About this episode
Riding Shotgun With Charlie #250 John Correia Active Self Protection This is a momentous episode! First, I didn't think, or know, that there would ever be 250 episodes of RSWC. I started the show with an idea, a couple GoPros, and no knowledge of how to edit video. Second, that I'd ever get John Correia on the show! I got to have Neil (#116) and Stephanie (#112) Weidner on the show back in 2021. They both work at Active Self Protection. We've had an ongoing joke that I had them on but didn't want to have John. This year at SHOT, we made it happen. John grew up in the San Francisco area. He's a 49ers fan and "gold and red 'til he's cold and dead." There wasn't much shooting or hunting going on, living with his mom and her parents for a while. His dad did own firearms, but it was mostly for duck hunting and not something John did with him. Around 13, he did some recreational shooting and occasional hunting with his paternal grandfather on his biological father's side. However, this man was a prohibited possessor despite owning some firearms. At 19 years old, John joined "Uncle Sam's Canoe Club" and was a nuclear reactor operator. And he also got married. Boot camp provided almost zero shooting, other than a converted AR into a .22. During candidate school, he was rear ended by a drunk driver, which messed up his back, and two years later, he was out of the Navy. After the injury, he was the first person to use the vocational rehabilitation education for a religious education. He cranked out 96 credit hours in 3 years as that's what the program paid for. Helping people is what he wanted to do and has done in several ways. From 2003 until 2018, he was pastor at a small church of about 150 people. Making ends meet, raising a family, and earning the Master's degree, kept him very busy. Going to seminary, he was also working as a retail manager at a video game store. When the PS3 and Xbox360 came out, there was lots of talk about people mugging managers to get the consoles. Arizona was a shall issue at the time. To be able to protect himself, he got the wrong gun, the wrong ammo, and the wrong holster and started carrying. His son was doing martial arts as an activity and wanted dad to join him, but John kept pushing it off until the end of grad school. Having had a gun in the house for a few years, he realized that having a gun was a 'non-zero risk' for the family. As we all know, training is expensive. So he pursued becoming a firearm instructor to be able to have some tax write offs. For a while he was living a dual life as a pastor and a firearm instructor. There was some crossover content on his socials, so he started a page just for gun activities. One evening he brought a video of a self defense scenario to work out how to com
