Episode Title: The Late For Changeover Show 04 Dec 2024
Date: Dec 4, 2024
I got pulled over for a California shot, which is excuse number four for being late for your weekly space news and variety show. I’m your host, Marty Smith, and I’m joined by Mr. History, Eric Perot. Whoo, what’s going on troops? Our man in the closet, Jake Wall.
I’ve actually gotten pulled over for that. And still our queen of sides, Ana Mondragon. Got my pj’s on, got my pj’s on.
We’re here to bring you the latest headlines and updates pertinent to all guardians and to the other lower branches as well. So take your seats, get informed and have a laugh as we as we present late for changeover. All right.
Tonight we got a guest, as you can see down there in the bottom right, former Marine and retired police sergeant Graham Dunn. Hey, welcome. Thank you.
Thanks for taking time out of your life to spend it with us. Tuesday night. I interviewed Graham, I don’t know, about a month and a half ago, maybe two months ago.
So it’s out there on the swearing in podcast. But here’s a here’s just a little quick recap. Graham was born in Liverpool, England, and your family and you immigrated to the U.S. when you were 10, right? That’s correct.
You joined a Marine Reserves in 87 and then at the same time you took a job as a deputy sheriff working in the jail. A couple of years later, yeah. Yeah.
OK, about a year and a half later, you applied and were accepted to the police department in 94. You retired in 2019, you wrote a book called The Jagged Blue Line, and you currently own and operate RagnarTactical.com. That’s me. I know.
And then open a business. Wow. Well, I left out.
I left out all the like grappling boxing martial arts career that you had to write on the side. Yeah. So you can bring those up.
So welcome in, Graham. First things first, we got a subtle debate from last week, which is the best Thanksgiving meal side dish. I had stuffing, Eric had mac and cheese, Jake had cranberries and Anna had sweet potatoes.
So for my family, I had one vote for cranberry, one vote for mac and cheese and one vote for stuffing. Oh, split decision. I know it was.
I couldn’t convince. I couldn’t convince them. But the fact that mac and cheese was part of the results.
That’s because she’s a non-meat eater. That’s what she eats. She’s been eating noodles for 20 some years of her life.
That’s all right. It was still three quarters of a vote. So 111.
Mine was between stuffing and mac and cheese. It was four to two mac and cheese. We even talked about traditional versus non-traditional Thanksgiving.
So on the traditional side, stuffing was certainly more traditional. But I told you before I even nominated mac and cheese, I was going non-traditional. And non-traditional mac and cheese fit right in.
So for me, it’s still mac and cheese. When Jake sent the picture of green chili mac and cheese and then Anna said hers was awesome. It was delicious.
I’ve never had mac and cheese for Thanksgiving. Dude, it was good. Three stuffing, five mac and cheese.
And what was the other one? Oh, one cranberry. All right, Jake, what’d you do? Oh, man. I didn’t break down the actual vote, but stuffing won, unfortunately.
And initially, there was a couple of mac and cheese people, but then I went to full cranberry offensive and they transitioned over. I was like, dang it. It was like a celebrity kid transitions left and right.
But your green chili mac and cheese was good, right? Oh, that was delicious. Yeah, of course. But I could make that at a random company bought.
That’s true. I’m not making stuffing for a random company. Fits all personal.
Traditional Thanksgiving. Out of you, one for stuffing. Oh, no, there was like, there was like five for stuffing and two for cranberry.
So nine stuffing, five mac and cheese or six mac and cheese. One cranberry, one yams. All right, Anna, what do you got? All right.
A majority of them chose dressing, stuffing, whatever you want to call it. Super delicious. And then the close second was cranberries.
Oh, okay. Nice. But I still got my sweet potatoes in there.
They were still like, but that’s good, too. You got to tell. I didn’t get the total count, but whatever.
You’re right. Stick your mac and cheese. Dressing was the overall winner.
That’s right. Of course. Graham, what would you have chose if you had had to defend a side dish? Well, if I had to defend one of those, I’d go with the stuffing.
But really my cream spinach guy. Cream spinach. That’s a good one.
Yeah. Do you remember the Boston markets? Boston markets had it and it was amazing. Oh, yeah, man.
Boston Market, you know, whatever it was. I knew friends who got their Thanksgiving dinner every year from Boston Market. Yeah, it was all complete.
That was the big thing. That’s smart. All right.
Done and done. So not Graham done Graham done and done. All right.
So thank you. We were dying to ask you some stuff. Anybody have any pressing questions for Graham right up front? Well, I thought Graham would talk a little bit.
I do have a couple. Oh, yeah. That’s right.
I’m sorry. That’s pretty shitty on me. Graham, do you have anything to say besides the cream spinach? Not really.
I’m ready to talk whatever you guys want to talk about. Throw me some questions. Now, to flesh it out a little bit if you haven’t heard the interview, Graham was your entire police sergeant because you didn’t want to get away from actually the law enforcement stuff, right? You did SWAT for a little while.
Eight years. Eight years of SWAT. A little while.
That’s a long time to do SWAT. It was a lot of fun though. I really enjoyed that assignment.
It was great. So we were incredibly busy. And that was from the 90s into the early 2000s.
And so we were really, when I started, it was all crack that we were doing. And then we weren’t doing that. But we were going after and then it went turned into meth, probably the late 90s.
No kidding. If I remember rightly. And we would probably do about 400 operations a year.
And because we would log in. And yeah, it was a lot. I’m pretty sure that was most in the state of Colorado.
And that was probably I would say 70% high risk warrants for detectives and for narcotics and for federal agencies. And then the other 30% was kind of a hodgepodge of barricaded suspects, manhunts, protection details, stuff like that. So we were really busy.
It was fun. It was really fun. And they gave us lots of time to train.
We did a full week of training every month, unless we were on operation. And so, you know, and I love to train. So it was, yeah, it was like a pig rolling in the mud and that assignment.
It was awesome. It was great. And you got to shoot a lot.
All the time. All the time. We had a huge ammo budget.
And so, and I’ve been a competitive shooter for, I don’t know, 25, 26 years now. So to me, that was great because I was shooting other people’s ammo. I put a lot of money on ammo, guys.
Let me tell you, I averaged, now that I’m retired, I averaged about 12 grand a year on ammo. I’m not kidding. Well, I think it’s impressive that you say that your job was fun.
Impressive. It was fun. So it takes a very special individual to do those type of like events.
I wouldn’t say activities, whatever you want to call them. And you walk in, and there’s such a shock, like so much adrenaline. I couldn’t do it.
I’d be like, no, I’m done. I think I was kind of addicted to it, honestly. I mean, I really kind of lived it.
And that’s what I lived for. And when I came home, I was like, this is boring, you know, I want to get back to work. Right, right.
So was it on SWAT that you were doing that you told me that doorknock story? How many you had that night? Was that? Yeah, that was that was my, my record was seven doorknocks in one night, basically, knocking down seven different doors on one night. It was it was a federal warrant. And it was kind of about the time when there wasn’t a lot of cell phones around.
But basically, we just go from one place to another place to another place. And, you know, one of the fun things about being on SWAT is when you when you do a high risk warrant, whoever wrote the warrant, they take all the evidence and the prisoners and they write a lot of the reports. So like, you go in, you have all the fun, you throw everybody in handcuffs, and then detectives come in, you go, Okay, see you later.
And you take off. And so they take them in jail. They take all the evidence and put it in evidence, they do all the, you know, the sucky stuff.
And you get to have the fun. And literally just write one paragraph, my assignment in this was this, you know, I went to, and I went into the first room, I put down handcuffs, I left, you know, so it was really quick. It was like, they were like paragraph reports, you know, it was, you’d have a lot of the fun and not a lot of the work.
When you did a door knock. Oh, I was just gonna answer Anna’s question. Did you have like the RAM or the sledge or? Yeah.
Still long. Everybody in our SWAT team, everybody started on breaching because it was actually one of the easier assignments. So we typically went with handheld rams.
And also with Halligan tools, Halligan tools for popping doors open. It’s a fire tool. Occasionally, we do something different.
