakes, then you'll carry one certain type of gun. My family grew up in the ranching family. So, of course, if you're out on your horse and you're riding across the mountains and you need a gun that's going to kill a rattlesnake, you don't need a hand cannon.

You need a small – a very small gun to shoot a rattlesnake with. But that's very different than if you're in bear country and you need to protect yourself against a bear. I am incompetent to give advice on that subject. And so that's not a significant factor for me and for this show.

If you are worried about that, you'll, of course, make your own decisions. Self-defense. The second category is against individual criminals, either random or specific threats to your life. Now, if you have specific threats to your life, if at all possible, I'd encourage you to eliminate the cause of those threats.

I've never been threatened by a local gang warlord who wants to say, "Well, Joshua, I'm going to come and get you because I'm messing with his business." I'm not involved in that and I hope that you're not involved in that either. I want to steer clear of anything like that and just simply eliminate the risk.

If you're under threat by your criminal competitors, the best way to minimize a threat is stop being their criminal competitors. Stop breaking the law. Stop being a criminal competitor and then the threat may go away. The way to handle that threat is not to arm up and get ready for war.

So please, just avoid that threat. It's a lot easier to always avoid that threat whenever possible. The individual criminals that would be more appropriate to consider are either random acts where you're riding the train to work and some guy comes out and starts attacking people. You are teaching in a school and some guy comes in and starts shooting people.

You are accosted on a dark alley, similar types of things. Somebody is angry at you on the highway and runs you down and starts to attack you. Or if perhaps you're being targeted due to your opinion, you've been exercising your rights to free speech and now you're being targeted by the racists or the fascists or the whomever you are going to be targeted by.

Those are legitimate threats and they need to be taken carefully. So self-defense against individual criminals is probably one of the major reasons that people purchase a gun, probably the major reason. I think you should also consider the importance of self-defense against government agents. Your most deadly force in the world, the force that will always kill the most people is always the government.

If we were to go back and do an accounting of the last century from 1900 to 1999, you would find that the government killed far more people than individual non-government sanctioned criminals did. The estimate that I use by Professor Rudolph Rummel from the University of Hawaii, he estimated after dedicating his entire career to studying the subject, he estimated that the governments of the world were responsible for 262 million murders during the 20th century.

So 262 million people were murdered by government. That number does not include the number killed during war. So that doesn't include officially declared war, that doesn't include World War I, it doesn't include World War II, that doesn't include the Civil War in the United States. That number is flat out government murder against their people.

He coined the term "democide" to refer to this and the word "democide" includes, it's defined as the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder. And he specifically uses the term murder in that estimate. Now you can go and research those statistics, but when I look at people who are concerned, rightly as they should be, about the murder of a dozen or a couple dozen people or a hundred people here and there, I mourn for those.

But I always keep in the back of my head the fact of 262 million murders. That's the death toll that we can lay squarely at the feet of government. Now various governments, of course, are better or are worse at this. I think many of us, and of course the bulk of the listening audience of Radical Personal Finance is US American, many of us who are US Americans would like to think that we are without guilt in this regard, but we are certainly not without guilt.

We have the blood of many hundreds of thousands of people on our hands. But I must concede and confess that I was a little bit taken aback at the gall over the last few weeks as the United States of America is embroiled in an argument over gun control. I was a little bit taken aback to read the output from the Chinese news agencies, the government news agencies, recommending that the United States of America should just simply remove all the guns from their people.

After all, mass shootings don't happen in China. Well, as one who has a particular interest in the tens of millions of people murdered by the Chinese government, I would have to say that there have been plenty of mass shootings in China. A similar thing, the leader of Iran, a similar thing.

As someone who takes a bit of an interest in the tens of thousands of people, I don't know if it's hundreds of thousands or millions, but the very conservative tens of thousands of people murdered by the Iranian government, I would have to take a little bit of an issue with the fact of the...

I'd have to take a bit of an issue with that. And I trust my fellow US American citizens very much. I trust the US government very, very little. So self-defense against animals, individual criminals, and government agents. Those are the purposes for guns in terms of a self-defense scenario. On terms of offensive uses, you have, of course, the hunting of animals, the intentional going out and hunting and harvesting of animals, or prosecuting a crime or war.

My hope would be that you would never be involved in prosecuting a crime. And my hope would be that you and I would never be involved in prosecuting a war. However, I have to concede that it is a possibility. And especially, I think it is important to maintain the authority and the sheer strength in the people so that the government doesn't go to war.

Because you may have to go someday and keep your national government from going to war. Governments find it exceedingly easy to go to war because they don't send their own children. They use other people's money and send other people's children to go and be killed. People find it very difficult to go to war.

And I always want to keep the hands in the people. I want to keep the power in the hands of the people. That's one of the reasons why it's so fundamentally in the United States of America. It's so fundamentally important that the Second Amendment is so clearly codified and is so clearly defended at every turn legally.

And most importantly, that the Second Amendment is defended in practice by you. Not just, "Oh, I support it in theory," in practice. It's one thing to support free speech in theory. That's great. I'll do that. It's another thing to support it in practice. When somebody says something that you don't like, that's when free speech matters, is when you support their ability and their authority and their right to say something that you don't like.

It's one thing to support free speech in theory. It's another thing to make sure that whatever method of free speech is used is being used. You should be using it. You should be using modern methods of speech. You should be being a pamphleteer if you have something to say.

You should be on Twitter if you have something to say there. Use and exercise that free speech because the more people use and exercise their right of free speech, the more peace we have, because when people can't talk, that's one of the times they go to fight, they go to war.

The more peace we have, which is important, the more truth we can attain, which is important, and the more we maintain that right to free speech. That's why free speech is so important. Second Amendment is obviously the same thing, but every other right is actually the same thing in terms of, for example, your Fourth Amendment rights or your Fifth Amendment rights.

You should make a habit and a practice of never letting government agents into your home, not because you have anything to hide or not hide, because it's your right and you should exercise it. When somebody is working as a government agent, they should have an intense respect for you and your rights, and that's only going to be maintained if you maintain it.

So don't allow a government agent into your home without a warrant, period, for any reason, any time, no government agent from any agency. There has to be that culture of respect for rights. When you start to lose that culture of respect for rights because people stop standing up for rights, you wind up with a culture of jackbooted thuggery and people who come together and disrespect rights.

Same thing, when your rights of privacy are invaded by the government censors or by the National Security Agency scooping up all of your data, you should stop, you should stand up, and you should encrypt and privatize your data, not because you have anything to hide, because you've got to push back and exercise a right.

