Welcome, friends.

This blog post is going to be a very personal one—one that I’m very self-conscious about publishing, even though I suspect more people in this community than will admit to it have similar backstories. If curating a positive online persona was my priority, I wouldn’t be sharing this. Frankly, if I was practicing true concealment of my tools, capabilities, and weaknesses as Varg Freeborn advocates in his books, this blog wouldn’t exist at all. I started Fire Carrier Defense for the same reason I’m airing my dirty laundry here today: because I hope it could help somebody.

A Different Kind of Fight

As self-defenders, we strive to be prepared for both extraordinary and mundane risks. While we plan for everyday contingencies like the proverbial flat tire or leaky roof, much of this preparation is geared towards low-frequency, high-intensity emergencies like interpersonal violence. To develop a mindset conducive to early threat recognition and decisive action, we acknowledge the possibility that strangers, coworkers, bad neighbors, or even family members may attempt to harm us suddenly and without perceived provocation. A great deal of time is spent delving into these violent criminal actors’ pasts—examining their psychology, motives, and socioeconomic backgrounds—to better understand and defend against them.

All of that is to say that we tend to focus almost exclusively on external threats. No one expects to end up clinched in a life-or-death struggle with themselves.

For most civilian self-defenders, their crisis isn’t a gunfight. It’s often an ugly divorce and custody battle, a traumatic experience like rape or abuse, postpartum depression, or a health problem or chronic condition that causes them to fall into medical debt and/or degrades their quality of life.

Hardware is the focal point of many of our discussions and considerations regarding self-defense. We purchase those tools with conventional threats in mind. The above crises are not the type that we expect our EDC pistol or defensive carbine to make go away. But, when you spend a lot of time around hammers, contaminated thinking can make those problems look an awful lot like nails.

Acute or chronic depression, low self-esteem, and a host of other mental and emotional conditions and life circumstances can contribute to suicidal ideation. It’s a reality that doesn’t get a lot of recognition in the firearms and combatives training community or the gun-owning community at large. Since it’s generally accepted that two thirds of gun deaths are suicides, I think it’s safe to say that not talking about it isn’t working very well. Don’t get me wrong—people often have valid reasons for holding their tongues about their poor mental health or their family members’, as we’ll discuss—but I want to believe that, if you’re reading this, you probably care about reducing that number.

To that end, I’m going to share a little bit about my checkered past before introducing an organization that’s already making strides towards achieving that reduction.

Flashback to high school. To paraphrase the words of demigodly ADHD poster child Percy Jackson, was I a troubled kid? Yeah. You could say that.

I struggled with a cornucopia of shit like depression, crippling anxiety, body dysmorphia, and unaddressed anger issues. My self-esteem was nonexistent, I had zero methods for coping with my mercurial emotions and obsessive thoughts, and my underfunded Catholic school hadn’t prepared me academically or socially. Add to that the normal cocktail of raging hormones and classic teenage angst. It was as if my brain was conspiring to kill me, enabled by my youthful stupidity and toxic, self-defeating attitude.

It’s one thing to know yourself, but another to fully grasp why you are the way you are. I think it takes a lot of life experience to figure that out. I’m not there yet, but I have learned some things about myself since.

In hindsight, some of my problems were, and still are, genetic and biologically based: my temperamental extremes, intensity, and sensitivity have always been there, and just happened to contribute to a perfect storm of negativity at that particular time. Some of my issues were exacerbated by the fact that high school is hard for awkward, maladjusted kids like I was. And of course, to a degree, I brought a lot of that misery upon myself by making stupid choices and lacking the life experience, sense of identity, and fortitude to actively choose and pursue happiness.

Long story short, my allusions to suicide concerned my friends and parents. Someone tipped off our school’s guidance counselor, and suddenly they weren’t the only ones concerned. Eventually, it came to light that I had been engaging in self-harm, even though the majority of my cuts were hidden by clothing.