Like occasionally, if the door is just too tough, we’d hook it to like a truck and just pull it off. You know, things like that. But you know, it was rams were probably our number one.
We tried the Thor’s hammer, which is like the big sledge hammer. And we had some failures with it, like guys missing the locking mechanisms. So we went back to the handheld RAM, and usually it’d be a two man, unless the doorway was too small.
And then we had a one man and we had a two man. The two man was bigger and heavier. And you’re pretty much guaranteed you can get through the door with a two man RAM.
Yeah, more control. Did you guys gather intel on these these locations? Oh, yeah. I mean, so you knew which way the door was opening in.
Yeah, we’d always go scout them. And I mean, sometimes it’s plain clothes you drive by and you videotape. And then, you know, as far as going, getting plans with the house from the county and stuff like that and looking at it.
And there was no plans, because it was too old, you go find a neighbor’s house that looks the same, and take a walk through, you know, just ask him, Hey, do you mind if we walk through your house? And people was very friendly, you know, so yeah, and, and then last couple years, I was a sniper. So I’d still do warrants as an entry man. But when it was, when it was like a hostage rescue, or something like that, I’d usually be in a sniper position.
But not always, like, sometimes I just get stuck in there, like, they, you know, there wasn’t a place for a sniper to go. So they’re like, just jump in the stack. You know, and your assignments going to be whatever.
So we’re pretty, how should I put it, we were trained in all the assignments anyway. So, you know, snipers were really the only ones who were singularly trained, but we were trained in everybody else’s job. So, you know, we can step in.
Yeah, I have a quick question. Early 80s and 90s, you probably weren’t impacted very much from that whole defund the police crap that came about. Major failure in my opinion.
Yeah, well, you know, I do. So, coming into your later years in the, in the force, did that have some impact, use of force continuum? What you couldn’t do? So I didn’t, I didn’t experience defund the police. That was after right after I left, like within a year to two years after I left in August of 19.
So I think I just barely missed that. But I was enduring. You know, really, when everything changed was the Obama Justice Department, they started what we call consent decrees.
And consent decrees is when a department has too many complaints for, say, excessive force or just complaints in general, whatever, racial profiling, you name the complaint. They would basically put a federal judge would put a quarter on you saying that the Justice Department was basically running your department now. And you get this team of attorneys come in and they basically would write the rules for you.
This is what you can do. This is what you can’t do. And the use of force and the pursuit policies got very, very restrictive to the point of you felt like you couldn’t really do anything anymore.
And that’s when it all started going really south. So that was about 2016 or 2008. Sorry.
Right? Yeah, 2008. That’s when it all started really changing. And not for the better.
No, no, I agree. I was just wondering how that impacted you guys. And related to that, I’m sure use of force became a big issue.
I mean, did you see a lot of Let me let me back up. Let’s say the four body cams on police officers, use of force was implemented. Did you see guys, whether good or bad, taking advantage of no, no body cam and maybe too much force or not? Well, you’re certainly based on the threat and how you felt about it.
I would say this before cams, I saw people get their butt kicked. But it was never anybody who wasn’t completely serving up getting their butt kicked. Okay, okay.
Yeah. I mean, quite frankly, maybe not always like in the context of like, they were fighting, maybe they spit in an officer’s face, something like that. Or the end of a car chase, where they, you know, ran into a bunch of innocent people, like the cars ramming their way out, because they would do that a lot.
Like, we would chase people almost every night in cars. And, you know, they, they don’t care about it. They don’t care about nothing, like they’ll go and they’ll just go through an intersection and just ram their way through.
So I was in one pursuit and it’s been a long time. I would say late 90s where I was pursuing a couple of guys wanted for a shooting and they went through an intersection and killed an old lady right in front of us. Now, even as restrictive as pursuit policies have gotten them, they’ve gotten crazy restrictive.
I could talk about that just in itself. For, for example, when I started, um, we could chase felonies and then they quickly changed it. You can only chase violent felonies.
Then they changed it to, you can only take chase violent felonies with a deadly weapon. So if you think about that, the Boston Strangler wouldn’t qualify. Yeah, right.
Yeah. Yeah. And then, um, so then, um, they went to violent felonies with a deadly weapon within 24 hours.
And who interprets the term violent with a weapon without a weapon? What constitutes a weapon? You know, Laura, um, there’s some more rural places where they still pursue people, but, um, in big cities across the nation, it’s pretty much dead. You have to be like literally shooting out the window for them to chase you. And this case, we actually saw them shoot out the window.
Like they pulled up to another car. It was gang related. And they literally pulled up to another car at, um, like Montview and Dayton, the old China doll.
It’s an old rush bar that was out there like in the early 90s. And the passenger leaned out and literally emptied a man bag into the car next to him, which is full of people. So the chase was on, you know, and they went through this intersection doing like 70 and, uh, this, uh, old couple coming home.
And, um, you know, the thing is though that even that chase would be approved today by today’s policies as restrictive as they are. But it’s nonetheless, um, of course, it turned to a big lawsuit. Um, the police department got sued.
Um, yeah, which is, I mean, I understand, you know, the, the outrage of the family. It was the, um, it was the old lady’s family who sued police point. When I understand that outrage, I’d be outraged too.
Um, you know, one thing that I never understand it was let’s keep it in perspective. Um, they created the problem, not the police chasing them. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Not to sound callous at all, but I mean, let’s keep it in perspective, right? Certainly.
Yeah. And I think that started down the road making police the bad guys where you don’t talk to the police. They’re going to hurt you.
You’re the wrong color. Don’t mess with them. And you know, guys, I mean, they’re not to say that police are to do everything, right? Cause they don’t.
I mean, they’re human beings and I certainly didn’t. I’ve said things, you know, that I, I went home afterwards and I go, man, I didn’t handle that. Right.
I lost my temper. I shouldn’t have said that, you know, or whatever. Um, so, you know, we’re all humans and we all, you know, when you, when you’re, when you’re arguing with somebody or when you’re fighting somebody, you don’t always do everything perfect.
No. Right. You’re adrenaline.
You’re fearful. You do the best things come into play for sure. You, you, you in the back.
Have you ever pushed somebody with their handcuffs on? No. Down a hill. I would love to do that.
With their hands. I’ll tell you a little story. Here’s a little story for you.
So the old police department. I want to do that one day. Tell me about your favorite oppression of a minority.
I don’t want to do that. It’s just funny. I would laugh.
You just fell on your face, bro. The old police department that was up at like 16th and Dayton, Dayton or Dallas. In the 50s, they had some steps going down into the jail.
I mean, the nickname for them were the steps paved in blood because if there was somebody who was like a shit talker or, you know, somebody did something, you just like, you know, heard a child or something. They got a good kick in the back as they were going down the steps. That was before my time, but that was a legend.
Yeah. I’d say there’s something to that. I’m sure.
You know, as a human being, you’re still going to have feelings about. Oh, that’s the record. And your rage is there and whatever.
Yeah. I mean, I’ve cranked people up while they’re, they’re in handcuffs. And what I mean by that is like, you know, wrist lock behind their back or kind of kick me or they’re trying to pull away or something.
And I cranked their wrist just to get compliance. And that’s totally legal. That’s called a pain compliance technique just to get them stop struggling, you know, so you can walk them to their, to the police car.
Or from the police car to the jail, stuff like that. I mean, that’s, that’s acceptable under the right circumstances. I’ve done that plenty had to have done that for me.
Just out of curiosity, this might be a bad transition or it might be a perfect transition. I went all the crap that’s been out there over the last couple of years, you know, with, with news, with opinion pieces, with all this and spinning this and that. I’ve always wondered what a, what a former cop thought of the whole Derek Chauvin piece, right? We were all familiar with that.
You know, he, he kneeled on him for God. I can’t remember how many, how long it was. Like eight minutes.
Yeah. Yeah. But yeah.
But you know, the trial was, you know, there was no bruising or anything on that. He was on drugs, whatever, whatever take you want. I just want from a cop’s viewpoint.