If you don't exercise it, the people who lust for power will always go after it, and the people who lust for power are the ones who are going to go after it in government. And if that government is not restrained by the people, which is what's so special about the United States of America, if the government is not restrained by the people, that the power is in the people, the sovereignty is in the people, you're not a subject of the king, I'm not a subject of the queen, I'm not a loyal subject of anybody, the sovereignty is in the people, and the people temporarily grant to a government entity for specific limited purposes some of their sovereignty and authority.

But it's an ongoing battle, and in the thousands of years of recorded history that we have to look back at, you should never slow down, should never stop fighting for liberty. And I use fighting there metaphorically. I don't want to fight with violence, I want to fight with ideas, because the advance of liberty is never certain.

The final category of the purpose for guns is, of course, personal enjoyment. Sport shooting, it's a hobby. You enjoy going and shooting three-gun matches or skeet shooting, whatever you do. You enjoy collecting them, or you enjoy investing in them. There are certainly some interesting collections that can be put together, and there are certainly some interesting guns that could be invested in.

But I'm not going to be going into those esoteric areas here today. I'm talking about normal people. I'm going to lay out for you an approach that I consider to be very practical, that will help to fulfill some of these goals, but to do it in the way that is the most practical, not to go to the extreme scenario.

We're not going to go immediately to the fact, "Well, my government's going to come and kill me, so I need to go ahead and be prepared to fight a war against them." No, that would be silly, especially if you're in the United States. That would be relatively silly. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be prepared for that, but that shouldn't be thing number one.

It's a lower level of threat right now. Now, if you were living in South Africa, or if you were living in the Philippines, or if you were living in Iran, this threat is different, and you, of course, would have to, or Syria, you would have to, of course, go through it yourself and perform your own analysis.

So I'm going to give you a budget. I'm going to start with very, very inexpensive and talk about just the functional, practical thing. The most likely reason for you to need and use a gun would be to protect yourself and defend yourself against a random criminal attack or a random animal attack.

That would be the most likely reason in which most people need a gun. And that's one of the most important ones to prepare for because guns are a phenomenal equalizer, especially for the weak, especially for the old, especially for the young, and especially for women. Guns are the great equalizer, and that's why it's what's so powerful about them.

Without a gun, size and strength and physical vigor will generally win. I'm a large man. Most people, if we got into a physical confrontation and they didn't have superior skills, most people would lose just simply due to the virtue of my size and my strength would lose in a physical confrontation.

If you're young or you're old or you're a woman or you're physically frail, you would lose. And that's how it was for a very long time throughout history until the gun was created. And the gun gives a 75-year-old grandmother the ability to not be a victim to three young strong thugs who want to attack her and steal her purse or break into her house.

A gun gives a weak 18-year-old girl the ability to defend herself against a large, aggressive man. And so no matter how young you are, how old you are, how frail you are, you have the ability to bring slightly more equal odds, which is why it's so fundamentally important that the weak and the young and the old and the frail have the means of self-defense in order to minimize the aggression by those who want to go out and commit crime.

Now, of course, you couldn't guarantee anything. Somebody who was trained or somebody who worked at it could certainly take a gun away from somebody or could certainly press through it regardless. You have no guarantee in anything in life and a superior army can defeat an inferior army even though that inferior army is well-prepared.

It happens all the time. But in the most normal common circumstances of life, the gun is the equalizer. And so on the lowest budget, I think the most sensible thing here, the cheapest, most reliable, sensible gun that would give 80% of the effect and the usefulness of guns for most scenarios is a simple snub-nosed revolver, either in a caliber called .38 Special or .357 Magnum Revolver.

If you're on a budget, if you're young, if you're broke, if you're old, if you don't have a lot of money and you just need a simple gun to protect yourself against a random criminal attack or I guess a random animal attack as well, a snub-nosed revolver is probably your ideal solution.

You can purchase one new for $300, $350, $400. You can purchase one on the used market for $200 to $300. And the revolver is really special because it gives you good, decent firepower. Usually it'll be either five or six shots. It gives you good, decent firepower without being too heavy or too hard to deal with.

The operation of a revolver is very simple for anybody to learn and there's very few things that could possibly go wrong with it. Just about any time you want to make a gun go bang, if you have a revolver, you squeeze the trigger and the gun goes bang. If the gun doesn't go bang, you just squeeze the trigger again and the problem gets rotated out of your way and the next cartridge goes bang.

Sometimes with semi-automatic handguns, which are wonderful, I'll get to that in a moment, sometimes with semi-automatic handguns, they don't go bang for various reasons. And when you're learning how to use one, you have to learn a drill of how to clear a malfunction, how to seat the magazine, how to fix the problem, but that requires extra training.

But anybody in the world, a frail 75-year-old grandmother who's never held a gun in her life, can pick up a revolver, squeeze the trigger and make it go bang. They're fundamentally simple and they're fundamentally reliable. As a handgun, one of the great benefits of a revolver is its versatility.

It can go with you into places where you're really not going to take a rifle. The AR-15 is a wonderful platform for a carbine, which is a small rifle, but you're not going to take it with you most places. But a small handgun, a small revolver will go with you to most places.

It has enough firepower to be useful and effective. A .38 Special or a .357 Magnum size of cartridge is very effective. For years, that was the exact cartridge that the local police officer would carry, the exact gun and cartridge. Carry a Smith & Wesson revolver, usually not a snub-nose, and I'll explain that in just a moment, but a Smith & Wesson revolver.

The FBI for years would carry .38 caliber revolvers. They're very effective, very, very useful. Now what I'd recommend for the first one is to start with something small that can be concealed. And so a snub-nose is just a slang term that would refer to something with a small barrel, about a two-inch barrel.

You can get a revolver in a two-inch barrel, a four-inch barrel, a six-inch barrel. You can get one with an 11-inch barrel. But you're going to have a challenge of what's easier to shoot and what's less easy to shoot. If there's any chance that you're going to carry it with you concealed on your person, your most comfortable and easiest to conceal option will be to have a snub-nose revolver to get something with a two-inch barrel.

The problem with a small barrel like that and a small gun is that it's very uncomfortable to shoot. Now if you have to use it, you can use it. And if you need to train with it, to put a box of shells through it to use it, yes, it's good you can do it.

But it's not going to be very fun. The smaller the gun, the harder it is to shoot. The bigger the gun, usually, the easier it is to shoot. So if you were just never, you said, "I'm never going to carry this with me," go ahead and get one with a slightly longer barrel.

Get one with a four-inch barrel or even a six-inch barrel if you're just going to keep it at home or keep it in your car and it's not going to go on your person. You can still effectively conceal it on your person with a four-inch barrel, and it'd be much more comfortable for you to shoot.

The best thing here is, the best advantage to a revolver is to get maximum bang for the buck. Yes, unintended, maximum bang for the buck. With a couple hundred dollars, you can get a good quality serviceable revolver that will protect you and protect your life in a circumstance where you're being attacked by a person or if you face the risk by an animal.

