SIG’s Reputation Issues, Matt Hoover Vs. The ATF, & Local FFL SEO: The Cap & Ball Saloon Ep. 5

Today in the Cap & Ball Saloon, we’ll be discussing SIG’s continued trust problem, lies, damn lies, and statistics, about the firearms industry,

ways to get your FFL top billing in local searches, why the 2A community should be paying attention to Google’s legal woes and untangling the social media mess,

and finally some good news for someone who’s been fighting the ATF.

I’m Anders E.T. Herzberg, and this is the Cap & Ball Saloon, an Gun Industry focused podcast talking about digital marketing and the second amendment.

Sit back, grab a glass, and let’s get into it.

I really don’t want to keep harping on SIG and the P320, but I think we’re at the point where it has to be admitted that SIG has a massive reputational issue.

The Achillies Heel Tactical video is just the latest in the continuing dumpster fire that is SIG’s reputation.

I want you to understand this is coming from someone who’s not rooting for SIG to fail, I want SIG to be the company that I remember when I first started shooting.

However, there are a growing list of training companies that are banning SIG P320’s from their classes.

Achillies Heel Tactical is just one, Regular Guy Training is taking the same stance, Tactical Defense Institute has barred P320’s from their classes, and all of them are far from alone, the Washington State Criminal Justice Training center has taken the same stance, barring the P320 from use at their training facility. Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police has voted to no longer allow officers to use the P320 in a recent statement. This just adds to the list of organizations that at are looking at the P320 as a danger.

I want you to understand just how bad this is. This is not a training problem, it’s not that dumb officers or owners are doing unsafe things, if anything the adherence to safe handgun handling has kept SIG from dealing with more wrongful death or wrongful injury lawsuits.

Now, some of you may be old enough to remember “Glock Leg” let me explain why that is not what we are dealing with.

This is training vs. mechanical issues. The old “Glock Leg” meme came from people not understanding either basic firearms safety, or willfully ignoring how the firearm operated.

What SIG is dealing with is not a shooter education problem, we’re talking about a shooting public with decades of experience with striker fired systems. They, by and large understand what is and is not safe with these pistols.

This is some kind of mechanical defect, I’m not going to tell you I know for sure that it’s a tolerance stacking issue, or that it’s because they are using metal injection molding parts, I’m not a firearms designer or an engineer.

I can’t give you a smoking gun, and honestly that’s what people are looking for a single, this is the problem solution that is easy to comprehend.

We’re dealing with a complex machine that has multiple small moving parts and clockwork mechanisms to accomplish its task. If you want to see just how complicated, go check out SIG Mechanic on YouTube, there’s dozens of videos that break down the inner workings of the P320. Especially the deep dive into pre-and post-upgrades for the first drop safe issue with the P320’s.

It’s an impressive and fascinating design that, for better or worse does not “just copy Glock”. And maybe, as I have seen argued that’s part of the problem. Though I’m not sure if I really agree with this take, I have seen it argued that the market wants lighter and “better” triggers. SIG is responding to that demand, and so maybe part of the issue is trying to meet a mechanically challenging demand: a light trigger with a striker fired pistol.

I would like to think that reliability and safety are the overriding motivators with things like trigger feel, ergonomics, use case, and more are trailing factors in a handgun purchasing decision. However, that’s something that each shooter needs to consider, as well as cost, fit in the hand, capacity, and so much more that goes into a firearm purchasing decision.

Furthermore people are starting to take notice, specifically that the same CEO of SIG is the same one that used to be in charge at Kimber, as General Manager of Kimber Manufacturing, during the time when Kimber went from a trusted brand, to a laughing stock of terrible reliability.

But beyond this I have other concerns. Specifically the anti-gun lobby.

For a very long time it has been clear to those that value personal protection that firearms don’t just go off by themselves, something has to happen, but when you have a major manufacturer with this highly public and highly controversial issue in an environment where all of the dirty tricks such as suing Glock over their handguns being “too concealable” the P320 is, arguably creating more risks.

