A few weeks ago, Matthew Nowlin and Shawn Graham interviewed Isaac Botkin on the Faith in Action radio show.
Hopefully you have better things to do this Christmas than listen to podcasts, but here is that conversation, going from T.Rex's early goals to developments in the gun culture, but also spending a lot of time on plugging into community and building community.
A few weeks ago, Matthew Nowlin and Shawn Graham interviewed Isaac Botkin on the Faith in Action radio show.
Hopefully you have better things to do this Christmas than listen to podcasts, but here is that conversation, going from T.Rex's early goals to developments in the gun culture, but also spending a lot of time on plugging into community and building community.
show and I think that speaks to the fact that a lot of people have a world view that I find Sad and incomplete. I think what you do is very Christian, but we don't have. Let's get the. Let's get the dinosaur in the room out of the way. We don't have many dinosaur related conversations on on the show. What does T-Rex do?
Speaker 2:So T-Rex Arms the name is a little bit of a joke. We specialize in small arms, so T-Rex Arms is a great name for a company that does that, and it kind of depends on on who you ask. In fact, we love to ask people T-Rex customers or others what they think T-Rex Arms is, because sometimes that's more enlightening than what we think it is. So we're a number of things. We do produce content. So some people think that we're an educational company.
Speaker 2:We do resell a lot of tactical items, everything from night vision and body armor all the way down to small accessories, and so people think that we're that kind of supplier. But we're also a manufacturer. We manufacture a bunch of that stuff in-house, particularly kydex holsters, and so that manufacturing component is something that close to my own heart because it really has allowed us to Grow individually as a company. But also we have hired more people out of our community and build stronger connections. I would say that side of the business not to play favorites, but that particular silo has allowed us to employ more people and do more things and grow in more areas as a company. So I have a soft spot for the engineering and manufacturing side Plus. It's just cool.
Speaker 1:Is that in your background engineering? I know you're very self-taught. You guys are all home schoolers. Learning is central. The Botkin family so learning is central to who you guys are has been your entire life. How much of what you're doing were you taught and how much have you learned through trial and error and just being a self-learner?
Speaker 2:A lot of this is self-taught. There's a bunch of things that are in the company that are related to things that we did before as a family, but the engineering side is pretty new for me. I got into it relatively easily at first because I had been a 3D animator and had built a lot of 3D models of things for movies and television and so building 3D models of holster jigs is kind of the same in theory, and then I had to learn a whole bunch of new stuff about routers and CNC milling machines and 3D printers and stuff. So there was a clear on-ramp but it turned out to be a completely new road. But I have really appreciated that and now I'm actually getting back into a little bit more of what is more normal, which is media production that's coming year more of the teaching content. So we'll see how that goes, or if I gravitate back here to the engineering space and the machines and build stuff.
Speaker 3:I think it's hilarious that if people know me and my background in firearms and training, they've probably received one of your videos. The video in your courtroom saying that you did was one of the best. Honestly, I've sent it to a lot of people. So thank you for your clear articulation and your education stuff. You guys are a great resource for people like me who are trying to talk with other people out there, and you have these conversations. You do an excellent job of drilling down to the basic needs of the issue. So I want to just say thank you to our audience and if there's anybody else out there who ever has these discussions about some of the issues we're talking about, please look up the T-Rex Arms YouTube page, the resources there and the conversations they have. Isaac does a great job and, of course, we can talk about Lucas and the shooting and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 3:And now he's such a technical guy, but there's a lot of stuff on there, education wise. It's not just about fun stuff and firearms. You guys really do a good job. How did that become such a focus for you? As you are, you are very wise about these issues.
Speaker 2:So the interesting thing is a lot of actually, this is an accusation. I've received this accusation before from dirt folks like oh you only care about guns because you generate a profit from it, or you only care about these issues because it's attached to your company. And that's not actually true. I remember when I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad was a video producer and one of the first clients that I got to help out on this video was gun owners of America. So my family has been involved in some of these issues for a very long time.