Is there things you just saw? I was like, yeah, he shouldn’t have done that. Or he shouldn’t have been gotten in trouble for that. Just what is your take on that whole situation? So, I mean, I have a lot of opinions on that.
One is, let me just give you a little background. I was also a full-time Academy instructor for eight years. So for years, I was teaching people, you know, like a risk control tactics, how to put cops on and self-defense and shooting and that kind of stuff.
And even when I was an instructor way back, and even when I went through the police Academy in the early nineties, they was told us, don’t kneel on somebody’s neck. That isn’t something new, right? Now look, if you have to do it for a second or two to get somebody in compliance, okay, that’s different, right? Not for eight minutes. So, you know, I think if I look at that scenario, I think that that crowd actually got George Ford killed because they were yelling at the officer.
And I think he was in basically one, I think his mindset, I’m just guessing is that you can’t tell me what to do. I’m wearing the badge. You know, the more you say it, the more I’m not going to do it kind of thing.
Like if they hadn’t been there, he probably would have just picked him up and thrown him in a car. But because they’re all making a lot of noise, he’s like, no, I’m not going to sit here. You can’t make me get off him.
Which is stupid upon his part too, though. So, you know, I think that, I mean, we all know that George Floyd was no saint. I mean, he died of fentanyl, not really from the knee.
Although it can have helped his crowded arteries. It seems like he had so much. He was going out anyway.
Yeah. Well, that’s what the cause of death was, wasn’t it? From the corner was fentanyl. But here’s the thing was, is that that said, I mean, and George Floyd, I don’t know if you know, he served three different terms.
In prison for robbery, one of which was for pistol whipping a pregnant female. So let’s keep this in perspective. No, no, but that said, Chauvin, not only did he destroy his own life, but he did a reputable harm for all law enforcement in the United States.
So everybody’s getting judged up the actions of one person. And I mean, it’s absolutely ridiculous. You know, there was a really interesting study done after the George Floyd riots, right? And it was from a place called the Skeptic, Skeptic Research Institute or something like that.
That might be it. And you can Google it. But anyway, they asked people, how many unarmed black men do you think that police in the United States kill every year? Right? And they also asked them where they get their news from.
And that was really interesting too. So the ones who got them from left leaning news sources versus the one they got from right leaning news sources. And they kind of divvied up the, you know, the results, right? So the possible, you know, answers could be around 10, 10 to 100, 100 or more, or 1000 or more or 10,000.
And there was a lot of I mean, like the average was like 1000 a year is what people thought, right? And there was some people thought 10,000 plus. You know, so an interesting way, they’re way heavier on the left leaning news sources than the right. So the right leaning news source people were like, way lower now, way lower guesses, right? But nonetheless, so many, the average was like 1000 or more.
And you know what the true results are from the Center for Disease Control, FBI and Deodorant Stats was they looked at 2019. This was 2020. The study was done.
They looked at 2019. In 2019, police made up 2% of black homicides, and they made up 6% of white homicides. In 2019, there was 12 unarmed black people, black men killed.
And 10 of them were very egregious circumstances, like they were trying to take the officers gun off them, or they’re trying to run them over by a car and they got shot through the windshield. There was two of them that were suspect. And both times, those two were charged.
The two officers were charged in those two. So there was really two that were questionable, right? Now out of the, you mentioned the white ones, Eric, I mean, there was, I think in the same year, there was, it was 24, 26 white people, unarmed white people killed by the police. Yeah.
Yeah. I do that. I thought the Caucasians were more involved in deadly shootings than black males.
Well, and if you look at, well, I think we’re asking for it. Maybe, maybe with the police. I mean, if you really look at the stats, you know, another big elephant in the room is that nobody wants to talk, talk about it with all this is disparities and crime rates between different cities and different demographics.
And also, you know, cause everybody’s scared of being called a racist, right? If you bring this up, you’re racist. So, um, but also how you interact with police. And I will tell you that during my career, I worked in a neighborhood that was, um, I would say the first half of my career, it was more black and then a little bit Mexican and white.
And then as by the time I, well, both, neighborhood, neighborhood, neighborhood, the population. And then by the time I retired, it was far more Hispanic, um, just from people coming into the country and more, um, the black population, we move more South, shall I say. And the white population, their state about the same.
It was like 20%, 25%, something like that. Um, there’s definitely a difference in how people, you know, react to police involvement. There’s definitely a difference there.
How it’s perceived. Yeah. And, and how they respond to you when you contact them, you know, as far as, um, anti-authority or respect and stuff like that.
There’s definitely a difference. And I think that’s a problem because I think if you’re anti-authority, when you encounter the police, I think that’s only going to go bad. And, you know, I’m sure your folks all told you the same thing, but you know, my dad, when I was a kid, when I was, you know, a young teenager goes, Hey, if you get pulled over, just be polite and shut your mouth and yes, sir.
And you know, that kind of thing. And things should be okay. And you know, fortunately, a lot of these people, they’re taught the opposite by the community leaders and by the religious leaders are like, you know, you’re a victim, you’re being oppressed, speak out, don’t do as they say, they can’t make you do this.
And that’s only actually going to backfire on you, sir. The environment that they grow up. It’s only going to make them worse.
And especially when you have so many young men who don’t have role models in the home. And you know, if you look at, I mean, I love stats, but if you look at like crime stats, the one thing that the single most number one indicator of future crime for young men and young men make up the majority of crime, like 90% is no male role model in the home. And that’s no knock on single mothers.
It’s just fact, right? Sure. Sure. So it’s really a knock on men for not being there, quite frankly, for not being, you know, in the home.
Hard of it. Absolutely. Yeah.
Anyway. Hey, Graham. So like certain jobs are notorious I think it’s like dangerous jobs are kind of a roast jobs.
The people that do those jobs famously kind of have a dark sense of humor, right? Military cops, nurses are fucked up, right? I mean, they have messed up jobs. I’m not going to say, I’m not going to ask you what the filthiest thing is. What’s one memorable prank that you guys, that you remember or either participated in or I got pulled on you? Because you know, I mean, some of the pranks are hilarious in the military.
So well, I mean, when you’re talking pranks, I mean, I can’t say I’ve really been a part of them. But I’ve seen a couple that were pretty nasty. And there’s some sick people like we had one guy.
This guy was an older guy. I mean, like I’d say he’s today, he’d probably be seven, like he’d been around, right? And he’s the detective. And he was known for being he was a sick fuck.
I mean, he seriously was. And, you know, one thing he did was he kept a booger collection on it in a tin on his head. And you know what he did a couple of times was he’d wipe his ass and piece of paper and like sticking in somebody’s car like underneath the vent.
Oh, they’re like, come around. And they got the window coming from, you know, that kind of thing. It’s pretty good.
They pull over, they rip in the car part, you know, trying to Oh, my goodness. Nasty. You had to ask Jake.
It’s gold. I raw meat pattied somebody one time. It was hilarious for me.
The poor bastard had his house open in the middle of winter in Aurora. But it was good. Somebody did a raw tuna, the tuna can and it rotted for like three days.
Oh, my God. I can’t imagine wiping your ass and then bringing it out. Yeah, carry it from the bathroom.
Did you go from the bathroom to the car? Or did you like shit? It was impressive. I’ll tell you that. This is level of sickness got me, you know, I’m like, God, you’re sick.
That’s a good one. That’s malicious, man. I already did the same thing with the telephone.
You know, the old phones we can unscrew. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
A little bit in there and then screw it back. Yeah, yeah. I’ll be going.
I forgot about that until you just saw that. That’s great. That’s going to become the new tick tock like glitter lotion.
I hope not. Oh, we did. Glitter lotion.
Glitter lotion and you rub it on your ear and that guy’s ear. Yeah, that’s good. I like that.
Blue. Blue. That’s another one.
Honey. Yeah. They did it with shoe polish in the military for binoculars and telescopes.
Simple. Simple. So funny though.
I made you have a question. I already asked it, but I have a couple about going down the hill and handcuffs. That was it.
That was the important thing. Everybody hesitates, right? Especially when they’re in the fight. Have you ever seen somebody like really hesitate or yourself hesitate? Where it just crapped? Where they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s real time and they studied. I would be like, wait a minute.
No, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the person because I’m going to overthink here. No, he didn’t have that cow leg.
It’s not him. Yeah. I mean, you know, the only thing that comes to mind is I’ve seen one officer fighting somebody and another officer standing there watching.
And that didn’t go over well. Yeah. He’s supposed to have the guy’s back.
And that was kind of the end of that person’s reputation. Yeah. You know, that spreads really quick.
Well, I’m going to ask you about another situation because I’m going to use that to transition into Ragnar tactical because you guys got to see some of this video and stuff. All right. So I want to ask you about Kyle Rittenauer.
Not necessarily the reason he was there and all that other stuff. But the actual act of what he did when he went to action with his… Was it AR? He was carrying an AR, I think. What is your take on Kyle Rittenauer’s marksmanship, control, trigger control? I mean, if it was me, I would have sprayed everywhere.
You know, I’ve been like, I can’t pull this trigger fast enough. And he shot four rounds? Three rounds, I think? Well, I will say that I should say my background first is that I have been certified three times in federal court as an expert witness on use of force. So I should throw that in there.
And my opinion as an expert witness is that he was 100% justified in doing what he was doing. And I would say that as a father, if my 17 year old son grabbed his AR and goes, I’m going to go downtown and help out. I would grab him by the neck and pull him back inside and roll his ass, right? So I mean, it was a poor decision.
You’ve got some of those things like don’t put yourself in positions where you’re going to get in trouble, you know. But on the other hand, if you look at the actual what he did, you know, as far as self defense, clear cut. I mean, when you talk about, you know, use of force, it doesn’t have to be a knife or a gun.
And so people were complaining, well, what about, you know, it’s just a skateboard. Okay, I’ll tell you what, give me a skateboard. Let me hit you in the face.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Like a person getting sucker smashed or like, oh, yeah.
And it’s disturbing. Oh, absolutely. Well, what about also just, excuse me, attempting to disarm somebody? Typically, when a grown man attempts to disarm you, that is a deadly force situation.
You can shoot them for attempting to disarm you. Now, there is differences when it comes to proportionality. Proportionality is like differences in size, age, sex, strength, stuff like that, numerous multiple attackers.
So like, for example, if somebody way smaller, weaker, older than me was trying to disarm me and I shot him, I go, well, you know, they’re trying to take my gun out of my hands. That would be a hard sell under proportionality. But if it was somebody who was another full grown male, absolutely justified.
And that’s what happened in that case, right? So, you know, I remember one was trying to disarm. Another one was trying to hit him over the head of the skateboard. And I can’t remember what the third one was.
The third one drew down on him, didn’t it? That’s right. Yeah. So all three were perfectly justified.
It should have never gone to court. You know, and I said that from the beginning, I watched the video and I was like, there’s no way that should be going to court. That’s purely political.
On the same lines. What do you think about before you go? I’m curious about the guy in New York on the train, put the guy in the headlock. Yeah.
Penny. Penny. I know it’s in court right now.
They’re waiting the decision. Yeah. The Marine, wasn’t he? He was.
And you know, so here’s the deal. Like when you put a car out of the thread, man. So really, there is two types of chokes.
There’s a windpipe choke and there’s carotid chokes. And really, the carotid choke is not a choke. It’s called the carotid neck restraint.
And the difference is, is if you choke somebody from the front, you can break these little bones in their throat. There’s three bones in there, the hyoid, the thyroid and the cricoid, more than you ever want to know. But if they break, they can swell up and all of a sudden you can’t breathe and you die.
And there’s a lot of panic involved, too, when your ear is getting cut off. As compared to the carotid neck, if you are, indeed, if you are compressing the carotid arteries, it cuts off the oxygenated blood to the brain and you pass out. Well, Penny put the guy in the subway in a carotid neck restraint to restrain him.
Here’s the thing with most healthy people, even if they’re under the influence of alcohol or drugs, they should come back and be okay. Where he went wrong is he held an arm for a long time. So really, you’re really only supposed to hold it on until they go out and then either get away or secure them, right? He held it on for a long time, like 45 seconds or a minute or longer.
It was a long, long time. And I just don’t think he knew any better because when I was in the Marine Corps, we were taught how to put on a carotid, but they never taught us the liability part of it because they’re like, who cares? It’s fucking war. He dies fine, right? Yeah.
Versus in police departments, they’re like, oh, shit, you’ll kill him. As soon as they go out, put the handcuffs on and call rescue for him, get him checked out, right? And that was policy. We’d have to get him checked out.
So here’s the thing, though, is that that has now become illegal in Colorado for law enforcement, which is interesting because they pass the law. It’s been a couple of years now that you can’t use a carotid neck restraint. But the interesting thing about that when it came to carotids, using carotid on somebody was the same legal threshold of shooting somebody like it was deadly force.
Like the only time you could put a carotid on them is if lesser means of force had actually failed or were not applicable. But it was on the same level as shooting somebody. So it was deadly force.
So here’s the thing, though. What’s interesting about it is even though they made a carotid or windpipe choke illegal, under the right circumstances, you can still do it. I mean, for example, if you’re beating me to death and I’m losing, I could take a pencil and stab you in the eye with it through, you know, into your brain.
Deadly force is deadly force. When you read or revise statutes, it doesn’t say under these circumstances, you can shoot somebody. It says you can use deadly force.
Deadly force is anything that, you know, can be used as a weapon, really, you know, a pencil, right? A heavy ashtray, a chair, doesn’t have to be traditional weapons. How do you know the difference? How do you know the difference between a carotid? So a carotid is compression on the sides and windpipe is compression on the front. So for example, like if I was pulling up on the front, that’d be a windpipe choke.
If I was reaching through and compressing the carotid arteries, which he’s clearly doing on the video that I saw in pictures and videos, he’s clearly doing a carotid neck restraint, which is a lot less lethal. But I think he, I don’t know all the particulars, but I think it was like a full minute he added on. It’s way too long.
That’s how somebody is going to die. And I don’t think he knew any better. Like he was never trained any differently.
I don’t think I would start counting seconds either. I would just be like, go down, go down. I think the outcome is going to result with people that would necessarily step in and say, I’m going to stop this guy from harming anyone on the train.
Now they’re going to go, I’m not getting involved unless it comes to my safety. So I think that whole good Samaritan will go out the door. Absolutely.
And you know, they’re just making a racial component out of it. You know, and I don’t think that was it at all. I think you got a guy who’s threatening people in a subway and know the guy who tries to restrain him.
But that goes all the way back to Bernard gets back in the subways way back in the early eighties, right? Right. So that’s so, yeah. Well, let’s get let’s let’s go on to some more fun.
And what I what I admire about what you’ve done, Graham, is you’ve taken all these skills that you learned on the police force from the Marines from fighting from all your shooting time. And you’ve made it into a business called Ragnar tactical. I think that’s pretty cool.
And part of that. So I went to your website and I’ll link all this your book and your website and all this again. But here’s the video on your website.
And it’s pretty cool. And I want to watch Anna during the first day portion, see what she says. My reaction.
Yeah. By the way, I’m way away. Marty, I just want to go on the record.
Yes, sir. Jimmy Smith and Rocky. Can you choke the shit out of us during that chokeout game on a daily basis in the office? And yeah, well, and they didn’t know any difference.
There was it was not good because their whole goal was to make you pass out. Well, you tapped at least you tapped quickly. Right.
So for the record, those two guys gave me PTSD just stateside in the office. And they deserve to be like you better follow the instructions of all future police. Yeah.
Fair enough. Fair enough. So here’s Ragnar tactical.
I think we should all book a group session and go do one of these things. But I’m an overthinker. There you go.
Anna. I would overthink it like, no, no, never mind. Never mind.
And then throw up everywhere. Very cool. That’s for zombie land.
What is it called? When the world gets taken over by zombies walking dead. Yeah. I’ll take that for that.
Yeah, this gives me, you know, a little excitement. I don’t say what Eric goes first half. I never liked the meal stands.
That shit hurts. Bigging into your knee. Yes.
