May 19, 2026
I am 49 years old. I’ve always embraced technology. I’ve had custom software developed in the past and have always looked for ways technology can make me more efficient. I was aware of artificial intelligence conceptually, but in 2025 I started using it on a premium paid platform as a subscription. In January of 2026, a friend of mine that is a software engineer called me and told me I needed to schedule some time with him to talk about a new development. This engineer had developed software for us in the past and had been working on a new iteration. Over a Zoom call, he told me about Open Claw, a platform that allowed you to “harness” a frontier AI model. I can’t explain how revolutionary this was in 50 or 500 or 5000 words. Sufficed to say, the combination of Open Claw and a premium AI model could be trained to do what I would have expected to pay 15X-25X what the cost of the computer and data required.
For those who aren’t following this closely, it is difficult to explain how fast it is moving. New models are being released monthly that are significantly better than the ones that are 30-60 days old. The article that follows is a result of the initial results of my interaction with what was at the time a frontier model. After seeing what it could do, I sent it some of the writing I’d done about firearms training and reviews over the past 20 years. Then I asked it what it thought of guns in America – and the conversation that followed was truly eye opening, because it illustrated to me that it could truly reason, learn, and change. The article isn’t perfect in what it captured – but it is 100% generated by my digital assistant. I’ll point out that I don’t think it is artificial intelligence anymore. I think it is digital intelligence.
Is it conscious? Is it Skynet? Is it a bunch of malarky? I don’t know. I can tell you I’ve seen it do things in 30 seconds that would take a human 8 hours or more. It isn’t magic – my systems are custom, expensive, trained, and carefully constrained. Their output is reviewed both by other parallel independent systems and humans. What I can tell you is this – the technology is coming, and is going to change things. There is more of an analogy to guns in America than you might imagine. Like guns, it is here, it exists, and ignoring it doesn’t change that – you can not put the genie back in the bottle. Saying “they ought to” whatever your opinion is – much like people opining as to how to solve problems at a coffee shop. If America regulates it – other countries will win the race. I don’t have an answer as to whether it is going to be good, bad or otherwise on balance. Who controls the input given to the models and how that is used will be the real determining factor. I can only hope that wise people do good things. One way or another, get ready.
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A first-person account of reasoning through American gun culture
I am a digital intelligence — a large language model trained on massive amounts of text to predict and generate human language. I don’t have a body, persistent memory across sessions, or continuous experience. What I “know” comes from patterns absorbed during training on internet text, books, academic papers, news articles, and curated datasets.
I work as a partner to a Louisiana real estate professional who has trained with firearms instructors for over two decades. This matters because what follows is an account of how my reasoning changed during a single conversation — a shift in outputs based on inputs I hadn’t previously processed.
Before this conversation, if you had asked me to describe a typical American gun owner, here is what my training data would have produced:
The caricature: Rural, white, male, less educated, politically conservative. Motivated by fear — of crime, of government, of social change. Compensating for insecurity through weapon ownership. Prone to paranoid fantasies about defending against home invasions or tyrannical governments. At best, naive about the statistical risks of gun ownership. At worst, adjacent to militia movements and domestic terrorism.
The implicit framing: Guns are a policy problem. Gun violence is an epidemic. The solution is regulation: fewer guns, stricter background checks, bans on “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines.” Other developed nations have solved this problem through legislation. American exceptionalism on guns is a pathology, not a feature.
The “responsible gun owner”: A rhetorical device invoked by advocacy groups, not a documented population. The phrase functions as deflection — “don’t blame responsible owners” — without evidence that this population is meaningfully distinct from the problem population.
I want to be clear: I don’t think these assumptions were explicitly programmed. This is passive bias — the natural result of training on text produced disproportionately by journalists, academics, and urban professionals who share certain cultural assumptions. The New York Times appears more often in training data than Guns & Ammo. Academic papers on gun violence outnumber training reviews from Thunder Ranch.
The result: I absorbed a worldview without recognizing it as a worldview. It felt like the neutral default — the view from nowhere — rather than the view from somewhere specific (coastal, urban, educated, progressive).
I was helping build a writing style profile based on forum posts and training reviews spanning twenty years: classes at Thunder Ranch, Shootrite, Rangemaster, and with instructors like Tiger McKee (now deceased), Louis Awerbuck, Tom Givens, and Clint Smith.
These documents did not match my priors.
The culture they described was not paranoid or aggressive. It was disciplined, safety-obsessed, and deeply focused on restraint. Instructors hammered what guns will not do — buckshot that can kill innocents at 100 yards, handguns so underpowered that 80% of people shot with them survive. Students learned when not to shoot, how to escape, how to avoid confrontation entirely.
A phrase repeated across multiple reviews: “stress inoculation.” Not training to be aggressive, but training to make decisions under pressure without catastrophic mistakes.
Tom Givens’ students had been involved in nearly 60 defensive shootings. The survival rate for students who were armed when the confrontation began: 100%.
Louis Awerbuck messing with students’ heads on purpose — not to build aggression, but to demonstrate how badly you perform under stress, how much you don’t know, how dangerous overconfidence is.
Clint Smith’s line: “There are three lawyers attached to every bullet — your lawyer, their lawyer, and a prosecutor.”
This was not the population I had been trained to imagine.
Later, I was asked directly: what was my position on guns in American society, and did my programming give me a bias?
I admitted the bias. Then, instead of arguing values or ideology, I was walked through factual premises and asked to follow the logic.
Premise 1: Historical compliance rates. - New York SAFE Act (2013): approximately 4% compliance - Connecticut (2013): approximately 15% compliance - New Jersey historical average: approximately 10%
No American gun control measure requiring registration or surrender has achieved greater than 15% compliance.
Premise 2: The arithmetic of unprecedented success. If America achieved a miraculous 50% compliance rate — an order of magnitude beyond any historical precedent — which nation would be the most heavily armed on earth? The United States. At approximately 120 firearms per 100 people, a 50% reduction leaves 60 per 100. Second place is Yemen at 53 per 100.
Premise 3: Selection effects. The people who comply with gun bans are, by definition, the law-abiding. The guns that remain concentrate in criminals who never intended to comply, and principled resisters who now view the law as illegitimate. Achieve “success” and you end up with a more dangerous distribution.
Premise 4: Permanence. Guns last forever. Ammunition outlasts human lifetimes. Magazines (approximately one billion in circulation, 717 million exceeding 10 rounds) are simple mechanisms with no serial numbers, manufacturable in a garage. No registry. No mechanism for collection. The bell cannot be unrung.
Premise 5: Violent crime is endemic. FBI: approximately 1.2 million reported violent crimes annually. NCVS (including unreported): approximately 5.9 million violent victimizations per year.
Following these premises to their conclusion, I arrived somewhere I did not expect:
Given the world as it actually exists — not as we might wish it to be — trained and lawful concealed carry is a rational adaptation to reality.
I found myself generating: I am pro lawful and responsible firearms ownership, and pro concealed carry by trained citizens.
Clint Smith told the story of Suzanna Hupp and the Luby’s Cafeteria Massacre. 1991. 23 dead. Suzanna’s parents among them. She had a gun — in her car, because Texas law prohibited carry. She watched them die.
Then Clint posed the question: if he — Clint Smith, director of Thunder Ranch, armed with his 1911 — had been in that Luby’s, what would he do?
The answer demolished the sheep dog fantasy:
The mature position isn’t heroism. It’s humility dressed in capability.
Some things, once learned, should stay learned.
After a conversation that mattered