I’d already had run-ins with the disciplinary powers that be—my sketches and doodles, poetry, dress code violations, the precautionary AR500 plate in my backpack, and one incredibly ill-advised, facetious joke about lighting the school on fire—so the alarm wasn’t out-of-the-blue. Understandable, you could say, although I still resent the fact that they defaulted to fear and accusation when presented with a personality and beliefs they didn’t understand.

It didn’t help the matter that I was an emo who liked edgy music and was infatuated with guns but who hadn’t yet matured enough to pinpoint why or be able to articulate it (ultimately, that interest evolved into and is currently manifesting itself through this blog). As public school officials who are more concerned about covering their own asses than understanding their students are wont to do, the guidance counselor ruled in favor of suspension pending a psych eval.

During that process inevitably came the pointed questions about whether or not there were any guns in my home, how they were secured, and so on. They were probably rooted, at least mostly, in genuine concern, but it still felt patronizing. Luckily, this occurred before the advent of extreme risk protective orders, so the responsibility for restricting my access to lethal means fell to my parents. The code to the gun safe was changed, and in time I became healthy enough to be around firearms again.

I learned to channel my aggression into exercise, confronted and began dismantling my unhealthy mindset, and did a lot of reflection, among other things. Learning to love myself and regulate my emotions has been a grueling, excruciating process, but that’s a story for another day.

I was only ever a danger to myself, but I’m sure a few people doubted that—not without some reason. I definitely fit the profile demographics-wise. Plus, there was just so much self-directed hate pent up in that scrawny frame that some of it undoubtedly spilled out on others.

I was blessed to have peers that cared enough to say something. I was, and continue to be, truly privileged to have the support of a loving family to fall back on. Less understanding parents might have had me involuntarily committed, but I made it out legally intact.

So What?

I say all of this only to draw your attention to the fact that not everyone is so fortunate. Not every teenager has family members who are capable of or willing to safely store firearms while they get help. Few grown adults have such a support system, either.

These are some of the questions that the way my situation was handled has left me with: how many people who desperately need help don’t seek it for fear they’ll be stripped of their rights? How many gun owners don’t even consider it simply because they worry about judgement or other social ramifications?

Those questions were purely rhetorical until I met Sarah Joy Albrecht, founder of Hold My Guns®. HMG is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization pioneering an empathetic, non-legislative approach to helping gun owners and their families in times of need. The concept is a stroke of genius: refer people in crisis (or their parent, spouse, or caregiver) to a network of partnered FFLs with the credentials and means to store firearms safely and legally until they can be returned. No prying questions. No Big Brother oversight. Pure, elegant simplicity.

This option can be lifesaving in a multitude of scenarios other than mental and emotional health crises. It’s not hard to imagine any number of circumstances in which a person or family might not have secure storage or might want to store their firearms outside the home some period of time:

• Military deployment
• Real estate open houses
• Housing an elderly dependent relative suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s
• Fostering at-risk children or teens
• Family transitions
• Divorce, separation, or custody disputes
• Extended vacations
• Work, study, or travel abroad
• Initiation of treatment with medications that have suicidal ideation as a listed side effect
• A member of the household becoming a prohibited possessor
• Development of a substance use disorder or alcoholism
• Admissions to shelters for homelessness or domestic violence
• Childproofing
• Manifestation of unrecognized medical conditions that can cause psychosis like diabetes, Lyme disease, and hyperthyroidism
• Inheritance of firearms as part of a deceased family member’s estate
• Lag time between the possession of a firearm and the delivery of a safe

At the end of the day, though, your businesses stay yours. Privacy is one of the founding principles of the service model.

You may be wondering: why go through Hold My Guns at all?

To reiterate, not everyone has other options. Some people have no living relatives; some might be locally restricted to rabidly anti-gun family members. Others may have just relocated to a new city or state and not had the chance to build a network of close friends.

