This one’s simple: in 2023 if you’re not working for gun rights online, you’re not working for gun rights. Everything we do is online-first. Not because this can all be won from a keyboard — it’ll take more than that — but because this issue boils down to building culture, and culture starts and spreads online. So that's the highest-leverage place to apply ourselves.

Psychology is funny: people go with their friends' bad ideas all the time, but never with an enemy's good ideas. So we have no interest in being anyone’s enemy. We’ll always be civil, thoughtful, and downright friendly, no matter who we’re talking to.

But we’re not coy about our beliefs. You can count on us to always make principled, hard-to-stop arguments that expansive gun rights are a fundamental human right. And you can count on us to be kind and approachable while we do it.

People get applause for going on TV today and shouting that gun owners have blood on their hands. And gun owners sit there and take it, because they’re afraid to come out of the safe. Beyond its core logical problems, gun control is a police-first idea that has always criminalized the poor and powerless. So we think it’s incredibly important to make it safe for people to come out and say, “Hey, I believe in gun rights. I don’t belong in jail, and I’m a good person.”

To do that, we decouple guns from all the culture war baggage. Gun owners come from all political stripes, all walks of life, and all colors. To stereotype and criminalize them is not just lazy; it’s morally wrong. We work to be a group that you can be proud to be associated with. A group whose conduct everyone respects, even if they disagree with us.

Yup, this one’s shamelessly cribbed from Jeff Bezos. In the gun world we often fixate on the past and what it means for the future. How things were pre-NFA, how some law or some news is the end of history. We don’t believe in the end of history, we think every day is the beginning of history. And we start fresh every day to make that history into what we want.

We play to win, not to slow down losses. That means we’re long-run optimists — we’re doing this because we believe it can be done. But to do it well means that in the short-run, we’re never satisfied. We are always focused on what we can do better, where we can do more, and what we need to fix. Relentless work today is how we pay for optimism tomorrow.

Kareem is a software engineer and was the second full-time engineer at Warby Parker, so ping us if you ever need glasses. He’s currently an engineering manager at a payments company.

BJ Campbell is a practicing licensed civil and environmental engineer in the Atlanta area. He writes for OSD, Quillette, RECOIL, and on his blog/publication Handwaving Freakoutery.

Chuck was the director of release engineering at Facebook from 2008 to 2018, and from 2016 to 2018 also worked on making the company’s firearms policy more transparent to users, advertisers, and content creators. He’s now a consultant and advisor to companies in the tech and firearms industries.

Jon co-founded the tech news site Ars Technica, which was acquired by Conde Nast in 2008. He has also been an editor at WIRED, and is a contributing editor at TheFirearmBlog.com. Jon has consulted for various tech and media companies.

In a prior life, Tom spent time kicking in tent flaps and harassing sheep in far away lands. After that he shepherded The Firearm Blog through a dark time as Editor in Chief, and now maintains various editor roles within the Carbon Media properties. He is also the spiritual center and most broken member of the OSD crew.

Mike is the marketing manager at Ferro Concepts. Check out his photography at @mem_projects on Instagram.

Daiji is a product designer who enjoys shooting 22’s and 35mm. When he’s not knee deep in pixels for OSD, you can find him making stuff at 999 Defense.