For a very long time it was utter lunacy not to think that the vast, vast majority of firearms manufacturers produced safe products that could only fire while being used normally, and were safe even when being abused normally.

Now with SIG’s P320 we have a firearm that opens up a chink in that logical armor. If one pistol can go off without interaction, or though simple handling, how much easier do you think it will be for the tyrants in government to convince the ignorant that other guns can do the same thing?

SIG, listen to me. Not addressing this issue properly is not just dangerous for you, but also for the entire second amendment community and the firearms industry. We have enough stupid arguments, poor legal reasoning, and ignorance running around in firearms law and courtrooms as it is. The P320 is becoming, if not already, a major problem. It is not anti-gun to point out a problem, if anything we should be policing ourselves as an industry against unsafe products, harshly, before those outside the industry and shooting community take notice.

For SIG, myself and Jason laid out a strategy for fixing this mess, I know it’s nothing you want to hear, but if you follow it you can correct these issues eventually.

For SIG owners, there’s at least one test that you can run to get back some peace of mind. The channel Three SIG P320’s in a trench coat has a video on how to test if your P320’s striker safety block will prevent it from striking a chambered round.

Check out that video, or SIG Mechanics’ break down of how the P320 striker safety works.

I’ll close this section with just a small note, SIG, please write your ship. You have a legacy to uphold, and a storied history that does not deserve to be tarnished, or be ended like this.

**Break**

I want to thank you for sticking around, we are growing and our goal is to reach 500 subscribers, so if you are interested in the second amendment and want 2A news and tips for the digital age, subscribe and share with your friends.

Down in the comments below, let us know what SIG could do to regain your trust.

**end break**

Next up we have an interesting study by Ammo.com and Cassandra McBride.

There are some key takeaways here that are interesting. We’ll go though some of the data and I’ll give you some thoughts and some key things you need to consider with this study.

First the overall ownership of firearms has increased by 26% since 2000, a stark increase in the gun owners in the most famously armed country in the world.

This probably stems from 21 million Americans purchasing their first firearm between 2020 and 2023.

However strangely, men owning firearms decreased by 25% since 1980, and female ownership has gone up 177%.

The report also notes that household firearm ownership has declined by 5% between 1975 and 2024. So while there are more guns overall, they are in slightly fewer homes.

This data also demonstrates that the political paradigm around the 2nd amendment is changing. As recently as 2015 the ownership of a gun by self-reported political party, was 44% republican and 38% democrat. However after Trump, in 2017 this changed to 41% republican and only 16% democrat.

Trump has changed the political landscape and without getting to far into the weeds with this, he’s bringing together groups that certain factions have spent a long time trying to keep separate.

There’s been good and bad with the second amendment under Trump and while I’d describe things as a mixed bag until real legislative reform and rouge states are brought to heel, this at least shows that when it comes to the second amendment more people who value it are in the republican camp then out of it. An inditement of the democrats if you ask me.

Finally rural and urban firearms ownership is broken down in this study as well, something that has remained almost completely unchanged since 2017.

I want to point out some things with this study and why I take it with a grain of salt. Actually why you should take everything you are seeing with polling online with a level of skepticism.

This specifically relates to who the data is coming from. The study on Ammo.com uses data from both Pew and Gallup polling. Two places that I inherently distrust because, if you are listening to Richard Barris, The People’s Pundit, you would understand that Gallup especially often has political bias in their research that they introduce through sample manipulation and question manipulation.

The dirty secret in polling is that those with a political agenda can and will manipulate how a poll is conducted in order to give the appearance of popular public support for a given issue. So if you and your friends ever feel like everyone else is crazy because of polling data, now you might know why.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have the time to dissect and analyze all of the studies that are being referenced, look at the questions asked, polling methods, and so on, so this is more of a gut check, but looking at the firearms ownership by year, we see a high of 50% and a low of 40% for men. I would almost wonder if this decline in male ownership is not due to a growing skepticism around others, such as the government, know you have a firearm or how many you own, not an actual decrease.