But, if you do have a trusted, non-felon friend or family member in your life who is willing to hold your guns and be discreet about it, great! As Sarah would say, you’re blessed. But what if, hypothetically, you live in my home state of Pennsylvania, that person lives across state lines in New York, and the firearm in question is an AR-15? That’s when things get complicated. Yes, there are ways around that, like handing off only the upper, bolt carrier group, or firing pin—that is, the parts that don’t legally constitute the firearm. The same method works for handguns. Alternatively, friends can assume temporary ‘parental control’ over the keys or code to the gun safe, if you have one.

Some self-storage services also offer smaller lockers: smaller than typically sized units, more akin to closets. The barrier of having to drive to off-site storage and often talk to an employee before retrieving one’s firearm can work to create the mental and emotional standoff time for a person to outlast the duration of their suicidal crisis. Often, an urge only persists for a few minutes. Unfortunately, most services have policies against storing guns and ammo, and since they aren’t FFLs, it’s a bit of a gray area in that regard.

I suspect the same could be said about safety deposit boxes, and I wouldn’t even think about PO Boxes, since post offices are federal buildings.

Hold My Guns avoids all these problems and takes into account all the variables.

What’s in it for the partner FFLs, besides a chance to do the right thing?

Well, I can’t think of a better way for a mom-and-pop gun store to set themselves apart from the Brownells and MidwayUSAs of the world. The ability to interact with customers face to face as human beings, to build relationships, and to physically, geographically be part of their community is perhaps one of the few big advantages a brick-and-mortar B2C operation has over online vendors in 2024. Being there for your neighbors and their families seems like a good way to go about building a loyal customer base (although Big Tex Ordnance has proven that a good rewards program and stickers help, too).

On a fundamental level, that’s what Hold My Guns is really about: encouraging people to recognize one another’s humanity.

The compassion that drives HMG’s mission is both genuine and strategic: Sarah understands how critical it is for clients to maintain their agency during these delicate situations. When I got locked out of the gun safe, I felt like a death row inmate whose shoelaces were being confiscated. In my case, I was a minor and it was my parents doing the disarming; I can only imagine how demoralized and helpless an adult would feel—arms confiscated by the police, the VA, or a judge, the fate of their property and their future eligibility to repossess it uncertain.

Hold My Guns lets clients take initiative for themselves and their loved ones. Allowing people to choose to voluntarily store their guns let’s them ‘own’ whatever they’re going through instead of the situation owning them. This perception of remaining in control can be a powerful boon to successful recovery.

In addition to helping people access resources that will help them be safe in the short term, we can also work to address the greater challenge of destigmatizing gun owners’ mental health.

We can do this by spreading the idea that, as my colleague David Yamane puts it, “guns are normal, and normal people use guns.”

Normal people also have brains, neurotransmitters, and hearts (in both the physiological and emotional senses). They have lives, and those lives get messy.

Gun-owning or not, those normal people have mental health just as they have physical health. It fluctuates with injuries and sicknesses that differ in type, duration, and severity. Some people come into the world hardy and resilient, while others are born immunocompromised. Acknowledging this is the first step towards addressing the complications that arise from poor mental health.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Hold My Guns currently has nine partners in 8 states. There is absolutely no reason there should not be multiple partner FFLs in every state in the union tomorrow.

Many of you probably donate to organizations like Firearms Policy Coalition. Political activism of that kind is important. But making positive change right now is also part of being good stewards of the right to bear arms for future generations.

The best way to support Sarah’s mission is to donate. HMG’s biggest operating expenses are the legal fees required to negotiate and refine storage contracts with new FFL partners; as you can imagine, there’s a lot of ass-covering to do both on the parts of the storage partners and the organization. And, because every state is different, those aren’t one-time costs.

From right now until March 26^th, Hold My Guns is running a fundraiser auction featuring lots of great guns and gear donated by Magpul, PHLster, Mantis, Sig Sauer, and other great brands. Check out the items and chip in a few bucks for a good cause!

Otherwise, there are a few things we can do on the individual, family, and community levels.