Speaker 2:And, of course, the firearm issue. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is attached to self defense, which is attached to the sanctity of life, which is attached to all these different, really intrinsic, important, foundational things. I kind of laugh at that accusation when it comes up because it is kind of silly and funny, but it is also. If you care about some of these deeper things, some of these historical things, if you care about people in life and you love the people around you and you want to take care of your neighbor, you have to have some thoughts and some positions on some of these issues. It isn't something that just suddenly pops into your head once you find yourself working at a gun company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we travel in a lot of the same theological circles. And you mentioned gun owners of America. I cannot remember if it was the Rush Dooney biography book that I read recently or if it was out of American homeschooler. But even Larry Pratt, founder of Gun Owners of America that you just mentioned, stems from the same theological kind of background that all of us float around in. I mean, he was a Rush Dooneyite back in the early 80s, so his work in law go to groups like ADF. We focus a lot on abortion, we focus a lot on guns, but these are just checkpoints, things for a foundational safe society, a foundational biblical society. This is in your wheelhouse. You just talked about loving your neighbor, essentially by being able to bring firepower to bear to protect them. That's my summary, not yours. We're seeing a lot of problems in Shelby County, west Tennessee, with enforcement of the law. We just had a situation at a dollar general.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we had a customer seeing a armed robbery take place and he took action and he put down at least one of the perpetrators of a crime in public view, and so people are starting to take matters into their own hands as the judicial system is starting to fall apart. So, as we do that, one of the questions that we have Isaac, you see this and you speak to this on a regular basis is what do you think the general atmosphere is for firearms and tactical supply companies in Tennessee right now?
Speaker 2:So there have been several things that have happened recently that are very interesting. One of them is that, as usual on many issues, what the mainstream media talks about and what people are actually interested in are diverging pretty rapidly. This is true on a whole bunch of issues, but you can see it in the firearms space, particularly because I saw an announcement from Joe Biden just this morning saying that part of his reelection campaign is going to be to finish the job that's a quote finish the job on gun control. But his track record for the last three years has not been great for gun control. The needle has actually been moving the opposite direction.
Speaker 2:So there have been significant legal challenges to gun control bills that have been successful. A lot of things have been overturned. A lot of ATF actions, specifically ATF actions that the Biden administration pushed, have been overturned in court. There have been firearm freedoms won legislatively in different states. This Black Friday was a record for gun sales, or at least the background checks that are associated with gun sales. That was a record high this year. So the interest of the people in firearms is very high. There was an NBC poll done recently where more than half of the households in America admits to owning firearms, and so I feel like the interest in owning firearms is extremely high In Tennessee.
Speaker 2:it was interesting to watch because we had a very interesting year this year related to firearms. After the Covenant School of Shooting, there was the special session that was called by the governor to do various firearm related things and everybody in the legislature apparently filed bills one way or another. It was an extremely fraught, contentious time. But the people that I have been talking to, regular Tennesseans, are not interested in more firearm regulation. They're interested in more firearm safety that they think they could actually achieve this by having more firearms and more understanding of firearms, as opposed to more laws. I think that's even the case in places like Maine.
Speaker 2:We had the shooter up in Maine was on the loose and the police response was telling people to shelter in place while they hunted the guy down. And Maine legislators said don't worry, as soon as we're back in session, we're going to pass laws. Residents of Maine did not wait. They went out and they bought firearms because being told by the authorities that they need to shelter in place made them think I would prefer to shelter in place with a firearm in this situation than wait for you to handle the situation.
Speaker 2:So there does seem to be again this divergence between the kind of mainstream talking points and what the man on the street, the actual people, are interested in doing. And I noticed that just in our Black Friday sale. Black Friday sale went well for us. The Black Friday season was really good for firearm sales in general and it appears to be much better than the Black Friday commercial sales just in general. I was comparing notes with the Visa reports, the MasterCard reports versus some other companies in the firearms space and background checks and stuff like that. There seems to be a disproportionately high interest in gun ownership in the United States right now, despite the talking points that are being thrown around in the more public space.
Speaker 1:As a company that deals with life in a small town and a market that is surprisingly peaceful. You guys are integrated very well into your small town and you made a post on Instagram the other day that really resonated with me. You were at your local Christmas tree lighting and you talked about how you'd been going to that, I think you said, for around a decade. What is it like for you as a business owner when you go out to a situation like that? Are you intentional with your time? Are you working the crowd? Are you trying to meet people? How, as a Christian business owner wanting to make an impact on your community, what would be your advice to leaders in churches who go out into the community in situations like that and to small business owners?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say my advice is to be extremely intentional. However, I would have to admit that this was just last Saturday. My main focus on Saturday was keeping track of four little kids running.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a little bit hypocritical of me, but it is something where I think the little things do in fact matter. I actually have discovered recently that my children are better ambassadors for me than I am in a lot of situations. My children doing stuff in a cute and adorable manner around town is far more memorable than some of the stuff that I have tried to do deliberately. But I will say that what does really matter is a level of consistency and this idea that being faithful in little things is going to have big repercussions. Because we started being involved in our county. That was a pre-T-Rex Arms goal. That was something that we really wanted to do as soon as we moved here, 14 or 15 years ago now. We wanted to try to plug into the community. Our church was full of folks that had moved to Tennessee, wanted to plug into the community, and it can be very difficult to do that. We were mostly outsiders in our church. We had really good relationships with another church that was also a lot of folks who had moved to Tennessee. Recently and this was 15 years ago Not many people had moved to Tennessee.