It hurts. You guys do any fat strain with the firearm simulators? Do you incorporate that at all? Yeah, we used to use bats. And then we went to TI, but we used to TI for many years.
It’s awesome training. Really, really good. We don’t have access to one right now, though.
Okay. Yeah. That looks cold.
I was waiting. I was waiting. It looks like a lot of laying down in the snow.
Tomorrow, it’ll be warmer. If you go to that regnartactical.com, what impressed me was the amount of different classes that you have. All the things that you have.
It’s amazing. He’s got a class called Gun Jiu Jitsu. Basically, you got to get into a fight, but be able to draw your weapon or be able to use it in a grappling fight.
Is that basically what it is? It was one of those things I saw a hole in training many years ago where people train martial arts, they train guns, but they don’t train them together. My thinking is, well, let’s look at statistics. The FBI tells us that the average shootout in the United States is two yards and 2.5 seconds.
It’s two yards in distance and 2.5 seconds. Based on that, there’s a very good likelihood I’m getting attacked as I’m trying to get my gun out. I need to learn how to draw while under attack.
We use blue guns for that, which is a hard plastic practice gun. Then we graduate to earthsoft and do some scenario stuff with earthsoft. No real guns, of course.
The thing is, I’ll have them draw from really contorted positions like on their back while they’re being attacked, from headlocks, from bear hugs. From really poor positioning, learning how to get the gun out. We discuss the easiest ways to get it out, the most successful ways to get it out.
Then, again, as the day goes on, we get a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper. By the end of the day, we’re actually doing some live fire stuff. Not live fire in the pistol sense, more like a scenario base.
They’re actually struggling with each other. I would shoot myself. I’d be like, you’d shoot myself in the leg.
You wouldn’t, Ana. You would get his training and you would learn how not to shoot you. That is a concern, right? It is a concern that you could pump off a round into your own fire.
Plenty of people have done that. I’ve heard of cops spraying themselves with pepper spray accidentally. Well, I’ve pepper sprayed other people and it’s gone on me.
That’s for sure. Or it’s gone on my partners. That’s definitely happened to me.
In fact, I got a chapter in the book on that. That was probably on accident. I take credit for it.
I sprayed a couple of my best friends and they give me… They still give me shit about it here and there and I deserve it. It’s fine. Did you ever have to get Tays to know what a Taser does? Now they don’t require that, but when I went through, they did.
When I was at the academy, I was a Taser instructor, an OC instructor, you know, pepper spray, a gas instructor, CSCM. For all of those, I had to go to school and get Tays and peppered and gas. I mean, I got gas in the Marine Corps, but again, several different times at the week-long instructor school for gas.
Anyway, the thing is that I think there’s benefit to feeling the effects and fighting through that and getting the confidence to know that you can fight through it. There’s also a benefit to knowing that if you’re fully incapacitated, like if you get pepper sprayed and you’re fully incapacitated for 20 minutes while you’re decontaminating yourself and you go, well, you know, I know that if I get pepper sprayed, somebody could just literally take my gun out of my holster and kill me because I’m incapacitated. So there’s an argument for that too, you know, with pepper spray and with Tasers.
And I know that, I mean, I’ve been Taser several times in training and I know that like when I’m tasered during that five second ride, I am incapacitated. You can literally take my gun out of my holster and I can’t stop you. I’m just locked out, right? Like a pugilistic response, right? So, I mean, there’s benefit to that.
I mean, like everything, everything’s being watered down now. Like they don’t, they can’t make people do anything anymore, you know? So I do think there’s benefit to it, you know, if I’m a training aspect. But yeah.
So, Graham, I have a question. Concerning your doctrine, especially for your SWAT tactics, did you guys work with other agencies, you know, lessons learned from different things or did you specifically say, Aurora PD does this and this is the way we do business? Or did you reach out? We didn’t really work with others a lot because we just had our own city and even the federal agencies would have us do the warrants, like DEA, ATF, all of them really, FBI, even postal inspectors. We did a couple of raids for them where they do controlled deliveries for like cartels and then we’d hit the house as soon as a postman would walk away.
So, you know, once they sign for it, and they go, thank you. The door closes, postman walks away, we’d hit it. So, you know, we do raids for a lot of agencies.
They didn’t do it. They didn’t work in our city. We did all our own stuff.
But we didn’t really have the opportunity to work with those. But here’s what we did do, Eric, is we would train with other people. So, you know, I went to dozens of different schools, you know, and trained with dozens of different departments and got to see what they do.
And, you know, some things you’d be like, we do it way better. And other things you’re like, wow, I really like that one thing. I’m going to take that back.
We’re going to steal that, you know. So, there’s definitely benefit to going to other schools and keeping open-minded. I’ve always been a big believer.
You got to stay open-minded. You can’t go, hey, we’re the best. And, you know, therefore, you know, everybody else sucks.
Then you’re living in a bubble, right? You’ve got to look at what other people do and maybe you’ll learn something from that, right? It was interesting and I am by far nowhere near the things that you’ve done. But I got to work with, I went through a course called SORT with the Department of Corrections here in Colorado and the correction officers. And I was really impressed with how well I thought they did.
Now, it was more here… It’s kind of like first start, but for cops. But they, you know, concentrated on extractions, but they also talked about how to do entries, weapon entries, you know. So, that was really cool.
I was wondering, did you guys ever do any joint stuff with the Department of Corrections? Nothing with corrections because we didn’t really have any jurisdiction there, you know. But the thing is, is that some of their missions are different, right? Like a solid extraction. Some things might be the same, but I will say this.
So, there’s not a whole lot of stuff, different ways of skinning the cat these days. Like, there’s probably, I could probably say there’s probably three different ways of doing a dynamic entry. And they’re all pretty synonymous.
They’re like not super different. And I’ve kind of come to the point over the years where I don’t get really aloof about what way I do it. The way I do it, I think it’s the best way.
But, I mean, honestly, my biggest thing is have a plan. Don’t just frickin’ run through doors and get your head blown off. Like, if you have a plan, that’s, you’re going 100% better than, you know, you’ve just increased your life expectancy, 100%.
So, have a plan, be trained so that your partner knows what you’re doing when you enter that room. He knows which direction you’re going to go or, you know, and what to do when you go there, that kind of thing. What his mission is, her mission, whatever.
So, you know, not just hodgepodgeing through things. That’s kind of what I’ve come to in the end, yeah. Okay.
The Ragnar Tactical, despite all the classes that they offer on there that you can take on an individual on a group basis, you also go out and train churches, organizations, people that ask you to come out and help them in their facility if they were to get, say, an active shooter or how to defend themselves and stuff like that. So, you’re not just restricted to that website. It’s fascinating.
No, I do a lot of church and school security groups. And, you know, we’ll do like range days for their firearms components and then we’ll go to their school and do actual tactics at their school because, you know, I’d want them to know what, like, I can look at their hallway and go, okay, if I was taking this hallway, this is where I’d start. Wow.
You know, and that helps them. They look at them and they go, oh, okay, right? And it makes more sense to them. And then I always do a medical component with them too.
So what, I don’t know if you guys are, have this term terminology, but tactical combat, casualty care. That’s basically penetrating comp traumas. It’s basically a gunshot wound.
It’s something buddy care is what they call it in the army. If it was one of putting a bevage on a wound or did it go real deep with shotgun, traumatic trauma to the chest, you know, I would, I would break it down to second chest. My favorite ID card ID card.
It’s one of them tension pneumothorax, right? So it’s tension pneumothorax commonly known as sucking chest wounds. It’s, you know, tourniquets for arms and legs and it’s hemostatic gauze for packing wounds. And that, that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.
Yeah. I’ve done a lot of it in real life and it’s worked really well for me. Like I’ve slept tourniquets on people that packed wounds.
I put a second chest wound on somebody or excuse me, with thorax and I had a really high survival rate. Like, I mean, it’s not rocket science. I’m not the smartest guy in the room.
That’s for sure. But it’s one of those things that if somebody didn’t show you, you wouldn’t know. You’d just be standing there trying to do your best and they probably die, right? It’s really simple stuff.
