Riding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #202 Paul Kricher Artist & Author, Jim Cirillo’s Tales from the Stakeout Squad I’ve seen the book “Jim Cirillo’s Tales from the Stakeout Squad” online for years. It’s always been very expensive, often selling for $250. I saw that Alex Sansone, The Suited Shootist, () was suggesting that folks buy the book no matter the cost. Well, I started hunting for it. I found a copy at GunBroker for $30 with shipping. I messaged the seller asking if it was a pdf of the book. Well, I found gold! Paul Kirchner, the author, was selling the book on GunBroker....
info_outline RSWC #201 Meet The PressersRiding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #201 Matt Mallory & Klint Macro Meet The Pressers It’s always a great time to run into Matt & Klint from Meet The Pressers. We filmed a show at SHOT in 2020. And they let me use their car to film a couple other shows. This year we were able to film another show on SHOT’s Range Day. Since our last show, Matt has been busy getting and giving training with , his training company. He offers several of the NRA and USCCA courses. But he is also a Master Instructor for Pepper Spray and for the TASER Civilian Course. He travels the country...
info_outline RSWC# 200 michael BaneRiding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #200 Michael Bane MichaelBane.tv Michael Bane. What can I say? I watched Michael for a long time as a new gun owner back on The Outdoor Channel on the shows Shooting Gallery and The Best Defense. I really enjoyed them and got a lot from The Best Defense! If I had a VHS player, I’m sure there are some tapes in storage. I met him at SHOT a couple years ago and asked for a selfie and he happily obliged. In November of 2022, Matt Mallory and I did a with him and I really had no idea about all of his history. Michael is an amazing storyteller so I just sat back...
info_outline RSWC #199 Brad LandseadelRiding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #199 Brad Landseadel Central Virginia Sporting Clays A trip to Central Virginia Sporting Clays last July led to another trip in October. I headed down to CVSC with good friends John Petrolino and Cam Edwards. On the first trip, we encountered Brad Landseadel, the owner. He’s a great guy and started telling us some jokes. We got to talking, telling him what we do. John wrote an . Cam suggested we should do this again. John said I should film a show with Brad. Brad suggested we do the show in one of his planes. On the trip in fall, I brought the GoPros and...
info_outline RSWC #198 David LairdRiding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #198 David Laird DSC Training & FASTER Saves Lives In the summer of 2021, I was fortunate to have taken a Level 1 course in Ohio. A number of friends and passengers of the show were there with me. David Laird was there, too, and he was nailing everything like it was nothing. Doing all the drills. Nailing the targets. Finishing before everyone else. It was impressive to say the least. I did interview him on that trip (RSWC #127). David was taking the FASTER course to see if it was something worth bringing back to Arizona. It was. David was a...
info_outline RSWC #197 Erin MihalikRiding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #197 Erin Mihalik Throom Targets, CEO At the Great American Outdoor Show in 2022, I got to meet Erin. I was there with John Petrolino and we were in search of Tony Simon. Well, we were pretending we didn’t see Tony while he was behind us and we were talking smack about him. Erin wasn’t sure what we were up to, but she just went with it. That’s the kind of fun spirited person she is. We saw her again at GAOS in 2023 and she wanted to be on the show as things have been growing at Throom over the last year and she has lots to talk about! She starts...
info_outline RSWC #196 Karise Jerel CrewRiding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #196 Karise & Jerel Crew That Gun Talk I’ve been going to the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival at the Tommy Gun Warehouse in Greeley, PA, for about 5 years now. While I was hanging out in the VIP room with a friend, Karise Crew came in and sat across the room. I invited her to come join us. I’m glad I did. Karise and her husband, Jerel, are instructors in Philadelphia. They were speaking at the event, too. So after some talking with them, I thought it would be a great idea to have them in the stagecoach. I have to start out saying that I love...
info_outline RSWC #195 Riley BowmanRiding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #195 Riley Bowman ConcealedCarry.com I met Riley in passing at SHOT Show a few years ago. We exchanged info and he said he would enjoy being on the show. On a trip to Denver, I reached out and messaged him and we were good to go. Then on the day I was heading there, I didn’t hear from him. I called Neil Weidner (RSWC #116) to double check the number. When I did get in touch with Riley, he wrote a text but didn’t come through. Regardless, it all worked out. I met him at the ConcealedCarry.com offices in Sheridan, CO. Riley grew up in...