The boating accident jokes exist for a reason. I personally would be skeptical of some random pollster phoning me up and asking if I’m armed and how well.

I think my big point here is not that I want to throw the credibility of Ammo.com’s report into doubt, instead, I’d urge you to keep in mind that too much polling is in service of crafting public opinion, not actually representing how the public actually feels.

However, we can take a look at a more reliable information about the growth of the firearms industry.

The NSSF, firearm industry trade association, has released their 2025 firearm and ammunition industry economic impact report.

In 2024 they estimate that over 3.9 million new gun owners have been minted and overall the firearms industry is supporting 383,000 jobs.

This translates to an economic impact of 91.6 billion dollars in 2024 alone. This translates to 26.2 billion in wages and $11 billion in state and federal tax revenue, just last year.

Jobs, wages, and economic impact all are growing year over year, so between this and the more defensive stance the federal government is taking on American manufacturing, there’s a lot of growth potential for the firearms industry in the years to come.

Now with that in mind, what should you do if you are an FFL serving your local community with either a store front or an at home FFL? Well let’s talk about some of the things that you should be doing.

I’m going to assume that you understand that the digital space, and search in general is a powerful tool for FFL’s to bring in business.

Someone looking for an FFL to transfer an firearm purchased online, or a brick and mortar for a purchase is going to go to Google to find what they are looking for, if not Google than possibly a social media platform, so it’s important that your local community is able to find you.

In my area alone there are at least 19 different FFL’s in the Reno, Sparks, and Carson City area, and that’s just what I could find quickly. I’m sure there are far more smaller FFL’s in my area.

All of those are competing for exposure and top billing in major search engines.

So how do you establish yourself as a credible and top billed place to go as a firearms dealer?

Well there’s a lot that needs to be done and it does take time and effort to accomplish, but here’s the basic outline.

First we have your Google business profile, this is free to set up and critical for local searches.

For home based FFL’s a word of caution. For a business like an FFL you have to have a physical location because of the goods that you deal with, firearms. Any business that offers products where the purchaser must be of a minimum age, must have a storefront per Google’s rules.

Google will nuke you from orbit once they find that you have a service area business, or rather one that does not list an address, just an area of operation, in a firearms category. I know this puts home based FFL’s in a bit of a crummy catch 22, but Google’s never really been our friend.

So if you are operating out of your garage and want to maintain a Google Business Profile be aware that it will be subject to publicly posting your address on the most visible location possible, Google.

With that word of warning up front let’s continue.

Claim and verify your listing if it exists, if not, create it. Make sure that once this is done you verify your listing. Verification will require you to use a mobile device to take a video recording. This normally entails starting at your storefront and walking into the business. Unlocking the door, showing use of employee only things such as registers, going into back rooms, etc.

Google also does not want faces in this so keep that in mind as well.

It’s a pain but once verified your profile will be stronger and more trusted with Google.

Now before verification, be sure that you have all of your business information correct, name, address, phone number, website URL, and store hours. Make sure these details match exactly across all platforms. So don’t have out dated store hours on your website and up to date ones on your Google Business profile.

Add categories and attributes, find the business category Gun Shop, at the time of this recording there are only Gun Shop, Sporting Goods Store, Shooting Range, and Firearms Academy that are relevant to FFL’s.

I’d recommend picking the one that encompasses your primary service. If you have an indoor shooting range with a store attached then I’d pick which one you want to emphasize most. If you sell guns but have fishing equipment, then Sporting Goods Store is probably the most relevant to you.

From there start getting your services down, gunsmithing, concealed carry classes, transfers, etc.

Once all of this information is filled out, top it off with quality photos of the store, inside and out. Most modern phones will take a perfectly useable photo so no pro photographer needed unless it’s in the budget.

Now a lot of directories, or websites that list local businesses will probably pick you up if you have a website, or some kind of online presence. I’d recommend claiming these listings if you can, or creating them. If there’s a local website that lists businesses in your area then make sure you are on that one at the very least.

