Guns in South Dakota Mark Schlueter is a certified firearms instructor in SF. He discusses firearms safety, training, and rights.
Lori Walsh:
Today, we're talking with Matt Schlueter. He is owner of Schlueter Firearms Instruction. He helps train South Dakotans in safety and marksmanship, and he has seen an increase in business as more people want to qualify for an enhanced carry permit, which allows them to take concealed firearms into other designated states. We begin when I asked Matt Schlueter about his earliest memory of handling a gun.
Matt Schlueter:
I was seven.
Lori Walsh:
Seven.
Matt Schlueter:
Yeah. Welcome to America. My dad made me go to the city dump with him to help unload F100 pickup. We get done unloading, and we're at the city dump. I grew up in a really small town. And he looks at me and he goes, "Oh, look. The city bar dumped all their bottles." And I was like, "Oh." And he goes, "Go pick up those bottles and put them on that tree stump." By the time I get done, I'm seven years, I really didn't realize what he had planned. He had pulled out a single-action Ruger 22-caliber pistol, and he goes, "Well, it's probably time you learn how to shoot."
Lori Walsh:
Wow. And you had no idea that was coming?
Matt Schlueter:
No. We didn't use eye protection, we didn't use ear protection. My dad his own way of teaching. Probably not to what everyone would consider the NRA standard for instruction, but it was all there. "Keep your finger off the trigger, keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. This is how it works. Guns are dangerous." And of course, he demonstrated that by then sending me out to fill bottles full of water. But anyways, in a road ditch, so you could watch them explode. To a little kid, these things are important, but you don't see a lot of that today.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Was it cool, scary, exciting? What were some of the emotions?
Matt Schlueter:
Exciting.
Lori Walsh:
Exciting. What did you like about it? What I'm trying to get at, is it the bottle and the explosion, or is it the connection with your dad?
Matt Schlueter:
I think it's a little of both. You got to realize, I grew up in the '70s and the '80s. The world was a different place. Watching a Saturday rerun of John Wayne with my dad was actually a normal thing, where you're watching TV shows where guns are involved heavily. Nowadays, depending on the family, you may or may not find that.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Let's talk more about that, because there is the sense, as we do this project on South Dakota Public Broadcasting, we're hearing all these stories. And many of them are rural, which makes the conversations we have about guns just as serious as anywhere else in the country, and we're just as worried about accidental deaths and homicides and mass shootings as anybody would be anywhere. But our formative memories are often of something such as hunting or target-shooting. What, in your capacity that you work in now, are you learning about, nationwide, what's happening to these skills and this knowledge of firearms in our country? How has it changed?
Matt Schlueter:
From my youth, having grown up in my school system I was attending, in elementary and secondary school for middle school and high school, if your kid back then came to school and told the story to the teacher about doing what I did with my dad at the dump on Saturday, nobody got excited. They'd be like, "Oh, did you have fun?" And I'd go, "Yeah." And then they'd go, "What kind of gun was it?" And I'd describe it, "Like something out of a John Wayne movie," which it was. And they'd go, "Oh, okay." That was pretty much the end of it. If I had a seven-year-old, which my kids are way older now, went to elementary school and started to tell the same story, you may not get the same reaction from your local teachers, because the acceptance of firearms is dwindling, and I think some of the perceptions are skewed, and I don't think that's correct that they are being skewed in that way.
Lori Walsh:
Have you seen an uptick in people wanting to come to your classes for enhanced permit to carry or other training that you offer? How's business?
Matt Schlueter:
Yeah. It got crazy. In a normal year, we run about 350 to 400 students on average. We exceeded 500 by quite a bit last year, and the interest isn't going away, unfortunately. For me, it's a business thing, but also, you're relaying safety information. When you talk about personal safety, it goes way beyond just learning how to shoot. You're talking to people about how to be aware of their surroundings, things they can do in their home in their personal lives to keep themselves safe. The truth is, sometimes, we're places where we can't carry guns, and when you're in one of those places, say a school, you need to have the skills to realize if you hear something that sounds like gunshots, it's time to do something, whether it be lock the door and stay in a safe room or flee the area, whichever would be appropriate. But now is the time to do it, because if you're trying to wait and make that decision, you're only reducing the amount of time you have to try to react before something happens to you.
Lori Walsh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Let me ask you this, because most business owners, if business is up that much, will say, "This is a great thing." And what I'm hearing you say, tell me if I'm hearing it correctly, is it concerns you a little bit because it means more people are afraid. What is your-
Matt Schlueter:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, okay. Tell me more about that.
Matt Schlueter:
A lot of our students, I have three different categories of students. I have people like myself who had been in law enforcement, got out of law enforcement, and now they decide they want their permit for whatever reason. And maybe they carried concealed while they were on duty for the agency or if they were in the military for whatever job they had. But now, they've decided, because something happened to them or in their community, that they feel the need to have the ability to carry concealed for personal protection again. And that involves, also, returning shooters, avid sportsmen who normally in the past would've never considered guns being carried on their person as part of their daily routine.