Animals do attack. There was a woman last year that was killed by a couple of pit bulls that her neighbor owned. So I think you should be prepared for that as well. But for a few hundred bucks, you are going to be well squared away. Another great thing about a revolver is it doesn't require a lot of extra accessories.

Generally, of course, with a revolver, you don't need to buy a whole bunch of extra magazines. There are ways that you could learn to load it more quickly than individually putting shells in one at a time. But you can pick up a speed loader. If that's what you want to have, you can pick those up inexpensively.

You don't need too many of them. So a couple of boxes of cartridges, a revolver, a good holster, and maybe a speed loader or two is about all you need. And so total, you're in it for 250 bucks, 250 to $300. If you're looking for the most sensible way to purchase your first gun, I think that's the best way to go.

If you have the opportunity, purchase, I think it's in your best interest to purchase a .357 Magnum size instead of a .38. If you're new to guns, all these different numbers refer to the size of the actual cartridge that you insert into the gun. And a .357 Magnum cartridge has the same diameter as a .38 special, but it's a little bit bigger.

So you can shoot, if you have a .357 Magnum revolver, you can shoot .357 Magnum cartridges. You can also shoot .38 special cartridges in that same gun. If you have a .38 special revolver, you can only shoot .38 special size cartridges. You can't shoot the larger .357 Magnum. The .357 Magnum is slightly more powerful.

It has more powder, and so the guns are built a little bit stronger, which might be a disadvantage because it would be a little bit heavier, but it would be built stronger, and that can be of help. So what most many people do is they'll buy the .357 Magnum.

They'll shoot .38 special cartridges out of it while training because it's a little bit easier to shoot, and then they'll keep their .357 Magnum cartridges in it for self-defense if they ever needed to. While you're at it, make sure that you buy some quality self-defense ammunition. Don't just buy the cheapest stuff that you can get down at Walmart.

Buy some quality self-defense ammunition. Usually this will be what's called a hollow point bullet, which is a bullet that's designed to come apart when it goes into your attacker and to cause maximum damage to them without going through them. If you're just shooting ball ammo, which cheap stuff that you usually would use when you're training, there's a big risk that if you shoot somebody that you will not just go into their body, but you'll go through their body, the bullet, and it won't cause maximum damage and may not stop them.

So purchase some quality self-defense ammo. But if you're looking for just the simplest way to own a gun that is simple, reliable, start with a revolver. That's my first recommendation for you. Financially, it is very hard for you to go wrong. You'll always be able to sell that for what you have in it.

You probably won't be able to sell it for a profit because these are essentially a commodity, but you'll always be able to sell it for what you have in it, which is really helpful. One final tip that I think is at least, I guess, worth considering. If you're shopping, I wouldn't make this a do or die, but if you're shopping, if you have the choice, if you're actually shopping for a new one, you'll have a choice of different kinds of metal.

You can buy a titanium revolver, which is very, very light. That's really nice if you're going to carry it every day. It makes it a little bit harder to shoot because it's lighter and a heavier gun is easier to shoot because the weight of the gun will compensate a little bit for the power of the cartridge when it explodes.

You would have a choice for that, but you'll also have a choice between buying something that's silver or chrome or black. If you're choosing, I think there's a very small argument that is, in my mind, persuasive about buying a black one. When I read last year, I read the book that I profiled on the show called Arrest Proof Yourself.

One of the comments that that particular author made in his book as a criminal defense attorney, he said that he thought that the ideal gun for anybody to carry for self-defense was a black snub-nosed revolver. The great thing about a black snub-nosed revolver is it's not a threatening gun if you're ever in court.

If you ever shoot somebody in self-defense, you're standing in front of a jury. If you're in there with some giant tricked out hand cannon, perhaps the prosecuting attorney would try to paint you as some kind of lunatic nut that goes around wanting to kill people. It's hard to make that claim about somebody who just carries a simple revolver.

One of the other benefits that he said about having a black one is many times these kinds of events would happen at night in the dark. A black revolver is very hard to see at night. If you wind up pulling it because you feel threatened, but you don't wind up pulling the trigger because you realize, "No, it's actually not a threat," and you choose not to shoot, then you run a lower risk of other people seeing it, which means maybe your actual draw would be never come to the attention of law enforcement, never come attention to the prosecuting attorney.

But it would also help you to run a lower risk of being accused or charged with brandishing the weapon because fewer people would have been able to see it just simply because it was black. I thought that was a good argument. Not a good enough argument necessarily to go and sell a silver colored gun to get a black one, but if you're buying another one, a black one sounds good.

So something like, if you're looking for a particular one to look at, something like Ruger's LCR, which stands for Light Compact Revolver in .357 Magnum, probably around $300 to $350. You can get cheaper ones. Great gun for you to get. You won't lose your money. Next, if you have a little bit of money and/or want to spend a little bit more money or you'd like to have a gun with more capabilities and you're willing to put in a little extra time for training, or if you'd like to have a gun that's just more comfortable to shoot, then I think your either next purchase or ideal first purchase would be a semi-automatic compact or mid-size pistol.

In my mind, you can't go wrong with a Glock 19. There are many gun people who want to constantly argue about these things, but for non-gun people, let me explain essentially how it works. There are so many high quality handguns today. There are many inexpensive high quality handguns today, but the one that has come out on top with decades of history is the handgun designed by a manufacturer called Glock.

They have proven again and again and again that their handguns are extremely reliable, are extremely effective. Some people don't like them because they're partly made out of plastic polymers, but they are effective, and there is a giant marketplace available for them specifically. The way that the Glock platform works, some of the gun parts are slightly interchangeable.

Generally, you're going to choose a caliber, and a caliber could be 9mm as a caliber, or what's called 40 Smith & Wesson, or 45 ACP, and they have different guns of different sizes that will work in these different calibers. If you buy a large one, the large one will of course be the most fun and easy to shoot.

You'll shoot it the best because it has a longer barrel, and it'll be very comfortable to shoot. So in 9mm, which I think is probably the best one to go with, in a 9mm, that's a gun called the Glock 17. It's a wonderful semi-automatic handgun. It's very capable. Right out of the box, it is an extremely capable gun.

Brand new, you can pick it up for about $550. Comes with a couple of extra magazines. Brand new out of the box, you could take it, and you could take it to many situations, and it would be extremely effective. The standard magazine capacity of the Glock 17 is 17 rounds.

It has what in gun nomenclature is called a double stack magazine, which means it's a little bit thicker, and it has the bullets are, the cartridges are side by side in the actual magazine, and it's a wonderful, wonderful gun. It's very simple. You just point the trigger and shoot.