Speaker 2:Not many people had moved to Hickman County, a fairly small, socioeconomically depressed county, and so there was already a level of suspicion like why would you move to this place? Nobody moves here. It was a little bit hard for us to plug in and a lot of these families were homeschooling so we didn't plug into the schools. A lot of us had brought our work with us. We were working from home or owner-owned businesses. We found it to be a little bit difficult to connect, necessarily, and so some of these small things, like the Christmas Tree Lighting Festival, were actually very, very important. Now that I think about it, it begins before that we began singing carols just on the square. We did it one year, and the next year that we did it, there's a lady in the bank. She said oh, they're back. They do this every year.
Speaker 2:We kind of looked at each other like ah, I guess we should do this every year now. So we have been just caroling on the square. It's a small thing. The Christmas tree lighting is also a small thing. It is a quintessentially small town thing. We decorate the small town. There's a moment that the lights are turned on, A guy in a Santa Claus costume comes up and talks to the people and members of our church and other churches come and sing. And it is such a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but it has generated so many relationships and opportunities.
Speaker 2:And again, I'm spending a lot of that time chasing kids around, but being able to interact with people and see them and introduce them to my kids, I think has really mattered an awful lot. But I will say to business owners, I had not really considered this, but one of our biggest bridges to people in the community has been the business. As the business has grown and we've been able to employ people, we get to know them, their families, their churches. That has been something that has generated a tremendous amount of fruit. And so in the past I've been a little bit more ambivalent about business.
Speaker 2:Your nine to five job, your daily grind, is kind of a necessary evil so that you can put food on the table. I now have a very different perspective on that, partly through, I think, a better reading of scripture, but also because, having seen the kind of blessing that a business can be in a small community, the kind of blessing that a business can be to people, I think that work is actually a very high calling that Christians need to take seriously and be very intentional about. And even if you have a tiny company, go to your Christmas tree lighting and see other folks on the square. This cumulative effect. You have the connection, you have the opportunity to see and spend time with these people in a way and in a context that you didn't have before.
Speaker 1:So last weekend in Collierville, a suburb of Memphis, the mayor and all the city officials, they proudly displayed their holiday tree.
Speaker 3:Matthew and I have talked about this a bunch and we kind of feel like in our world, definitions and terms are very important and culturally we feel like this is an erosion point for us. You so well articulate the red flag law issues you can talk about mental health laws and all the things. The way we have changed definitions and terms. Do you see this definitional? I would call it evolution or devolution. That we're seeing right now is holiday tree the same thing as what we're doing with mental health orders and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think that there's a very important aspect of the Coleridge Reward which is to change definitions, and you can see this in the firearm conversation. That happens. You can see this with the Second Amendment. There's a huge amount of furor over the Second Amendment from the gun control and the gun freedom side. One of the sticking points is in the Second Amendment. This term a well-regulated militia and the modern term of regulations, brings to mind government regulations, restrictions and controls that are top-down from the government, and the word regulate at the time of the founding meant something that is functioning well, like a well-regulated clockwork mechanism, which I think, matthew, you could speak to.
Speaker 1:I'm a classically trained watchmaker and back in the day, 90% of watchmaker's jobs was clean oil regulate. So yeah, I get you.
Speaker 2:So this is an example of where you change a word and there are unintended consequences to the changing of the definition a generation or two later, and so I think that this is a very important thing, and I don't want to be that well-actually guy who's constantly nitpicking about words, but I think that we do have to be very intentional about this thing, where, if something is important, we hang on to definitions, and we do that by hanging on to the right traditions. So wishing people happy holidays is one thing, but making sure that the word Christmas doesn't appear anywhere is something else. So where we need to make sure that we really maintain some of the definitions of words like Christmas, so that we can actually maintain the ability to have a conversation about things.
Speaker 1:So, in contrast to the holiday tree in Collierville, a Bartlett Mayor, mayor David Parsons. At their lighting ceremony he said as long as I'm mayor, this will be a Christmas tree and we will say the name of Jesus. So, first of all, mayor Parsons has been on this show before, shared his testimony. Great guy Bartlett has a great mayor. But is this stance going to be necessary from Christian public officials? I don't want to make it about the Christmas tree, I want to make it about the use of words. Yeah, is this going to be the type of stance that's really necessary if we're going to rebuild our country as a Christian nation?