So I do teach that. So, you know, typically my church and school security groups, they get like two days a year, which is not enough. A couple of them will have me do more, but it’s a budget thing, right? So one day is typically range day.
The other day is like tactics and a T triple C refresher, you know, or something like that. So, but yeah, you know, and then I do some body guarding on the side. But yeah, that’s cool.
That’s, you know, it’s not really. He doesn’t talk about it though. Well, I do have some really big clients.
That’s right. It’s, it’s more just, it pays well, you know, and it’s hard to turn down good money. Right.
But it’s not something I really enjoy. I got to be honest with you. It’s a lot of hurry up and wait.
And a lot of dealing with very aloof attitudes, you know, depending on who I have never done any of that. I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you some bullshit. I have them though.
I’m details. I have had to let their dogs out to go pee. I have had to go, you know, like, like I’ve had to, you know, clean their car out.
So, you know, those are like the kind of bitch chores that you have to do, but here’s the thing. You know, when you, when you have a, let’s say you run a car for a week and you’ve got a client in town, you know, somebody flies into Denver and I’m, you know, they’ll hire two or three of us to run them around. Right.
And, you know, we have a, we’ll, we’ll hire a nice rental, you know, like a big escalator or something, right. And if it gets dirty, I mean, it’s not like anybody else is going to clean it. And it does kind of reflect on me.
So, you know, I will, you know, after I drop them off, I’ll vacuum it out and, you know, wipe it down, I think. So it’s not a thing that people don’t think about that. Right.
You know, and they think of bodyguard and they think of, you know, standing around a suit and looking really cool. And there’s some of that. Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, right? I mean, that’s what you’re doing out there.
Yeah. And, you know, more in the private sector. It’s funny you say that because like secret service, they won’t do anything but security.
And I work with several retired secret service guys. And because, you know, secret service with all of the heat they’ve taken in the last year, they still are the gold standard for protection. They really are.
And a guy who retires from secret service can kind of write their own ticket when it comes to protection details. Oh, wow. Yeah.
They’re kind of the creme de la creme and they really are. They should be. They are.
With the exception of that one lady. Yeah. They’re taking some hits, though, haven’t they? They were homeland, I think.
They were homeland, weren’t they? They weren’t secret service. No, I think it was secret service. The lady looked like me with a better hairline.
I thought they were, I thought they were homeland. Didn’t know where her holster was. So whatever.
Well, you know, it’s interesting you bring up the holster thing because that’s a training issue. I will tell you that a lot of times in police work, they will tell people, don’t look at your holster when you’re putting your gun away. So in other words, the whole idea behind that has been that you’re looking for the threats like you’re keeping your eyes up while you’re holstering up.
Right. And I’ve always disagreed with that because here’s my counter to that. If there’s still threats around, why am I put in the gun away? Yeah, exactly.
Right. So, you know, beyond that, then you don’t end up doing the secret service shuffle, right? Where you’re dancing around, like trying to find your gun because you can’t find it. Whereas if you just glance for a second, you’d find it.
And you know, it’s even more of a concern from a safety perspective is in my gun life, 25 years of being an instructor and way more of that, you know, shooting. Right. I would tell you, I’ve seen several negligent discharges through holsters and what every single time I saw it, they put the gun in the holster and like the zipper or the little tag or clothing got caught in the holster and it pulled the trigger as they put it in and they weren’t looking.
They were like looking at the target, you know, and they put it in, it goes boom, and it blows their holster bits and skims or leg. Yeah. Not good.
Safety button. Safety and then come on. Well, a lot of guns don’t have… This is your safety.
Well, for starters… Well, that is true. But that is true. But a lot of guns don’t have external safeties.
And quite frankly, I’m in agreement that if you do have an external safety, with the exception of a 1911 single action, you shouldn’t have your safety on anyway. When you pull it out, you need it to go boom. You don’t need to go switch off the safety.
So, for example, in the military, and I know only like, literally I read somewhere that like 2% of the military gets handgun training. Yeah. But in the military, everything is safety on.
And you know why that is? It’s liability. It’s for that one guy. We’ve all met that one guy.
You know, the one guy who’s going to shoot himself in the foot. So really, if you think about the… Here’s my argument. If you think about the average is 2 yards, that’s 2.5 seconds.
Is there time for me to take off the safety? Or beyond that, will I forget and get hacked to death or shot, you know, right? So it needs to… I mean, like all police departments carry safety off if they have safety. If they have an external safety, it’s safety off all the time. The one exception is single action 1911s because it’s carry clocked.
And it’s got like a two pound pressure trigger. But outside of that, and they teach sweeping it off as it come out. With all traditional actions, double actions, they’re teaching safety off.
So, I mean like… Glocks don’t even have an external safety, right? Yeah. Glocks for you guys don’t have an external safety, but when you say 320, that doesn’t have an external safety at all. Yeah.
And I don’t think you need it. I mean, you know, somebody said it, either Eric or Jake. I mean, this is my… It’s a cliche, but it is my safety.
If I follow the… If I follow the safety rule… I get it first and it copied me. Ah! If I follow the… If I follow the final safety rules, I don’t need it. Yeah.
Fair enough. Yeah. I only need it if I’m unsafe, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Right.
Ana, you need a safety. Exactly. I think we give her training.
Training. Training. That’s right.
That’s exactly it. I don’t… I have my concealed. I don’t honestly feel comfortable carrying because I haven’t been at the range in a couple of years.
You lose a little bit. Yeah. That’s actually very smart because most people are on the other end of the spectrum.
You guys ever read the Dunning-Kruger study that was done of people where they found that 90% of people in any given task overestimate their abilities? So, like, they watch John Wick and they go, fuck, I could do that. Yeah. You know what I mean? Right? In reality, you can’t even move your fucking leg that way.
Right. Yeah, you’d be the person that pretends, like, you pull out the gun and then it falls and then I’m like, all right. And you know what’s interesting? I would pull a groin just getting the gun out.
In that same study, in that same study, there’s like 10% of people that actually have decent abilities and underestimate themselves. And I am definitely in that category because I’m shooting, I don’t know, two or three days a week on average year round and training martial arts a couple days a week. And I’m like, oh man, I suck.
Like, I’m always really hard on myself. I mean, and I don’t suck, but I know there’s always room for improvement. Like, I look at it and go, I could improve this little thing that I do here.
So, you know, but it’s just funny, but I would rather be on that level because I’d rather be on the end that goes, I need improvement than on the end that really sucks. I got it. I got it.
It’s gonna be self-critical, right? Yeah. The people that have the inability to self-evaluate, like honestly self-evaluate. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I think that goes back to our previous discussion of, you know, being a victim or, you know, blaming others like, well, what could you have done in this situation? They’re not introspective. You could have done something different.
Sure. Yeah. You know? Well, yeah.
Blessed are those with no self-awareness, right? Because they get to, they get to be that 90%. But they are not the ones to be relied upon in those situations. Graham, I got a question.
So there’s always those ridiculous videos out there, right? Like one of my favorites is the Louisiana sheriff that is just standing there. Have you ever seen this? It’s Louisiana sheriff. And there’s a gang of people that are terrorizing a town.
And he’s got him and a whole bunch, like all his sheriff deputies behind him. And he is blatantly calling out this gang and just saying, you guys are sissies. If you go to president, you’re just going to be nothing but a mattress.
Like bring it on. In any reasonable fight, we’re going to tear you up. You’re freaking shooting sideways.
Those videos like that. Do you have any of those favorite ones that just kind of make you? I know you’re a big impressive man that does jujitsu. Do you ever just giggle at one of those big videos? You know, I don’t.
But I got to be honest with you. I mean, I’m super pro police, right? I mean, of course. But I mean, the thing is, is occasionally I see a video and I’m embarrassed for him.
I’m like, man, you make us all really bad. The stupid shit you’re saying or the things you’re doing. And I’m like, I wish you just shut up and go away.
Because you’re giving us all a bad name. And I say us. I’m speaking in the wrong text, right? The wrong tense.