It's effective. It's reliable. But it's a little bit big to conceal, and so you can get a slightly smaller one that has, it's called a Glock 19. That's their model. It's 9mm, and it's a little bit, the barrel's a little bit shorter, and the grip is a little bit shorter.

So it's smaller, and it's a little easier to conceal. Then of course, they would have the smallest, the compact version, which is a Glock 19, sorry, a Glock 26, and then if you needed to get smaller than that, you would go to one of their single stack thinner versions, which in 9mm, I think is the Glock 43.

Glock 19 is basically the perfect all-around, will do just about everything you need to do gun without too many compromises. It's hard to go wrong with a Glock 19. The great thing about it from a financial perspective is there are tons of them on the market. You can buy them new for 550 bucks.

You can sell them just about any time you want to anybody who wants to own a Glock, and as long as it's not obviously been destroyed, it's going to be great. It's going to work, because with it being a Glock, anybody even who has problems with it can swap out all the pieces without much trouble.

And so it's just a wonderful, ubiquitous commodity gun. You can buy cheaper, and there are many brands that are cheaper that are very effective. However, from an investment perspective, I think you're well served by buying something that if you ever needed to sell it, if you ever needed to trade it, you're buying something that has a broad appeal.

If you buy another brand, for example, something like the CZP-10, a lot of the gun people really love this particular gun that I'm referencing. Something called a CZP-10 is a 9mm striker fired pistol. It's fantastic, but you're going to find a lot fewer people outside of the gun world that know what it is and how it works.

So I think a Glock 19, you can't go wrong. The great thing about the Glock 19 is it's a good balance. You can conceal it. You can also shoot it well. It's comfortable for you to train with, unlike that snub-nosed revolver, which is very uncomfortable to shoot. The Glock 19 is a dream to shoot, and you can train with it.

And that's probably the most important thing, is to actually have a gun that you're going to train with. So consider that being your next option. What I'm essentially trying to do for you is create what gun people like to refer to as just the five gun challenge. If you only had five guns, what would you do?

And then from there, it's up to you. But each of these, if you had each of these, they fulfill a unique function. I don't think you'd be wrong to have a revolver and a Glock 19. Start with a revolver, and then move up, get a Glock 19 as well.

After that, I think your next gun should either be a Ruger 10/22 or an AR-15. Let me explain the differences. A Ruger 10/22 is a .22 caliber rifle. It's a very small, very lightweight rifle. There are other good brands of rifle. I'm just telling you what is ubiquitous. And I like to have stuff that has an easy resale value.

I like to have stuff that there are tons of parts for. Some people, that's why I'm not a gun guy, I don't want to have something that's weird and interesting. I want to have the standard thing. If I'm going to drive a pickup truck, I want an F-150. If I'm going to drive a car, I want a Toyota Corolla.

Just give me what everybody else has, and let me go about my business. The Ruger 10/22 is a wonderful .22 caliber rifle. It is semi-automatic, it's effective, and it can be made to be all kinds of different things. There have been, I don't want to say millions, I would guess without looking up numbers, I would say there are millions of them out there in the marketplace.

But a Ruger 10/22 is very inexpensive. And with it being a .22 caliber rifle, it's inexpensive to buy and it's inexpensive to shoot. It's also easy to use to train people, to train yourself and to train other people to use a rifle. You can go out in your backyard with a box of .22 cartridges and you can shoot all afternoon and you're out of pocket a dollar or two.

It's so inexpensive to shoot a .22 caliber rifle. It's much more painful to shoot a larger rifle in terms of the cost of ammunition. And a .22 caliber rifle is one of the most versatile, useful weapons that you can own. You can use it, of course, to kill small game.

You could use it in self-defense. You could certainly kill somebody with a .22 caliber rifle. But you'll use it and learn the skills of effective rifle, the effective ability to use a rifle. It's two to three hundred bucks to buy a new one, depending on whether you buy a black one or a wooden color, wooden one or whatever version you buy, whether you buy a stainless steel barrel or not.

There's a little bit of range, but they're ubiquitous and they're wonderful weapons. You can adjust them and build them to be however you want it to look. If you want to build it to look like a scary black rifle, you can do that. If you want to build it to look like just a standard rifle that every rancher would just carry around in his truck with a woodstock, you can do that.

You can buy large magazines for them, 30 round magazines for them. You can use standard box magazines. You can put a scope on it. You cannot put a scope. It's just a wonderful rifle. I don't think you go wrong with buying a .22 caliber Ruger 10/22. The next option, and these are not necessarily in order, but the next option that could also work well is to go ahead at this point and buy an AR-15.

An AR-15 is a wonderful rifle platform. I'm intending to release to you an entire show on the AR-15 platform because I get so annoyed with hearing people yell about it without actually understanding what it is. The AR-15 is a wonderful, wonderfully effective rifle. In short, it is frequently referred to as a modern sporting rifle because that was how it was originally designed.

The AR-15 rifle was designed in about 1945 by a man named Eugene Stoner, and he designed it for the civilian marketplace to be a versatile rifle, a versatile sporting rifle. And it was designed around a caliber called either 5.56 millimeter NATO or 2.223 Remington caliber, which is a relatively small bullet size.

It was later adapted and taken on by the US military where it became the famous M16 rifle that has been used by the US military for many decades, but it was first designed for the civilian marketplace. When the rifle, Stoner went on, he left ArmaLite, they sold the patents to Colt who continued to produce it.

But what's happened is in the last couple of decades, especially the last decade, the AR-15 marketplace has been completely open to competition. And there are so many people that have been creating AR-15s. And so the range of accessories and the range of parts and the range of quality of all the different parts of the rifle have been, it's just been phenomenal.

It's incredible. And so you can take an AR-15 and you can transform it for many tasks, for just about any task that you need. Now, it has some disadvantages. For example, the AR-15 platform shooting the standard 5.56 millimeter NATO bullet or the .223 Remington bullet is too small to be effective as a large game rifle.

It would be too small to be effective at shooting a deer, for example. You generally want a larger rifle round for that. It's a relatively small round, but it's very effective for hunting. Many people use it for hunting. It's also very effective and can be adjusted for many different approaches to effective self-defense.

And the AR-15, because it has so many different ways that it can be adjusted, you can do something like add in a .22 caliber conversion kit. And so if you want to train with the rifle, if you didn't want to buy both a Ruger 10/22 and an AR-15, you can go ahead and purchase an AR-15 and then convert it with a .22 caliber conversion kit so it can shoot less expensive ammo.

Because the actual size, the diameter of the bullet of the standard rifle is the same as the .22. It just has more, the large, the normal AR-15 cartridge simply has more powder which makes it come out as more velocity, but it's a lot more expensive to shoot. So an AR-15 is a wonderful first rifle.

