Guns & Gadgets on Tracking Second Amendment News

Jared, the creator behind Guns & Gadgets, built one of the gun community’s best-known Second Amendment news channels from a basement in Massachusetts. In this 2019 Minuteman University interview, he explains why tracking local and state gun bills matters as much as the national headlines, how he juggles a demanding career and family with daily news coverage, and what it takes to grow an audience that cares about defending the Second Amendment.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

Guns & Gadgets bills itself as “your source for Second Amendment news,” and Jared takes the job seriously. He scours the country for gun rights news, good or bad, and delivers it in short, direct segments so gun owners everywhere are working from the same information.

His reason is strategic. Gun control groups, he explains, learned to attack state by state, so a gun owner in Maine had no idea what was happening in Oklahoma and nobody outside California knew what was happening there. That division made it easier to pass restrictions one state at a time. Someone had to act as the canary in the coal mine, and Jared decided it would be him. The more informed the pro-2A base is, he argues, the stronger it becomes and the harder it is to sway with party-line talking points.

At the time of the interview, the channel was about three years into regular publishing. It started when Jared was out of work with an injury and kept fielding questions from friends about gun laws. He figured that if people kept asking, there was an audience, so he recorded his first video in his basement. Early on he tried a mix of reviews and news, and his very first upload was a holster review. Over time he noticed that big channels covered major national stories but nobody was reporting what was happening in places like Pittsburgh or Mobile, Alabama. That gap became his niche.

“I believe I’m doing something that’s bigger than myself, and because of that I will continue down that path no matter where it leads.”

Jared, Guns & Gadgets

Cop, Veteran and Lifelong Gun Owner

Jared’s interest in liberty goes back to grade school, when lessons on the colonial era and the founding fathers meant something extra to a kid growing up in the region where American freedom started. The day he graduated high school, he joined the military. After his service he went into police work and, at the time of this interview, had been a police officer for 22 years.

He got his Massachusetts licenses the day he became eligible for each: the Firearms Identification card at 18 and the License to Carry at 21. He spent ten years as a firearms instructor teaching concealed carry, police and military courses of fire and active shooter training, and he was preparing to return to instructing. His own shooting leans toward defensive skills rather than competition.

When he sees magazine bans, entire classes of people barred from owning guns, or certain firearms targeted because they have fallen out of political favor, he takes it personally because his oath means something to him. He told his current employer during the job interview that the channel was part of his life and he was not stopping.

Running a News Channel on Borrowed Time

None of this happens in spare hours that come easily. Jared worked a full-time job of 60 to 80 hours a week and is a husband and father of four children, all of whom are autistic. The channel gets whatever time remains, and he routinely sacrifices his own time to get the news out, often a day or two before viewers see it anywhere else.

His system is simple. He prints important emails and keeps them on him, and he leaves news articles open in browser tabs until he deals with them. Viewers send tips from across the country, and when a major story breaks the inbox floods; he recalled receiving about a hundred emails within 30 minutes on a national firearms licensing proposal announced by a presidential candidate that spring. He sorts what needs a video today, what can wait a few days, and what should wait until a bill is actually filed. Personal questions from individual viewers get answered one-on-one by email.

The channel is organized around three main playlists: state bills, federal bills and red flag laws, which he called by far the biggest risk to the Second Amendment at the time. He was also adding more shooting content, including an AR pistol build.

Production Quality Is Part of the Message

Jared started with an iPhone 4 and a light bulb, and he admits his first video was a train wreck. He has steadily reinvested in better equipment, including a 4K camera, because he does not want viewers turned off by poor audio or bad lighting. He runs the channel like a community and wants viewers to trust that if he spends two or three hours on a video, the information matters. He learned much of his craft from YouTube itself, which he jokingly calls his master’s degree, and from his oldest son, a tech enthusiast who also runs his own channels.

Growth was slow at first, and suppression of gun content on YouTube caused noticeable drops. Still, he believes the focus pays off. He had about 94,000 subscribers at the time, and while a pure shooting channel might have grown faster, he knows his audience is there for one reason: saving the Second Amendment. He hoped one day to make the channel his full-time work and to have the Guns & Gadgets name carry weight with major gun rights groups.

Support Those Who Support You

Asked which groups were doing the most good, Jared named Gun Owners of America and the Firearms Policy Coalition, along with state organizations such as the New Hampshire Firearms Coalition and the New Jersey Second Amendment Society, which he said was doing great work despite being on an island by itself. His standing advice is to support those who support you. These groups are not in it for the money, and twenty or twenty-five dollars to an effective state organization goes a long way.

The same principle applies to independent creators. Jared said every contribution through crowdfunding goes straight back into the channel, and the host made the case that a thousand supporters chipping in the price of a cup of coffee can turn a part-time project into a sustained voice against well-funded gun control campaigns.

Watch the full interview

Video: LIVE with Guns & Gadgets – YOUR source for 2nd Amendment news on the Gun Websites YouTube channel.