Then you have new shooters, and they're a different story, a lot of them. Some of them get the permit because somebody else in their family already carries concealed. Others had something happen to them, either directly, indirectly, or in their community. Here in Sioux Falls, if you watch the news, it doesn't take long to pick something out and go, "Oh, that happened over on such-and-such side of town." Well, somebody lives on that side of town, and some people may decide they need to start taking either martial arts classes or other self defense classes such as ours as part of their preparatory plan in case something ever happened to them.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Matt, I want to talk to you about some basic gun safety things, because we just don't do that nearly enough. But first, I want to get at this idea that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and I bet you have, too. And that is just, when you carry, you have decisions to make. You have decisions to make about how to protect yourself in a way that is safe. You have to be willing to take action, and you have to think deeply about what you are willing to do and what you're not willing to do. How do you help people process? In some sense, it's simple to make a decision to take things into your own hands, and then when the situation is upon you, you better have thought some things through before it happens. Walk me through some of that.
Matt Schlueter:
Some of the tools we talk about in our class would be the same thing your ex-husband or I would've experienced in law enforcement, where we talk about means, opportunity, and jeopardy. But it goes way beyond that, because you have to realize, what if you made a mistake? And you really have to keep that in mind when you're putting your personal protection plan together.
When I first got into law enforcement, they'd do the interview, and I'm sure they did in the military, too. They'd say, "Could you use deadly force?" Everybody says yes. But the truth is, not everybody can. The reason everybody says yes is because that's what's expected of them, but what we think about and what we talk about in class involves, "What if? What if you were wrong?" Ultimately, you'd be responsible for that decision. And some of those things that could be an honest mistake may not actually be an honest mistake in the middle of an incident.
Let's say you're shooting at the bad guy in a justifiable shooting, and the bullet passes through the bad guy or you miss. Well, you're responsible for that round. If I hit something, meaning property, I'm responsible for it. If I hit a person, which is a lot bigger problem, because now we're not only talking about civil liability. We're probably talking about criminal liability on top of that. This is something concealed carry holders have to think about. They have to come up with these plans that we talk about in class.
Lori Walsh:
We have talked a lot about responsibility, and I want to ask you about rights. When we do look at efforts to curtail those rights, people who are listening and say, "Wow, nobody should be allowed to have these things. Let's just get them off the streets," you would respond what?
Matt Schlueter:
I obviously like shooting, and I grew up around guns. I use guns, I hunt with guns. My favorite type of hunting, believe it or not, is black powder hunting for deer with a muzzleloader in our state. They give me a really long season to do it with. And it's more challenging, because you only get one shot, typically.
Matt Schlueter:
That being said, I have hunted deer with an AR-15. I like shooting them. They're fun to shoot. They have a place. My wife hunts. When we rife hunt with our tags in South Dakota, we both use an AR-15 based rifle. I don't think you can classify a tool as being bad. You really have to concentrate on the actions by the person using it. If we were to talk about criminal behavior, if a criminal used a rock to kill somebody, we're not going to ban all rocks. And if the criminal went out and got drunk and drove through a crowd of people at an open-air event, like a spring or summer concert venue, we're not going to ban all the cars. Obviously, these people had issues. To be in the frame of mind to commit a violent act against other people, whether it be with your hands, feet, or a weapon of some type, I don't know how you get there, but we got to hold those people responsible for how they made that choice and making that choice.
Lori Walsh:
Let me ask you this, then, because the response for people who hear this are going to be, "Well, you can use a car to get to work, and you can use a rock to build a building, but you can't use a gun to do those things. It's pretty much designed to fire a round at a target." Having been a law enforcement officer and seeing people at their worst days, do you have thoughts on how our society needs to address some of those problems that push people to criminal behavior or self-destructive behavior? They will grab a tool, whether it be a rock or a car or a handgun or an AR-15, and they will take some kind of destructive action. I know that's a big question for one law enforcement officer to answer, but surely, with your career, you have some insight as to human beings at their lowest moment.
Matt Schlueter:
When I was in law enforcement, I was a firearms trainer. I was state-certified. At times, I was working with new jailers or patrol officers. When you talk about violent behavior, from being on patrols standpoint, you have to realize when you approach these people, whether it be a traffic stop or call to their house, you're responding to a domestic violence or you're doing a welfare check, the people that make the decision to use deadly force on other people or just force in general, they are at a point in their life where they feel like they have nothing left to lose. But the truth is, they have a lot to lose, because in our state, being a death penalty state depending on what they do, ultimately, that could be the most severe punishment handed down to them. In addition to loss of freedom, maybe even for the rest of their life. How do you end up in the position where you think you've lost everything you have?
I think some of this goes back to at home, growing up in a family, and I realize... In our state, I can say things like this. A lot of it starts at home with going to church with your kids and being involved in their activities, whether it be at school, 4-H, or Boy Scouts, or the church youth group or whatever is going on with your family, or the marching band, or other activities. But nationwide, I don't know and I don't honestly think that takes place. As you talk about more urban centers like New York City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and I hate to say it, Minneapolis and Omaha, they are far removed from the rural roots that we come from, and they may not have those values that were instilled in them by their parents and their grandparents. I hope I answered the question.