I think you should have one. I really do. I think you should have probably a couple. AR-15 has certain limitations. It's not going to be a tremendous long-range rifle. It's not going to punch through cover if you ever needed it in war. There's a reason why the older battle rifles from the military were always built on a larger caliber bullet.

But it's just a great gun. And today, there's never been a better time to buy one because it's so inexpensive. You can get a new AR-15 for about $550 to $700. Now you can spend a couple thousand bucks on one depending on how fancy of a one that you buy.

But you can get a great rifle at a great price and it's just a wonderful rifle. So I encourage you, if you don't own an AR-15, go ahead and get one. And if you don't own one, get one today so that you can practice shooting with it and that way if the legislatures do change any laws that you already have one.

And most importantly, get one so that you can go ahead and teach other people how to shoot with it and dispense with some of the mystique of the AR-15 rifle. I'm appalled at so much of the commentary that I see about the AR-15 rifle specifically. It's just apparent that people have never shot one.

They don't know how it works. They don't know what makes it good. They don't know what its disadvantages are. It's appalling. And you see it all the time on the news, etc. So go get yourself one, use it, and then take your friends out and teach them to shoot.

It's a whole lot more effective for you to take a friend of yours who doesn't like guns or is scared of guns, take them out with an AR-15 and teach them how to shoot it. That's a whole lot more effective than arguing about gun control legislation online. Next and finally, or sorry, next two weapons would be get yourself a shotgun.

It's hard to go wrong with a Remington 870 shotgun, basically the standard pump-action shotgun. The wonderful thing again about the Remington 870 is it's the ubiquitous gun of shotguns. There are tons of them out there. You can buy a good one in the used marketplace. You can buy a good new one.

They're relatively inexpensive. But while you're shopping, pick up a couple of barrels. Pick up a short barrel and a long barrel. Pick up a short barrel to use if you needed to use it as a home defense gun or around your house. And pick up a long barrel so you can take it and use it to shoot skeet or to shoot birds or to shoot animals or whatever you're hunting for.

The great thing about a shotgun is the variety of ammunition that you can use for it. Everything from deer hunting with a slug to buckshot to birdshot. You've got so many different choices. You can even shoot all kinds of interesting novelty rounds out of your Remington. So get yourself a shotgun and get a couple of barrels for it that are interchangeable and learn how to use them.

A shotgun is one of the most useful imposing weapons. If you're dealing in a situation, it's funny, a few years ago there were a bunch of riots in London and the number one selling thing in London at the time was baseball bats. People were buying baseball bats to try to protect themselves from rioters.

Well, sorry, but I don't want to stand with a baseball bat and try to protect myself from rioters. I'm going to turn tail and run the other direction. But I'd be happy to stand outside of my car or my house or my store and people are marching through lighting stuff on fire.

I'd be happy to stand there with a shotgun and most people will make a tour around it. And I think it's a very effective persuader. So get yourself a good shotgun. And then last couple is at that point, if you can expand your home armory a little bit more, look into getting a long distance rifle, a scoped long distance rifle, which would be useful for hunting large game.

And then consider purchasing a larger caliber, semi-automatic military style weapon, a good proper heavy duty rifle, a battle rifle. So there'd be variants, maybe an AR-10 or some of the various variants that you can look into. There are some really good ones, but that is important. Now when you're doing this, those basically, what do they do, five or six guns?

Those five or six guns put together constitute a very effective home armory. If you're looking for a good collection to put together for each of your children so that when they graduate from high school or graduate from college or at their, you're giving a wedding present to them or whatever, if you could put together over the course of years, put together that five or six gun armory, you're going to put them in a situation where they're very well equipped for the future.

And they're very well equipped for all of those strategies. In that home armory that I outlined, you have very effective guns to protect yourself from animals, to protect yourself from criminals and to protect yourself from government agents. You have very effective guns for the offensive use of hunting animals and for prosecuting a war if you ever have to be involved in one.

And you have very effective guns for personal enjoyment that you can use for sport shooting. And in terms of collecting, those aren't really going to be collector pieces, but at least you're going to have a decent investment in the value of those guns. It's hard, unless you destroy them, it's hard for their value to go down.

Because if you can sell them into the secondary market, you're always going to find someone that's more willing to pay a little bit more to be able to buy them from a private party versus buying them from a dealer. If you buy firearms from a dealer, then you have to do all of the required federal paperwork, which means you wind up filling out forms, you wind up having background checks done on you, et cetera.

Now, there are a bunch of laws restricting the power of the federal government to use that data, to store that data and to use it to build lists and registries of gun owners. But I think you should always be skeptical and always be a little bit paranoid about that.

There's simply too much strong history to look at throughout history of registration that is used to then later as a disarmament technique. Many people are rightly paranoid about that. I don't know how to say what you should be paranoid about all of it, but I would say that you should not purchase all of your firearms through a federal firearms dealer.

I think it's good to buy some of them in the private party and you should be willing to pay a little bit more in the private party. Now, let's talk briefly about accessories and then let's talk about risks because it's important to recognize that guns fundamentally can be very dangerous.

So we have to manage and mitigate those risks. And it's important that your investment not wind up killing you. That is one thing that a gun is very effective at that a gold coin or a stock certificate may not be so effective at. With regard to accessories, once you have a basic home armory put together, the power is in the accessories and the power is in your personal skill.

So if you have set aside for yourself, let's say you have a budget of $500, I think you're better served to buy a snub-nosed revolver for $250 and to go and buy a class on how to use it than you are to go and buy a $500 Glock 19.

Budget for training and budget for ammunition to use in training because the actual gun is not the key thing. It's your training. So whatever your budget is that you set out for yourself, focus on making sure that you don't spend it all on the actual firearms platform. Make sure that you're saving and setting aside money for training and for ammunition.

And that is the fatal flaw of guns, that the actual cost of the firearm is not all that much. But all of the other stuff to be proficient with it is. And you can't really sell that. If you buy a class for a few hundred dollars to go and take a weekend class on how to effectively use your handgun or how to effectively shoot your AR-15, you're never going to be able to sell that knowledge and experience to somebody else.

You can't sell the expended ammunition. So there are straight up costs with guns that make them not a great investment. Now, you could stack your safe full as many gun people do with guns that you never shoot. And in that case, maybe you do get a good investment. But we have to acknowledge that if you're going to actually use, the point of a gun is not financial necessarily.

The point is to be able to use it. And in so doing, you're going to be burning money in ammunition and training. But it's hard for me to imagine anyone ever regretting that. I've never heard of somebody who has had to defend their life and lives of their loved ones or their property with a firearm, who ever regretted time spent at training or money spent in training or money spent on ammunition down at the range to practice with it.

