RSWC #149 Santee – Riding Shotgun With Charlie

Riding Shotgun With Charlie
#149
Santee
The Santee TV

I know this sounds weird, but I love having some stalkers. OK, they’re not real stalkers. But there are some folks who watch the show and are happy to meet me. Santee is one of them. She’s been watching the show for a hot minute. She reached out to me after catching shows with Brooke Cheney (RSWC #075) and Jerah Hutchins (RSWC #133). She said the next time I’m in Texas we need to get together. So with the NRA Annual Meetings in Houston, near Santee, we were on.

She did have me on her YouTube channel back in January 2022, which you can watch here!

Santee, of course, isn’t her real name (you’ll have to watch to find out). She became a gun owner after a scary incident like many folks. There were some guys going through her apartment building looking for someone. They passed her sons but they didn’t know what was going on. The guys ended up shooting through someone’s door in her building. She ended up grabbing a kitchen knife when she heard the shots and went to look for her children.

And that’s when she decided it was time to get a handgun. She was in the Air Force, but she wasn’t really familiar with handguns. All of that needed to change. She needed to be sure that she could protect herself and her children, should something else happen. She took a handgun safety course to get a permit (Texas was not Constitutional carry/permitless carry at the time) and bought her first handgun, which was a Taurus PT111, still her favorite handgun.

Getting her first handgun gave her confidence. This is something that everyone goes through on some level. Yes, a firearm isn’t a magic talisman and doesn’t keep trouble away, but it gives people like single mothers the confidence that they can protect their family from harm. It lets women know that they ARE in control of their safety…and that they’re the immediate responders.

After the Air Force, Santee ended up becoming a probation officer in Houston. What she finds most rewarding is hopefully getting these folks on the right track and getting their lives together. I’ve got to hand it to her, that’s got to be a tough job!

We do talk about the process of getting the carry permit in Texas. Most states that are Constitutional/permitless carry still offer licenses so that their residents can have reciprocity. I am a big fan of training, of course. Even if you aren’t required to, it’s a darn good idea to learn about the laws in your state especially if you’re going to be carrying.

We eventually get into raising sons and what could be done to help them. One of the things Santee did is she saw that her sons were spending a lot of time on (The) YouTube. She tried to encourage them to start their own channel for doing some gaming. But she ended up starting a channel to show them that it wasn’t as hard as they thought and that anyone can do it. (Even this teacher who became a YouTuber!) After buying ammo at a local gun store and making a video of that, she decided that it was time to start making some range videos. So now she and her husband have started filming range sessions regularly. It does take some planning for each session and video, but that’s a fun part.

She’s got some strong feelings about our Rights and about self defense. I don’t think we’re that different. We want to have fun, we want to protect our families, and we both want our YouTube channels to grow. So SUBSCRIBE to BOTH of our channels!

Favorite quotes:

“What am I going to do when I need to take care of me, my children, anything in the apartment?”

“What we have a problem with is not gun control, is not the firearms, it is…mental health.”

“I have family members that don’t like firearms, but they’re not like that (NRAAM protestors)”

“We don’t want to hurt anybody, but we ARE going to protect ourselves.”

The Santee TV

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