Yelp is another good bet for getting your name out there, as the focus on brick and mortar businesses, again just make sure that you are fully filling out the profile so Yelp knows how to categorize you.

Beyond these kinds of listings you can do work with your own website as well.

Talk about your location on your pages, if you are offering classes, words like “premier concealed carry training for the X area” should be on that page predominantly. Gunsmith? Same thing, Carry the widest selection in your city? Most knowledgeable in your town? Put that stuff on there.

Describe your services, put up pictures of your work, and keep a clean and easy to navigate website.

If your worried about how easy your website is to use, get your least tech savvy relative to do something on the website, preferably on a phone, WITHOUT your help. If they can’t then you may need to revisit your design and navigation.

There’s a lot more that I could go into, email lists, social media management, but that gets you the basics of cracking into Google Search and getting them to start to show you to customers.

Speaking of Google, we should actually discuss some things that has been going on with them and where things might be headed in the future.

Now take this next bit with a grain of salt as I am doing some speculation here, but I think that the advice that follows on from it is on sound logic.

Long story short Google is getting hammered with anti-trust lawsuits accusing them of being a monopoly. The government wants to break them up, and as a long time anti-Google person, I can’t wait to see them drawn and quartered.

This could result in a lot of Google’s properties getting broken off, namely YouTube.

Now would this mean that YouTube will suddenly become the bastion of 2A advocacy that we all want it to be? No, I really don’t think so, but this would force the biggest search engine in the world right now to stop giving preferential treatment to their own video platform, YouTube.

I’ve long been an advocate for diversification of your content strategy and this just adds fuel to my fire on this. If you are doing something in the YouTube space, shorts, long form video, etc. get a Rumble channel up.

I’m currently cross posting everything to Rumble, yes, it is an extra step, and it gains a fraction of the views, but currently I’m collecting data to help develop a guide for best practices on Rumble for the 2A community.

So far, mixed bag. Views and subscribers are a fraction of what I can get on YouTube even on a poorly performing video. I’ve also been experimenting with short form content on Rumble, however, at the moment, it does not seem to make difference. Also Rumble, please do something about the spam comments. Seriously the spam comments about “improving my Rumble account” or “how we can market your business” are just annoying.

It will take some time, and I don’t think that Rumble is going to dwarf YouTube any time soon, but a platform that does not go out of its way to censor is one that’s worth putting at least a bit of time into in my book, especially when they worked with Robert Barnes and David Freiheit to build their Terms of Service.

Laugh at me now, but look, organic reach on a lot of social media platforms is going out the window and it’s getting to the point where it’s pay to play on social media. Something that I’ve been talking about in the background years ago and look where we are.

Instagram, it has a big focus on reels and stories, and you can focus your content to a specific location with location tags, but you are looking at only a 3% organic reach and your content will have a shelf life of only a day or two, and Instagram has one of the best organic reaches around.

Facebook, only give a 0.05% organic reach, it’s primary redeeming feature would be ads but for FFL’s that’s a no-go, so you either spin up a whole dedicated website that’s JUST accessories, or you just don’t get to do anything with FB or Instagram advertising. Leaving you somewhat hamstrung in growing organically.

So, the best thing that you can do with FB is focus on local groups, answer questions when something related to your services when that comes up and build trust with reviews.

Beyond that if you want to reach a younger audience, think not older people but younger and first-time firearms owners, Facebook is kind of dead for this.

Neither of these platforms are firearms friendly, full stop.

TikTok, also has issues, again they only give you about a 3% organic reach, and I someone who just talks about firearms marketing practices and firearms history has had to battle with “not eligible for recommendation”, something that they don’t tell you, instead you have to go searching for this issue on EACH of your videos manually, in the app, not desktop, in the app. Add to that changes in trends and the algorithm, you get a rather unpredictable and annoying space to work in.

The main redeeming features of TikTok is that users generally don’t care about production value and short form content is king, so you can just stick to quick simple videos and get attention that way.