I can't imagine somebody regretting it. Let's talk about safety. With safety, it's important that you recognize that there are risks to gun ownership. The risk of getting shot in a school shooting is infinitesimally small. The risk of getting killed by your government is not so infinitesimally small. Again, 262 million, I think we'd be hard pressed to find.

If we were to go over the last 30 years, we'd be hard pressed to put together, I think, what are the numbers? 900 people killed in mass shootings and in school shootings, something like that. It's a very statistically small number. The government number is harder to parse because it's very big but it's very much a big difference as far as where you are in the world.

We need to account for those things. You have to recognize that guns are fundamentally, inherently dangerous. Let's talk about how they're dangerous. I often hear gun people relate things to, they relate guns to something like a hammer, for example. They say, "Well, a gun is a tool and a hammer is a tool.

You can use a hammer to build a house or you can use a hammer to bash somebody's skull in." I think that's an accurate comparison. It really is. It's true. But I don't think it's quite honest for us to compare a gun to a hammer. A hammer can be used to bash somebody's head in but it's not nearly so destructive as a well-placed gunshot.

I think it's better to compare a gun to something else that's inherently dangerous like a chainsaw and to recognize that it's not so simple. You could pick up a hammer and if you're learning how to use a hammer to build something, then the worst you might do is bash your finger a few times.

But most people don't kill someone while they learn to use a hammer. But you can kill somebody while you learn to use a gun just like you can kill somebody while you learn to use a chainsaw. You need to be very careful and respect the actual tool and its destructive capabilities.

So take training and learn how to use it and be very, very careful. One of the most important things to do is from the very beginning to train yourself properly with good safety practices that will eliminate the potential of a negligent discharge, an accidental discharge, and/or mitigate the risk of a negligent discharge.

So in talking about the dangers of guns, because many people say, "Well, I don't want to have a gun because I'm statistically dangerous." With that, you need to recognize that there are basically two categories that comes down into the danger of a gun. One is a negligent discharge and the other is suicide.

But the great thing about these risks is these risks can be mitigated. So the great fear that of course any of us would have would be somebody accidentally getting their hands on a firearm, one of our children. You buy a snub-nosed .38 because it's supposed to protect your life, but then you just stick it in the dresser drawer and then your seven-year-old child goes in and starts playing with it and it goes bang and kills your other child.

That is not a scenario that any of us want to wind up in. And sadly, that's a scenario that many people have ended up in and it's a great danger. It is your responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen. It's your responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen. Rights come with responsibilities.

I believe it is your absolute right to keep and bear arms and that that right must not be infringed upon by the government in any way, shape, or form. But it's your responsibility to exercise that right carefully. So plan ahead and make sure that you're proactive in mitigating the risk.

There are certain risks with young children who are too young to be trained in the proper handling of firearms. It's your responsibility to make sure that one of your guns never winds up in the hands of a young child. Do not take this lightly. Buy proper receptacles to keep them in.

If you're going to keep it by your bed, buy a proper locking case for it. Buy a proper safe that won't tumble open when it gets knocked to the ground. Buy a proper safe and install it and make sure that the gun is either on you or in the safe.

In addition to that, you have to teach your children. I think this is so fundamentally important. You have to teach your children how proper gun safety. I'm a young father, so I'll just tell you what I'm doing without any claim to saying this is the best thing to do, but I'll tell you what I'm doing and why.

Number one, I never allow my children to play with my guns, period. I actually seek to entrap them to make sure that they won't. A few times as a test, I give them careful instruction. I show them, "Listen, this is what a gun is. You may not touch it." Then I'll unload it, make sure that it's rendered safe, and I'll leave it in a way that we might be tempted to touch it.

I'll set a trap and wait and see how effective is this going to be. I also am a nut about teaching gun safety. You need to practice, back to other risks as far as how to protect yourself against the risk of accident, you need to be a nut about gun safety, which means you never play with guns.

You always practice safe unloading. You're very, very careful with where you're pointing it. You keep your finger off the trigger. Just like a chainsaw is entirely safe, a gun is entirely safe until you touch it, until you turn it on. You can have an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine loaded up, locked, cocked, and ready to go.

You can put it in a safe and it'll sit there for hundreds or thousands of years and nothing will change to it. It will never become unsafe until you touch it and start waving it around. Just like a chainsaw can be loaded with gasoline, it can be sharpened and ready to go.

You can have that thing ready to go with a pull of the cord and it'll fire up, and it's nothing unsafe at all about it. It'll sit there for thousands of years and never turn itself on. But the instant you turn it on, you've got a deadly weapon. So you've got to deal with guns in exactly the same way.

Take them seriously. Practice the fundamentals of gun safety. Practice the rules of gun safety. And don't ever allow an exception of any kind for any reason. That's got to be your attitude. And if you'll do that, you'll, number one, remove the risk of a negligent discharge just in gun handling, and you'll lower the risk of a negligent discharge if it did happen, actually harming somebody.

Back to children. Keep your guns locked up away from your children, but not forever. Teach your children how to use guns and ensure with them that they practice good rules of gun safety, that they learn how to shoot and they learn how to shoot effectively, and then instill them a moral calculation of when you shoot and when you don't shoot.

One of my biggest concerns for me is that I want to make sure that I never lose my sensitivity to the horror of violence, to the horror of war. I don't ever want to feed the animal side of my soul to say I'm going to glory in violence. And so for me personally, I don't watch violent sports.

I don't watch boxing. I don't watch MMA. I don't want to feed my bloodlust of combat. I don't watch violent movies. I don't want to, especially not if the violence is glorified. It's kind of like nudity, for example. There's a way that you can watch a movie that contains nudity in which the story wouldn't be told the right way without nudity.

I'm not scared of nudity, but I want nudity to be presented the way that it is in Schindler's List, not in a way that glorifies and sexualizes the nudity in and of itself. Same thing with violence. I'm not scared of violence, but I want to make sure that violence is always horrible and awful and presented as repulsive, not as attractive.

And I think we need to do the same thing with our children. We need to expose our children to violence. I'm not opposed to martial arts in this meaning not specific. I'm not opposed to somebody learning how to fight, fight effectively. I think that's important. But that fighting cannot be disconnected.

The violence cannot be disconnected with the moral foundation of right and wrong. People like to make fun about, after a shooting, when someone talks about violent video games. I don't see how you can make fun of it. When you feed the violent tendencies and make it a sport, that has a corrosive effect on your soul in exactly the same way that pornography does.

If you feed the sexual lust and objectification of women and sex the way that pornography does, it has a corrosive effect on your soul. And you stop viewing people the same way. You start viewing people as animals and not as people. And so you have to accompany physical instruction with moral instruction.