info_outline RSWC #194 Rob CampbellRiding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #194 Rob Campbell Eye On The Target Radio You have absolutely no idea when or where you’re going to meet your next best friend. I replied to a Facebook post about a radio show wanting to talk to instructors from every state. I replied because it was 2015 and I was teaching NRA courses in Massachusetts. I made two great friends during that show but I didn’t know it. In 2016, I was at the Gun Rights Policy Conference and I ran into Amanda Suffecool. She’s Rob Campbell’s sister. They were the radio show hosts I talked to. We became fast friends....
info_outline RSWC #193 Lenny MagillRiding Shotgun With Charlie
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #193 Lenny Magill The GLOCK Store I’ve known about Lenny Magill probably since I started getting gun catalogs in the mail. I even have a VHS, yes VHS!, tape that he did back in 1993! Before I learned about the other instructors, I knew about Lenny Magill. Lenny now owns The GLOCK Store. But he started out selling advertisements on radio and tv. Back in 1893, he did some commercials and ads for a San Diego area gun store and instructor. The ads did well and lead to some other things.The more he got into firearms, the more he wanted to get...
info_outlineRiding Shotgun With Charlie
#195
Riley Bowman
ConcealedCarry.com
I met Riley in passing at SHOT Show a few years ago. We exchanged info and he said he would enjoy being on the show. On a trip to Denver, I reached out and messaged him and we were good to go. Then on the day I was heading there, I didn’t hear from him. I called Neil Weidner (RSWC #116) to double check the number. When I did get in touch with Riley, he wrote a text but didn’t come through. Regardless, it all worked out. I met him at the ConcealedCarry.com offices in Sheridan, CO.
Riley grew up in Idaho and has been a lifelong shooter and hunter. During the crash of 2008, he had a construction company that went out of business. In 2009, he moved to Colorado to a bigger city due to the economy. He was a project manager for the government doing construction projects. After a few years he went back to having his own construction company, but then an interest grew in becoming a firearm instructor. He started with some of the NRA training programs and started doing some volunteer police work. Those duties varied between things like driving a patrol car and filling a shift, crowd control at large events, and even responding to natural disasters.
Eventually, he became certified for pistol and rifle and started to teach more. Once the classes picked up more, he stopped volunteering and focused on instructing, expanding his knowledge base and offering more classes to clients. Riley also started competing more often, too. By 2015, he was working full time with ConcealedCarry.com. The new business was geared towards helping new instructors with booking classes, marketing, and developing websites. While offering the courses, he started offering products to clients. Products ranged from holsters and belts to training aids, books, and other classes. Seven years later, they’ve got hundreds of products offered to help people carry. Over the years, they went from more training and less products to more products and less training.
On his personal website, you’ll see that Riley does offer training around the country. He has also done some instructing at the Active Self Protection Conference.He also keeps his schedule busy with competitive shooting, too. Besides the businesses, instructing, and competing, he’s got a wife and five children that he also wants to spend time with. As he says, he’s trying to raise some freedom loving Americans.
The great thing about people like Riley is their business sense. He’s taken ConcealedCarry.com and purchased several other companies over the years. Each one has its own customer base, marketing plan, and business plan. Keeping several businesses going is similar to when he was a project manager and running the construction business. There’s lots of things going on that need attention and never a dull moment.
The current businesses under the ConcealedCarry.com umbrella are: Range Tech Timer, Mountain Man Medical, Barrel Blok, KSG Armory, Dry Fire Pro Shop, and Ready Up Gear. Links are below, of course. Riley and his team also have their own conference, called The Guardian Conference.
I’m always excited to hear about people who make massive changes in their careers. Going from construction to volunteer policing to firearm instructing and running several businesses with hundreds of products cannot be easy. But Riley and his team have great products. And he wouldn’t go back to construction and project managing because every day he gets to do what he loves.
Favorite quotes:
“Now it's fully reversed. Used to be training and a little bit of product sales. Now it’s a little bit of training and a lot of product sales.”
“Juggling a lot of things doesn’t cause me a lot of stress.”
“It’s also important to us that we help people be well rounded self defenders.”
“I really, really enjoy what I do now. It doesn’t feel like work.”
“Everyday, I get to talk about, teach about, or actually do guns.”
Riley Bowman Website
ConcealedCarry.com
https://www.concealedcarry.com/
Range Tech Timer
https://www.rangetechtimer.com/
Mountain Man Medical
https://www.mountainmanmedical.com/
Barrel Blok
KSG Armory
The Guardian Conference
https://guardianconference.com/
Dry Fire Pro Shop
Ready Up Gear
Second Amendment Foundation
https://secure.anedot.com/saf/donate?sc=RidingShotgun
Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
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Dennis McCurdy
Author, Speaker, Firewalker
Self Defense Radio Network
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