But you know, I still, even though I’ve been retired for five years, I still can, you know, I say out of the blue. I mean, it’s hard to break that after so many years. Sure.
Sure. Yeah. That sort of thing.
I mean, I don’t know, man. There’s a time and place for it. I don’t know.
But from the way you’re describing it, it doesn’t sound that great. But I don’t know. Maybe it is.
Maybe it’s funny. But I think it’s humorous because it’s just so outrageous. I’ve never seen any other group.
Especially before body cams like I was, I was driving past once. I’m in the hood one night, right? And I’m driving. It’s a hot summer night.
You got your windows down and I would cruise around. This is at like 16th and gnome. Well, that’s a good one.
Yeah. So anyway, I’m driving through this neighborhood and there’s a group of guys on the corner, you know, bangers. And one of them throws out, you know, you fat pig, something like that, right? And I pull over and I go, I go, who’s the tough guy, you know? And it’s just me.
Again, this is before, right? And this is this was like 20 years ago when I was fighting routinely, you know, in a cage and in a boxing wing. So I was in good shape, right? And, you know, they all kind of looked at him. He didn’t say anything but you look nervous and they all kind of looked at him and I go Hey, man, I go, how about with this? Let’s see who the pig is.
Let’s have a push-up contest. Oh Right. Anyway, and they all just died laughing like his buddies like And he got like he I mean he did like 20 and they weren’t good push-ups or like 20 shitty Yeah, and they’re all dog and busting his balls the whole time and and at the time I was in really good shape You know, so I think I I took a breather at like 90 in the up position I’m something like 90 and I stopped in that position and I go hang on I’m gonna hit a hundred I did ten more Right, and I got up and I go who’s pick now and they all just It was a way of owning them, you know, it was cool It’s also you didn’t back down which they probably expected, you know for you to tuck tail and go on so, right So maybe Maybe it was better.
Oh, yeah Hey, you’re right to this day his friends are like, oh man you remember when you got Well, I think now let’s do a little test of how good a cop Graham Dunn was right now, right? So we are gonna play the cop movie quiz All right I’m going to show you two movies as we’ve done this before I’m going to show you two movies You tell me which one had the higher audience rating? I know jake hates this one, but i’m just so horrible at all this stuff And I love it Call me everything I needed to know about police work, right? Which movie police academy? Yeah All of them If you’re not tackle berry, I don’t know who you think so All right, you guys ready All right, so first up we got the departed versus Seven Brad Pitt versus Decaprio. That’s right. That’s right.
I’m gonna say departed got way bigger Yeah departed departed going with him going with grand I’m gonna go opposite man. Seven was really big because he was gonna, you know, shoot the guy after he saw the What’s in the box? I think that was bigger Jake I gotta have faith in humanity. I gotta go with departed.
Come on guys. So three departed one seven and the winner is murphy’s everything Grab it’s surprising how many of these things eric wins I don’t know why he wins these quizzes all the time Seven was pretty disturbing though. It was of course.
It was disturbing. Yeah, like i’m still mildly traumatized by all the Like the trees like the the smelly trees in that one. Oh sure.
That was a gluttony one Or the night where he just kept that person a lot The razor blade, uh condom or whatever. Yeah Yeah, it’s terrible. Yeah.
All right next up end of watch Never seen it Stupid movie. I thought that no, I thought I thought the relationship between those two was pretty I agree. I thought I thought that rash talking and the verbal abuse and the racial comments.
I thought that was almost On point with any kind of military Crewing too. Graham. What do you think of that movie? Uh about 50 percent really realistic and about 50 percent totally unrealistic Yeah, so like you’re saying I mean like the relationship part was kind of interesting and a couple of scenes You know like chases and stuff were realistic, but the stuff that happens in there.
There’s just no way Really? I’d like i’d rather hear your opinion on these Movies tell me about cops later Well, yeah Versus training day training day training day all day long. Oh, so jake jillin hall versus denzel I’m going only only because it’s denzel washington and i’m taking training day. That’s the only reason I said training day.
I would agree I’m not going to say it says training day Jake, are you going? Yep, i’m going opposite I’m going into watch this is the downfall. Just because I don’t want to be you always don’t Everybody’s on the board except for jake and eric has to Train day wasn’t good All right, let’s get some real serious stuff now naked gun Versus beverly hills cop. Oh, that’s a tough one.
All right I’m going with beverly hills Eddie was a big movie was a huge movie What was what was the years between weren’t they pretty far apart? They were that far apart. Yeah, I don’t think they were that far apart Yeah, I think naked gun was in the 80s too. So I prefer naked gum, but i’m gonna go with beverly hills cop for viewership.
Yeah, fair enough I’m going naked gun only for the gratuitous women’s shower scene during the opening credits That’s the only reason i’m going when the car drives through. Yeah, all you see is the lightning It’s running through the bathroom. That’s it Every 80s movie had random boobs in it.
Absolutely I mean, absolutely Where’s that porky pig one or what was that? Porky porkies were bad Porkies. Yeah, I like to part an airplane where they’re in turbulence and just the naked loops fly out. Right? I’ve actually warned my kids.
I was like keep in mind as an 80s movie. There will be random boobs in it at one point in time Ryan’s like my son’s like no there won’t I’m like guaranteed dude Oh, yeah I’m gonna go make a gun with him I always make a gun better. I got a chance Naked gun naked gun gram you went beverly hills cop and honor you went beverly hills cop, right? winner is naked That theme song is so iconic though of beverly hills cop Oh the axle for you Thought was theme song or whatever it was.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah All right, here we go final rounds not a shutout far go the movie All right.
What was her name? Uh Oh god, I can’t believe the sheriff. Yeah, she was a sheriff, right? Charlie stern like dormant or something like now Jesus versus heat That’s so far Wow So far go versus heat Marissa tour me There we go. He was just like a mob Cop movie.
I don’t know. I I didn’t like heat but it was it was a pretty popular movie. So big names Big name big names, right? Yeah, first time they’ve ever been in a movie together, I think The tactical reloads in that scene were very impressive in heat.
Yeah, sure Sorry, they they weren’t playing around in that I was like, okay somebody did some work here I’m gonna go with Fargo just because of how big it was that Fargo was big. Yeah, it was a good one That was a good one. I’m going heat Far because I think Fargo won an academy award didn’t it? I think it did I’m gonna have to go Fargo then.
All right Too far goes one heat honor don’t Switch the button marty Well, what did you guess? I said heat. Oh, so I didn’t hear you. I didn’t no worries.
Oh, yeah, she’s with all right winner is skinny Val Kilmer for the win All right, and since it’s Christmas time our last set is die hard Versus lethal weapon both Christmas Boy that one’s tough. Yeah Itotic What’d you think what’d you think before we guess? Uh Graham, what’d you think? Cop wise. I mean, I know it’s over the top.
I know it’s ridiculous, but Cop wise between those two movies Even though I know they were detectives. Yeah, they’re both. I mean, they’re both so unrealistic, but of course they are.
Yeah. Yeah I mean I’d go with Bruce Willis. I mean, I think he he plays a better cop Quite frankly, he’s more believable.
Okay, fair enough. Yeah How about Danny Glover though? How about him as a cop? I can see him. I could see him.
Yeah. Yeah With his with his wheel gun Of course, of course, it’s the best shooting range scene of all time, right? The smile. Yeah when he shoots the smile that is nothing.
That’s great All right, eric. What do you got? All right, man, I think I’m gonna go die hard as well Die-hard christmas jake. Yeah How many yippee-ki-yays can you have? I’m going i’m going lethal weapon, but only for the air stream trailer on the edge of the cliff That’s true.
You can never even get you couldn’t even get out on that beach. No, no, there’s no way He had a trailer and he had a trailer on the beach with a dog and everything. No fence.
No, nothing Okay Thinking about eating a bullet every day. Yeah, it’s a rough life. Yeah Burnout from narcotics.
There was so much volume. Hey, is that or is that anywhere near anything? That’s real gram. We have a burnout from who used to work in narcotics.