Finally there’s the deserved sword of Damocles hanging over TikTok. It’s a CHINESE app and there’s a reason the app lives on a “quarantine phone”. The U.S. government could nuke it from orbit again at any time. Though I’d like to see a more Constitutionally aligned method be used. The way it was taken down last time was a massive government overreach that opened up bigger legal issues.

Now X is probably one of the most 2A friendly spaces, while it is pushing the subscriptions hard, and the Crypto and Thot bots can be annoying there is at least room to breathe here for the Second Amendment.

The best way to deal with X is to be a reply guy. Comment, get attention, and post your stuff. That said, local targeting is almost non-existent and your stuff is going to have a short shelf life.

And then there’s LinkedIn, this is almost exclusively business to business, a typical consumer won’t be bumbling around on LinkedIn so for me, someone who’s actively looking to help smaller and medium sized 2A businesses it has a purpose, but for FFL’s selling to shooters, it’s probably not a place to do much more than the occasional post.

Finally, while YouTube is a great video platform, we circle back to the issues that the firearms industry has on it. Arbitrary and non-sensical rules, can turn once ok content into verboten content overnight.

That’s why I recommend Rumble as a backup, it’s hedging your bets, yes, the user base and features are nowhere near as good as YouTube, but if the ground shifts overnight you’ll have that built up, secondary platform up and running.

So, if I was a small FFL I’d probably do the following. Spend some time polishing a once-a-week YouTube video with halfway decent, searchable title and good thumbnail that makes people want to click, then break that up into shorts with specific segments and key points.

No, you don’t have to have the greatest production values, heck look at Buffalo Bore, I was just talking about them in a previous episode, and they have exploded in viewership and subscribers.

If you’d like me to outline a free, boot strap way to start social media content production, with a phone and a computer with free software let me know, I can do a full tutorial for you that can get you started.

Now for our final topic of this episode,

CRS firearms and Matt Hoover.

If you are unfamiliar with the case, this is one of two that boils my blood with the injustice of it, but the 60 second overview is that Matt Hoover of CRS Firearms on YouTube worked to promote and advertise these nick nacks with a drawing, not a scoring, not a cut into the metal design where you can pop them out, but a DRAWING of a lighting link on this piece of metal.

To put it simply, Matt Hoover was imprisoned over a drawing on a piece of stainless steel. A drawing mind you that no one at the ATF or DOJ could get to work using its dimensions as printed on it when they went through the effort of trying to make it work to “prove their case”.

This was a travesty that should be getting everyone up in arms, but there has been some good news for Mr. Hoover and his family.

According to his wife, who still maintains his YouTube channel in his absence, it appears that he may be able to get out and see his family again as soon as this upcoming July with the second chance act, however he will more likely be able to get out at the end of this year.

If nothing else, drop by the CRS YouTube and give them like and a subscription. If anyone deserves it just because, it’s this family.

I know I’m small, but every little voice counts guys.

The other case that boils my blood is the case of Tate Adamiak, another example of the ATF and people that should know better, lying, fabricating, and outright misrepresenting the law in order to convict a law-abiding citizen.

Much like Hoover’s case the ATF took things that should not have been classified as machine guns and destructive devices and did so, going so far as to take a decommissioned training aid RPG-7 and try to claim it was a destructive device when the ATF put their own 7.62 training gun into it.

Hoover’s lawyer, Matt Larosiere goes into more detail about both cases on the NAGR’s YouTube channel if you want to get more details about just how messed up both of these cases have been.

At least in the case of Mr. Hoover we have some good news at least. Hopefully soon we’ll see some measure of justice for everyone who’s had their lives ruined by this out of control federal agency.

Now, on that somewhat somber note, that wraps our topics for this episode. Thank you again for watching.

Our mission here is to improve digital marketing for FFL’s and the 2A community as a whole, so

Sound off in the comments below what your thoughts are on any of today’s topics, don’t forget to like share and subscribe for more like this as well as our historical coverage of small arms ammunition development in the Dead Calibers Archive.

So, I’m Anders E.T. Herzberg, for the Cap & Ball Saloon hoping to see you all again real soon.