Those two have to be there. And I think that, especially for children, we have to do a good job of making sure that our children live in a morally clear universe. When is force appropriate and when is not? When is violence appropriate and when is not? I ask you those questions.

Here are some challenging questions for you to consider. I ask you this question. When is it okay for you to hit a man? When is it okay for you to hit a woman? When is it okay for you to shoot a woman? When is it okay for you to shoot a child?

When is it okay for you to shoot a cop? That last one's probably the most explosive. I ask it again. When is it okay for you to shoot a cop? Now, grapple with those questions. And we've got to be the kind of society who deals with those questions seriously, that doesn't pretend that horror doesn't exist, but that doesn't glorify it and worship it.

Rather, we need to be a society that puts it in its proper moral context. I think I understand school shooters a little bit. I get it. It makes sense to me sometimes why they do the things they do. I'm not psychoanalyzing, but when I look at all of the factors, it makes sense to me and it's pretty awful.

Now, there's many factors, of course. We all have a tendency and a bias to go to what we're comfortable with. So when people who like guns look at a school shooting, they immediately notice the fact that if you had a gun, you could protect yourself and you could save innocent life.

Whereas people who don't like guns look at that and say, "Well, of course the shooter had a gun. How did he get the gun?" And everyone sees the same facts and they all look at it and draw different conclusions. A teacher may look at it and say, "If only I had noticed that this child was being bullied." And that's true.

A parent may look at it and say, "Oh, if only the parents had been able to pierce that through." Somebody who's adopted children would look at it and say, "Adoption. We've got the emotional issues with adoption and how do we deal with these things?" And there are dozens and dozens of accurate points of analysis.

We've got to be careful about applying only our own thing and say, "This is the way it always is." I'm getting a little bit of feel. Let me go back to suicide. The major risk with guns is suicide. More people are killed with suicide with guns in the United States than any other factor with guns.

Negligent discharges are usually result of bad gun handling. And I encourage you, be the one to stand up and walk away. When I see people doing bad gun handling, I hate to always be the bad guy, but I'm not willing to take a risk with my life or with the lives of someone else because somebody being lazy and sloppy, passing loaded guns around that haven't been cleared or engaging in unsafe practices.

Be the person who stands up and raises the level, especially if you're a gun person, if you're involved in the gun community. Make sure that you're the person that raises it because negligent discharges are unnecessary. Nobody needs to be hurt by a gun and it shouldn't happen. Thankfully, people are generally very safe, especially in the United States of America, and very few, statistically speaking, actually happen.

Most people killed with guns deserve to be killed with guns except for suicide. So let's talk about suicide. Major risk with guns is suicide. Now, I don't know how you connect this causal factor of what makes people commit suicide versus not. I don't know how you do this. And we live in a very weird time with regard to suicide as well, speaking culturally.

Many people glorify suicide, and I'm concerned about this being glorified more and more. You'll often hear people, when somebody commits suicide, you'll often hear people use phraseology such as, "Well, at least they're at peace now." Well, you don't know if they're at peace. For all you know, they're burning in hell.

Now, of course, we use these euphemisms because we're trying to make sense out of an insane situation, but I think this is very damaging for us to use these euphemisms. "Well, so and so, at least they finally found peace," or "They're in a better place." I hate the lies that are told at funerals.

I really do. And what happens is suicide has this multiplying effect where when somebody who is psychologically unstable and is in a very painful place hears that, well, they want peace, wouldn't you? Now, let's say that you supported suicide. And I use that word advisedly because many people do.

One of the biggest concerning political issues to me that is encroaching in the United States of America faster, and very few people are talking about it, is assisted euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. This has a horrendous history, especially worrying if you look in Europe and you study what's happening in Europe where physician-assisted suicide is legal.

And it's happening in the United States and many of our states. And what's more worrying is that the moral argument is not being had. It's worrying to me. And so suicide is seen by many people as a good way out. Now, let's pretend for a moment that you believe this.

Let's pretend that you support the concept of suicide. And now, you might put your own restrictions on it. You might say, "Well, if somebody has an incurable disease and they're living in great pain and suffering, then I'm going to support their right to take their own life with the help of a physician." Well, if you support that, then it's hard for you to ever say anything bad about suicide.

It really is. And be consistent. Because, and this is what's happened in Europe with physician-assisted suicide, is the definition of what is pain and suffering has transitioned from what we would all agree is pain and suffering to what some of us might say is normal life. But yet, to that person, it may feel like unbearable pain and suffering.

Now, in a sense, if you're supportive of suicide, suicide by gun is probably one of the best ways to go. If I think through all the different ways that I could commit suicide if I wanted to, I would choose suicide by gun. I've never understood why people hang themselves.

To me, that sounds very painful and stressful. I've never understood why people ground themselves. That sounds very painful and stressful to me. I've never understood why people throw themselves off of buildings. That sounds very painful and stressful to me. I understand why people take medications to commit suicide, but that sounds not so guaranteed to me.

If I wanted to commit suicide, it's hard to imagine a better solution than a gun. And so I understand why people do it. And I think that if you're promoting suicide in your ideology, and if you ever say things like, "Oh, they're at peace now," or "I'm so glad that finally these things happened," or "So-and-so was in such pain and I'm glad that they were able to escape from it," then I think you better be careful and not say, "Oh, it's against guns," because I could make the counterargument that guns are a great way to commit suicide.

They're sure, they're quick, they're pain-free, they're accessible. You don't have to be rich to get a prescription from a doctor. Any poor person that wants out can commit suicide. But I do think you better pay attention to the fact that a lot of people die by suicide. I don't think you solve the suicide problem or make any dent in it by guns.

I think they almost have to be separate. But I do think that if you find yourself with suicidal thoughts, you better get rid of your guns and talk to somebody. Or if you know somebody with suicidal thoughts, you better get involved and you better take their guns away. We have a responsibility to one another to get involved in one another's lives.

You have a responsibility to get involved in my life if you're my neighbor, and I have a responsibility to get involved in your life if you're my neighbor. And that involves guns. Number of years ago, I had a neighbor who was starting to fail mentally. This neighbor was starting to exhibit some worrying symptoms of dementia.

Their behavior was starting to be a little bit strange. We got involved, especially with regard to guns. Of course, I knew this neighbor had guns. Many people do. And so I immediately went and talked to the family, talked to the son, and said, "Listen, hold on a second. Does this person have access to any guns?" Now, thankfully, in that case, they'd already done the right thing.

The son had taken all the guns away. The house was completely free of guns. All the guns were locked up and the older person did not have any access to guns. That's how it should be. You have a responsibility exactly the same if you're concerned about anything. If your neighbor is suicidal and they're talking to you, you have a responsibility to get involved.