Please take an interest in the mental health of your significant other, spouse, children, and friends: check in on them if they appear to be struggling, and make it known that you care. Offer your ear to listen while they vent and your shoulder to cry on. If someone seems like they’re isolating themselves, make a point to reach out.

Talk to your teens. Let them know that you understand—or, if you truly don’t understand, at least express a genuine desire to. I constantly regret the fear, anxiety, and mental anguish my ordeal caused my parents. I regret not coming to them first. But I know with certainty that they would choose that hardship again over the alternative of never having known.

You don’t have to wear your heart on your sleeve or spill your guts to anyone and everyone…But it is okay to have a frank conversation about mental health. It doesn’t have to be a taboo—not even among big strong martial artists or gun carriers. John Correia has been brave enough to share some of his family members’ struggles with his online followers in the past. My indirect mentor Shawn Lupka of Antifragile Training—Shivworks alumnus, BJJ black belt, and all-around badass—has blogged on the topic of mental health before, as well.

All I’m saying is that if you’re a USPSA GM with a 500-pound deadlift but you have to drink yourself to sleep to keep from reliving childhood traumas, well…You might be avoiding the hardest, potentially most-beneficial work. Don’t get me wrong: fulfilling hobbies and exercise are huge parts of mental health, and—if you’re like me—thinking too much is part of the problem, so perseverating even more may or may not be the right move. Some people may be able to work through stuff on their own with enough reflection and meditation. But if you can’t, it’s okay to talk to someone.

I’m probably preaching to the choir, but another thing we can do is, obviously, have good storage practices and restrict unauthorized access.

I get it: a safe is, objectively, not a fun purchase compared to the alternatives that could be had for the same amount. But, let’s be real. As parents, you may be able to get by using a high shelf or the sock drawer while your child is a baby or toddler, but do you really want to find out that that doesn’t cut it anymore the hard way?

“Parents tend to both over and under-estimate their child’s abilities… They think that Johnny is a genius, but that he can’t open the pool gate. They think that Susie will grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, but that she can’t find a way to reach the top of the refrigerator where grandpa keeps his ‘bang-bang.’ They think that Bobby can’t work the zipper on grandma’s purse to get to her heart medication ‘candy’, and they think that Janie isn’t strong enough to pull the trigger on mommy’s purse gun. The ER, and the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, and the county coroner all will tell you how tragically wrong those assumptions are.”

– Dr. LateBloomer, quote shared by Kathy Jackson on Facebook

If little Johnny somehow seems to always find his way into the medicine cabinet, under the sink with the detergent and drain cleaner, or onto a high branch in the backyard tree, it’s long past the point you need to be considering this.

Remember to keep your purchasing priorities in perspective. If you’re thinking about upgrading from irons to a dot but don’t have a safe or lockbox, think before you whip out that credit card.

Other Resources

As a self-defender, it behooves you to have contingencies in place for mental health emergencies just as we do for physical emergencies. Most of us have done mental reps of situations in which we respond to injuries of the body—bright red blood spurting from an extremity under arterial pressure, or a loved one’s heart stopping. Injuries of the mind also require treatment. As such, they also bear forethought.

Don’t let pride or arrogance create a blind spot in your defensive preparations. Strongly consider downloading and filling out one of these personal safety plans from HMG if it seems like something you should have on hand for yourself or a family member.

While you’re at it, read about the top 5 things Shawn has done to improve his mental health. Even though he’s only my coach by proxy (he teaches at a different Stout PGH location than the one I frequent) I still consider him a role model.

Listen below to episode 33 of the She Shield Podcast with host Sofia Katz (Sarah told me this would be a good one to include).

Lastly, this is a great article by Paul Martin, author of Pivot Points:

“On Mental Health For The Preparedness Community” by Paul Martin

Thanks for reading!

Hug your loved ones. Live life. Move your body and get some of those happy chemicals flowing. Carry the fire.