The first thing you feel after being shot is the heat.
Our story begins with a man named John Correia. Correia joined the Navy and served for seven years. There, he gained an acute inclination towards firearms. After he served, he was a pastor for a decade. In 2011, he founded a YouTube channel called Active Self Protection.
I stumbled across one of Correia’s videos, “ASP Compilation: My Favorite Defensive Firearm Usages of 2022”. In the video, Correia analyses security footage of encounters where people use guns to stop attempted crime. There is barely any censorship. This wouldn’t be concerning without the air of learning throughout the channel. It’s okay to have a gun in a situation in which your life could be in danger- if you are in mortal danger, having a gun could be the one thing between life and death. Learning how to gauge a situation for firearm usage properly could be very useful, especially in the more crime-ridden places in America.
In 1991, there were 9,388 bank robberies in the United States. That is roughly 1 bank robbery every 16 minutes. If these places all had a way to defend themselves and crime picked up like this in the future, it would put a permanent solution to these kinds of robberies. If sane everyday people had firearms, in theory, it could end crime altogether.
But people like Correia are the reason why guns don’t work this way.
A common euphemism for Active Self Protection is the “Room temperature challenge” or “asphalt temperature challenge”, which is code for someone losing their life. The philosophy of the channel derives humor from death- something that is often associated with firearms. To the people who take pride in carrying a gun, death is a funny and easily accessible consequence. These perpetrators have families to support and have probably been forced into crime through poverty or inequality.
And in case you have any doubts about what kind of community is being created, here’s a real comment.
There are hundreds more just like it, praising Correia’s work and laughing at the carnage. I’ve never witnessed anything like it before.
That’s what death is to these people. It’s a construct. Why are some so scared to say “death”? It’s like the concept of death is too dark for them so they have to dress it differently. It’s ironic how people so confident in their ability to kill can’t even say “death”.
It’s disgusting, and if all 3.45 million subscribers as of 2025 have this way of thinking, that means we have a dormant army of people itching to use their firearms. They almost fantasize about getting into one of the situations portrayed in the footage. Personally, if I’m stuck in a robbery, I would rather lose my things than have the situation escalated by a person with a gun.
When will these people realize the problem is the fact that they even have to be vigilant in the first place? I shouldn’t have to fear for my life at school, the grocery store, or just walking down the street. There’s an inherent fear created by channels like this. Their viewers perpetuate this fear, and It’s corroding what guns represent to American society.
So if you are another person who doesn’t want to experience that searing feeling of the bullet, consider acting against it.
