Topic

PDW

Personal Defense Writing. Essays and reflections at the intersection of readiness, mutual aid, and the inner life of self-defense. Not just gear. Not just theory. This is the everyday practice of showing up prepared—in body, mind, and friendship.

So You’re AR-curious

That is a normal thought. The rifle is everywhere, it takes a standard magazine, and half the internet will tell you that you are incomplete without one. You can want one without joining a militia, naming it, or writing a novel about the collapse. Here is the civilian version. An

Return to Target: An Afterword

I spent a few hours the previous Saturday helping with the PST 103 class, primarily keeping an eye on students for basic safety, changing targets, and driving the brass Zamboni between drills and during breaks. Or was that the other way around? By this point, the students are in the

Return to Target

Sunday afternoon at the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office Public Safety Training Center. It's a mouthful, and those who frequent it call it PSTC. I first set foot here nine years ago to get fingerprints taken, not for any shenanigans, mind you. My employer scored a contract

The Easy Part

The first time most people fire a gun under my supervision, what surprises them is how little it asks. There's a flinch they were braced for, a noise the ear protection mostly eats, and then a hole in a paper target a few yards downrange. That's

The Shot Is Easy

2nd Amendment Borg and the Hard Part of Guns There is a one-page roleplaying supplement on itch.io called 2nd Amendment Borg, written by Karl Druid, the designer behind Frontier Scum: Acid Western Roleplaying. It is printed in black and yellow. It has a distressed American flag on it.

Semtex in Every Pot

“Semtex in every pot, a 3D printer in every garage.” It lands as a joke because it sounds like a mutation of an older promise—a chicken in every pot—but something in it feels less like satire and more like recognition. Not a policy. Not even a warning. A

Your Caulk Gun Is Not an SBR

Notes on Misclassification, Water Ingress, and Why You Shouldn't Be the Red Shirt There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has taken a defensive handgun course and then returned to ordinary domestic life, when you realize you are indexing your trigger finger along the frame of a

They Built an Improbable Bridge

On a bipartisan gun policy document, its ceiling, and the work that has no PDF I don't want to be at the table. I should say that upfront, because it colors everything that follows. I'm a certified NRA instructor who volunteers as a range coach at

A Dry-Fire Regimen for Addressing the Visual Interrupt

What this regimen is for This regimen targets a specific, extremely common bottleneck in intermediate-to-advanced handgun shooting: The visual interrupt — the brain’s tendency to treat recoil as the end of a task, forcing a perceptual “reboot” between shots. At slow cadence, this interrupt is cheap and often

Failure as a Curriculum

Reflections on spending Super Bowl Sunday in a concrete box I spent Super Bowl morning in an indoor range at the local sheriff's department facility, putting about 350 rounds through a stock Glock 19 over four hours. The class was called Performance Skills Group — drills designed to push

Subscribe to The Grey Ledger Society