So they put them in somewhere else Because oh, yeah, that’s actually really yeah, no kidding out’s from not only narcs But from anywhere and they just they’ll they’ll throw them back on patrol or whatever because You know, they’re just burned out or whatever and Yeah, that’s no kidding. Yeah, and you’re like god that guy needs to retire like he needs to go There’s there’s some of those yeah, there are some that they’re like, okay, they took them off of Narx or whatever I don’t know if I want to really ride with this guy, but now i’m stuck with them. Is there that kind of There’s some interesting personalities, you know, um, but Yeah, I mean you you just you meet so many some of the stuff you just can’t make it up I mean really You know, I think I I think I talked about in the book that there was a I worked with an old guy When my first year on the road where he he was a detective and he’d just been demoted for Picking up on women too much on the job.
Like I mean he was like he was like, um, yes He was like calling women at home, you know, like and their husbands on the phone. They’d be like, hey, he’s a wife They’re you know, like he was shameless, right? Yeah, and you know, they report they complained on him so they demoted him from detective which is a big Devotion. Yeah, they put him on graveyard shift with me.
You know, I was one of the brand new guys. It was my first year and um Yeah, I mean and he wasn’t a bad guy, but I mean just A perv or whatever. I don’t know.
He just couldn’t help himself and a guy who’s a little disgruntled now that he got demoted and But he just working with him didn’t give a shit like he’s like i’ll just do the bare minimum I’ll grow the calls. They want me to go to but i’m not doing shit else And you know, you saw that a couple times guys burned out at the end of the career and very negative Yeah, you know, I mean and it’s unfortunate because you know, they’re like that in the rest of their life now It’s not just a work like they’ve become a super Negative person, which is kind of sad really Wow, wow. So there is some truth to that that for sure Eric diehard jake lethal weapon gram diehard on Lethal weapon because of mel gibson.
He’s cray cray Because he liked him when he was naked when he was waking up in the air stream This was a bigger span than I thought it was but the final is diehard 94 86 But you know that the end of lethal weapon was horrible It’s so bad The guy’s laying he wakes up with his his rifle in and starts shooting at people Well eric how many did you get Because you probably got all of except the last one. So I got I missed one. I missed one Here’s the thing Marty can never keep track of the score.
So you can just be like They’re all winners They’re all winners I didn’t have a chance to set up my spreadsheet because I was rapidly trying to get that together So that’s a good call grab. We want to let you do a pitch if you’d like to do a pitch for your book for your For your business or just in general. Well, i’ll make it quick.
But thank you. Um if You’re looking for a real Permit class I do a full eight hour day Not one of these joker classes where they do, you know, an hour or two of lecture and shoot a couple rounds you’re done So I go and like in my basic permit class I go through of course safety But marksmanship reloads malfunctions close quarters combat one-handed shooting. It’s a full eight hour day on the range very thorough We’re very patient and easy going with people.
We don’t make people feel stupid, but there’s an emphasis on safety Um, if you’re consider yourself more advanced we do level two level three pistol also level one level two level three carbine Which is usually ours, but I do get some aks divorce some other stuff precision rifle one and two Combat shotgun and then as far as oh and I do a pistol red dot class two for people have red dots on their pistols That’s a level two class because that is its own animal and then um I do uh, my gun jitsu course that you mentioned and an edge weapon seminar. So everything’s on the website Um, i’d like to think we’re on the cheap end even though we shouldn’t be around the cheap end Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, I want to be affordable to people though And then um, also if you have a you know, a church security group or you’re part of a school security group I’d love to be you know, talk to you about that Um, and then as far as book goes, uh, the jagged blue line It’s available on amazon and I do have an audible version which I recorded myself And it’s on audible itunes.
It’s on all the different platforms Um for audible’s yeah, and it came out really well. I’m really proud of it. I’m very happy with the way it came up So, you know, it was done professionally and um, they made me sound normal.
Not like a good They edited a lot of stuff a lot. There’s a lot of editing and um, that sounds great because I got your audible I got the audiobook. Yeah.
Yeah, it’s very good. I’m very happy with all of it I don’t have enough for everybody keeps asking me when I was when i’m gonna do a Part two and I just don’t have enough information enough stories. I think i’ve run out but um I mean, I could write a book on body guarding for sure.
But the problem is i’ve uh signed all these non-disclosures Yeah, and if I talk they’re all gonna sue me and they have way more money than I do So i’ve got to keep my mouth shut about that. I could tell my friends, but that’s about as far as that goes You know, it’s unfortunately some great stories Um, but uh, yeah, so that’s it there’s there’s me in a nutshell and I appreciate you giving me the time Ah, that was a blast. We could have sat out here.
Yeah Waited for anna’s next uh crazy scenario that she’s gonna cook up in her head To see if you’ve done it. I love um, but it was good to have two people like-minded on the shelf Versus of being around a bunch of fucking space junkies grab their space guys Oh many times i’d say probably a dozen times I found somebody in an attic Yeah, I would 100% go hide up in the end. Yeah, that’s not unusual You know what when I was on swat what we do is we had these like pepper, uh spings.
Sorry there. Um They were kind of what they call them, but they had their little grenades full of these hard little balls And you would literally throw them up there and it’d shoot these balls every direction And man, these things were painful Or the other thing we do is on patrol is we just would laugh so we’d spray oc spray up there And then they’ll kind of run out the room and you’d hear them often i’ll come down, you know that kind of thing. Um Yeah, either a washer washer or dryer.
I’ve seen a canine guy throw a canine up there before Yeah, not fun for the guy who was up there no Yeah Yeah, he climbed up the uh ladder like pretty slowly and started, you know Pulling the dog back, you know on the on his leash, but he let him have his dinner Wow, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. So get his book.
It’s full of that stuff. It’s really I just did it Oh very good. Yeah, right Uh do that Graham it’s been a honor to have you on the show, man.
Thanks, man. Appreciate it. I’ve enjoyed it I’m always happy to come on.
You got a police topic. I’m happy to come on and give you the police opinion on it All right. All right.
Yeah, because uh, yeah, we’re always wondering if eric’s opinion is real or not Well, it gets look at some validation there that because those two opinions is a street cop’s opinion and then there’s the you know Command opinion which is bs You know what it’s going to cover shit up, right? Yeah, the street cops will actually tell you you know, so here it is. That’s that was me, you know So i’ll give you the what really is going on if I can Very good. Graham.
Where’s where’s your facility located? Um, so I was we’re talking about getting our permits not that i’m gonna ever carry But if I ever thought about it, I yeah Well, you know and a lot of people come through the course who are not going to carry They just want it for like home defense or for road trips or whatever And they’re never going to carry but other than those situations They just want to know how to function the weapon properly and what they can do legally and stuff like that Um, so I do my permit classes in bennett um, but I have two other rangers one in walk-ins and one in kywa that I use more for like in my advanced stuff and um, and then I um I have a couple of facilities I use for building clearance stuff one in aurora one in denver So i’m kind of all over the place i’m a couch shiver Okay, sure. Yeah Yeah, yeah, very cool. Bennett is not far from aurora.
I mean it’s actually really close. It’s all highway too Right kyle is really close to both eric and work. Yeah Yeah, we’ve shot down there.
Just studies. So yeah, yeah, all my places are private. They’re only open when i’m there Um, which is cool because we don’t have to deal with anybody else and i’ve got them set up the way I want them And everything like that.
So are you gonna you’re gonna come with us take a class? Sure, I went to dragon bands That’s a wild west so you’re good that guy is out of control I met him personally and I was like We’re not the same I got it because he’s from new york. That’s why no like he showed me his uh museum. Have you seen his museum? Yeah, i’ve heard about it.
Yeah, it’s scary Yeah, he was showing me the claws and mannequins and I don’t know I have no idea I was like part of the museum political things are Yeah, yeah, that’s true Well gram on behalf of all of us here, uh, thanks for coming on the show and for everyone listening Thanks for listening today Please like share subscribe Let us know how we did in the comments and make sure next week that you are not late for change over Get into the button. I just did it me Kurt thanks for coming on and again gram. Thanks for your time.
We really appreciate it. Uh, and everyone listening and watching We’ll see you next week Thanks You