Speaker 2:I think to a large degree that will be the case. I think that we've lost so many definitions that it is important to get back to those. I mean, certainly, if you want to talk about firearm law the Supreme Court mentioned this in their Bruin decision you have to apply new firearm regulation to this historical test. You have to test it against historical firearm legislation. Well, obviously, in order to do that, you have to be able to understand the historical language. No two ways about it. But even just in general fuzzy cultural things, I think that it is really important that we hang on to certain definitions in a very gracious and loving way, and I think that maybe the best way to do is kind of a yes and way where are there many winter holidays? Yes, and Christmas as opposed to just making a more aggressive kind of approach but making sure that clarity on the message is extremely important so that that level of specificity is still possible in these different conversations.
Speaker 3:And that really goes back to your company motto is equipping serious citizens, and what you guys are doing is I hate this word, but I'm going to say it's a holistic approach to actually citizen activation, right, I mean? So it's all the areas of a citizen. We got to be right on the first things, right, and it seems like that's what you guys are doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, thank you very much. I appreciate that Our goal is to be able to provide a complete and full defense for people. In what we're doing, to provide a defense and the products that we provide, they're obviously a very small sliver of physical defense, but we want to be able to equip people with the knowledge and the information so they can provide a fuller defense and they explain why this is a necessary right, why this is the correct response, et cetera. I do think that holistic approach is really quite necessary, because in the past, I think it's been easy for our forebears to see a cultural issue and to address that very narrowly, because the assumption is that the underlying Christian foundation is here, because we are America, we are a Christian nation, and today, without that foundation, it's almost impossible to address issues on their own. There is a lot of context and foundational work that you have to do, and so almost everything I think needs to have a much more holistic approach than a generation or two ago. I agree with that.
Speaker 3:It makes it difficult when we have separation culture that we have right now too because we've gotten into a point where we don't want to have those conversations that are in depth, where you have to think and use your brain.
Speaker 1:Think about, though, how pleasant Thanksgiving is, when everybody's just silent and no one talks about it.
Speaker 3:I don't know about that.
Speaker 1:But we do have to have serious conversations. I heard a guy say once upon a time that when people start using squishy words, squeeze.
Speaker 2:So you guys equip serious citizens.
Speaker 1:Well, what are you guys working on now? You guys normally have cool stuff in the works.
Speaker 2:We do. I'm in the engineering space. There's a bunch of top secret stuff happening on the shelves behind me. We are always trying to balance inventing new products and then continuing to improve the existing ones. So we launched some new chest rigs this year and we have some new holsters coming next year, so there will be some additional options for people who are looking for different things, and then there will be a million little tiny improvements along the way. But I do think that this year we probably added more products to the website than any other year put together. So weapon lights and night vision Night vision is a big one. We added night vision to our list of products this year, which was a long time coming.
Speaker 1:I want to encourage everybody to check out your social media channels. You guys have some great YouTube stuff, very informative videos. You do a lot of those. Your brother Lucas at TRX his Instagram channel is probably the best firearm related Instagram channel.
Speaker 2:I will say that is a fantastic Instagram channel to follow. It's far more interesting than the boring company channel. He has the most interesting stuff, the most interesting takes and comments, and he started to do more on Twitter as well, a lot more cultural engagement on.
Speaker 3:Twitter. Yeah, I enjoy him. He gets to play with so many cool toys. It's just not fair.
Speaker 2:It's true. He gets a lot of hate on the internet and I think it's 99.9% jealousy because he always has something fun that he's doing.
Speaker 1:Where should folks go to find out more about what you're doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you head to trex-armscom, there's some of the little buttons on the bottom that will take you to the YouTube channel, the Instagram page and then the podcast. We have a podcast too, so that's on the main trex website there.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, folks, trex-arms is again a Christian company run by Christian brothers in Middle Tennessee. They've had some great insight to offer our legislators. They've done some great organizing. We appreciate them and their Christian witness, isaac. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and for taking time out of your day. I know you're busy filling those Black Friday orders.
Speaker 2:It's true, like I said, it was a very good sale for us and now we have a gigantic pile of orders. We've got to dig ourselves out from under and get those to people before Christmas.
Speaker 1:Thank you again for your time and folks. This has been Faith in Action. Remember, until next week, our favorite promise from the Book of Exodus the Lord shall reign forever and ever.