Now, I don't know how to cut this politically, and this is the great challenge. It's because I'm very uncomfortable with the federal government designating what is mental illness and what's not. I don't have much confidence these days in the practice of psychiatry and psychology. I used to have a high opinion of these practices, no disrespect intended to those of you who are engaged in this, but I go to zero now.

In my mind, you're at zero and you've got a lot of work to do because I've seen the damage that's happening in people's lives because of psychiatry and... I always get messed up. Saying, "Oh, well, yes, in fact..." I have a family member. "Well, yes, in fact, sir, you should take a knife and slice your penis off and mutilate your body.

And yes, we're all going to love you and support you. I'm sorry, but you're at zero in my book and you got to build it up." I know I have a few good psychiatrists in the audience, just like I've got to deal with the financial planning industry. But the point is I'm not real comfortable with a giant bureaucracy stating what is and isn't mental illness.

I'm not real comfortable with the same people that believe that the President of the United States or the Vice President of the United States is mentally ill and who've lobbied that allegation again and again and again, saying that somebody can't have access to a gun. I'm not real comfortable with that.

I'm not real comfortable in a society that says that when you think that Jesus talks to you, then you're mentally ill. Well, we can have that debate. It's a worthwhile debate. We can have it in a formal setting and we could talk about it, but it's a worthy debate.

And I'm not so comfortable with people saying what for millions of people is an integral part of their life over thousands of years, well-documented, saying, "Well, this is a mental illness." It doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. Governments are very bad at most things. They're very good at killing people.

What else do they do this good? I don't know. It's hard to say. But they're very bad at most things and adjudicating mental illness is not one of those things. But you and I can observe what's going on. And I do think that if there is a role for government, it should support individuals who are going to get involved.

You know what's happening in your life. You know what's happening in your wife's life. You know what's happening in your brother's life. You know what's happening in your neighbor's life. And it's your responsibility to get involved. Now, I think one of my hopes that comes out of this Parkland shooting is hopefully people will even go to another level.

There were a lot of people that got involved and did the right thing. And it just shows you cannot trust government agents, period. It's not that they're unnecessarily untrustworthy. Thank you to the... I know many of you who listen are government agents, but the systems don't work. They work very rarely.

Just like self-protection. The police have no legal duty to protect you. Did you know that? In many court cases, there was one that brought this out a few years ago with a guy who was slashed in the New York subway while the police officer stood by because they weren't sure...

The story... What was the guy's name? The story was that they were looking for a guy who had killed three people, four people with a knife. And this guy got up in the morning in New York City, he was on the subway. And while he was on the subway, there was what he thought was a crazy person, which was banging on the door of the cabinet or the compartment where the engineer was.

And so he thought, "Okay, well, we'll stop him." But he said, "Hey, listen, man, leave it alone." And the guy turns around with a knife and attacks him. He winds up fighting him, finally gets the knife away. And then at that point, the two cops who had been in that very next car watching the guy that they knew had murdered either three or four people in the last 24, 48 hours, watching that guy, they didn't intervene and help save him until after the Good Samaritan had already disarmed the guy.

So they also didn't offer him medical aid. One of his fellow subway passengers offered him medical aid. And then he wound up suing them. He sued the police, the NYPD for, I forget what the exact charge was that he gave, but the court order indicated the police have no special legal duty to protect you.

And there are many other cases that have affirmed this as well. But the police do not have a legal constitutional duty to protect somebody from harm. That's the legal scenario. Now, thankfully, there are many men and women who get up every day and put on a badge and a gun and go to work.

And their reason for doing that is to protect others. But there's not a legal duty. So, in summary, it's your responsibility to protect your life and the lives of those around you. Nobody will care about them more than you. As we saw with the recent Parkland shooting, thankfully there were many police officers who eventually did come in and try to put a stop to the situation.

But there were also police officers that didn't. Now let me ask you a question. Let's say that you're in that situation. If you have the means of defense, and this is your student, or your classmate, or your children, are you going to care enough to get involved and stop the carnage?

I think you are. So you have the responsibility to protect yourself. You have the responsibility to protect others. You have the responsibility to exercise your rights and means of self-defense. And thankfully you can do it. And although I don't know exactly how the money will work out in the long run, there's a pretty good investment case that those guns will be useful.

Guns are one of those investments, however, that you kind of hope doesn't work out. I really hope that a mutual fund goes up in value and I'm not real happy when it goes down. But man, I hope I never have to use a gun. And I'm sure you do too.

But if you ever do, or if you ever need it for the worst case, your national government is coming after you and 40 million of your fellow citizens, or 10 million of your fellow citizens, or 5 million of your fellow citizens, or 50,000 of your fellow citizens, even those unlikely cases we have abundant historical evidence to demonstrate that there's a good reason to prepare for those.

So act and arm yourself accordingly. I hope that the show has been useful for you. Hope it's been practical. I try to do keep things that are practical and interesting. So my hope is that practical to you and don't get distracted by other things I didn't talk about. I was going to talk about force multipliers and anyway, I'll skip it for now.

I was trying to make this about investments, but I should have done more on magazines and scopes and night vision and all the rest of the stuff, but we'll save that for some other discussion. Snubnose 38, Glock 19, Ruger 10/22, AR-15, Remington 870, scoped long distance rifle and a .308 battle rifle.

That is a start of a good home armory. And that is a start of a good collection that you'll be proud to have, hopefully you'll never use, and you'll pass it down to your great, great grandchildren, who all talk to each other about how wise you were and how overly paranoid you were and are thankful that you were.

Thank you for listening to today's show, you radical you. Before you go, I have one question for you. Was there an idea in today's show that helped you? Were you inspired? Were you motivated? Did you get an idea on how you can earn more or spend less money or invest more wisely or perhaps protect yourself from catastrophe and insulate yourself from financial disaster or just improve your life and your lifestyle?

Well, if so, I have three requests for you. Number one, take action. Listening doesn't improve your life. Doing, however, can revolutionize your life. Number two, take the idea or concept that you learned from me and go and teach somebody else. If you want to really learn something, go and teach it to others.

That ripple effect of you to someone else will systematically transform your life and the lives of all those around you. Number three, if you thought there was financial value in what you just heard, I'd ask you to come by and pay for it at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Now however much you want to pay, that's up to you.

But if the show is worth a dollar a month, come by radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron and sign up to support the show at a dollar a month. If the show is worth $20 a month to you, I'd be happy to have your $20. Hey, if it's $1,000 a month, write me a check.

Don't send it to me on Patreon, but I'd be happy to have that as well. radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron is where you can do that. Thank you. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs.

Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value. Discover your tropical dreams at FijiAirways.com. That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. (upbeat music)