I am a long time knife nerd. 

I was deeply, deeply involved in the Filipino and Indonesian Martial Arts from around 1982, through 1997 or so. I even had instructor certifications in multiple systems. I have carried a knife on me every day of my life since the original Spdyerco Police model came out in 1984. So my bonafides are deep and rock solid. 

One knife I have always loved since being introduced to it circa 2006 is the Shivworks Disciple. It appeals hard to my inner FMA nerd, and it was a nice segue to being convinced of the efficacy of the Clinchpick. 

While not quite as easily concealable as the Clinchpick, the Disciple is still good for concealed carry, and it is a bit more intuitive to use. But back in the day, they were very, very rare. Even Craig Douglas, the man behind the idea and concept of the knife did not have ready access to them. 

I was resigned to never being able to have one, until my good friend Michael Brown gave me one of his original Trace Rinaldi made ones. I could not believe what a fantastic and thoughtful gift it was. Michael could have sold it for a good chunk of cash, but instead, being the good man that he is, he gave it to me after a seminar I taught for his training group of LEOs in Tulsa. I loved it and wore it all the time, even risking losing such an almost irreplaceable tool. 

A bit later, I became a convert to the Clincpick, and the Disciple became a sometimes carried blade, but that gift always has had a great palace in my heart. 

A few years ago, Craig – through the Shivworks Product Group – brought the Disciple back into availability at a great price that put it in reach of pretty much everyone. I have a number of them and they are everything the older blades were. 

I even tried to make a Disciple version of my IAC Clinchpick sheath (from JM Custom Kydex). Myself and Tony Mayer of JM tried many iterations, but it just did not work unfortunately. The handle length of the Disciple defeated the deep concealment aspect of the sheath. 

Pictured here are all of the above. The far left is the original Rinaldi blade that Michael gave me, the middle two versions are the current SPG produced ones, and the far right is my failed attempt to do the IAC sheath.

With the risk of sounding like a horrible cliche, I have been a life-long shooter. I shot my first firearm (my dad’s winchester ‘97) during a dove hunt when I was five. I shot in an adult skeet shooting league when I was 12 and 13 (and generally finished in the middle of the pack). My first dove and quail hunt when I was actually participating in the shooting was at 11. My first coyote, javelina, and deer hunts were when I was still in middle school. My first defensive oriented shooting class was with Chuck Taylor in 1985, and I went to Gunsite and took 250 General Pistol when I graduated college in 1987. 

I say this to establish the very real fact that I grew up in a time when firearms were treated as the precision machines that they are. I was indoctrinated that after firing any gun, I did not go to bed with it dirty. A firearm was to be maintained at all times, and it was to be treated as a valuable tool to be preserved while being used, with the idea that they would be handed down to the next generation in as close to the same condition as when they were originally obtained. In fact, that very first gun I shot – the Win 1897 – was my grandfather’s that he had from when he was  a young man in the early 40’s (before he went off to India in WW2 to help fly the Burma Hump) and my Dad still sued it until is was stolen around 1976. The same time that my father taught me how to use a gun, during that same lesson he taught me how to clean them. The two things were intrinsically intertwined. 

But somewhere along the way, that concept has at times seemed to be lost. Now, it is fashionable to brag about not cleaning your guns, to the extent that the brag is how long has it been since the last cleaning. 

In some ways, there is some validity to that with the preponderance of polymer guns, that have a slightly less need for as much cleaning and lubrication as all metal firearms do. It’s certainly nice to be able to just shoot a gun, and occasionally dump some more oil on a few moving parts and call it a day. I just can’t be one of those who do so. I feel that anything made of metal to any extent, that has moving parts that rub against each other, that I am counting on to possibly save my life, should be taken care of as the machines they are. When I was a teenager, I worked in a machine shop that made high end aerospace parts. The CNC machines they used were the lifeblood of that business, and got a lot of use. At times round-the-clock use. But every chance they got, each one was cleaned as often and as well as possible, along with massive amounts of lubrication. They knew it was needed to keep them working, and those machines were built to a far higher tolerance and massively stronger than any firearm ever built, and still cleaning was crucial. 

The other reason that I clean the guns so often is that I enjoy handling firearms. That time breaking the guns down, cleaning, oiling, and reassembling them is just more time to build intimate familiarity with them, and have a greater and deeper sense of proprioception when I use them. I like shooting, and I like having extra excuses to be around guns. 

I do the same thing with all of my knives and edged tools. Whenever they are used in any way, even if it is the knife equivalent of dry fire, I tend to at the very least wipe them down with a soft cloth and check to see if they need a light coating of oil. When I was super hardcore into the Filipino Martial Arts in the 80’s and 90’s, not a day went by that I did not use a blade for practice and that was always followed by a bit of polishing/wiping down. I have a WW2 style kukri that is a big blade and at my old house whenever I needed to do landscaping, that kukri was my main tool. It did a great job keeping my giant Palo Verde tree under control, but afterwards it was covered in tree sap/muck/bark/shards, and even though it was relatively inexpensive and easily replaced, I still treated it with the reverence a Ghurka soldier probably would, and it got the careful cleaning. 

So I will continue to be a Fudd and clean my guns every time after use, or at least as soon as possible in cases as when I am traveling. I certainly am not advocating for anyone to follow my path, and I don’t judge anyone else for their way if they choose to do the more modern thing of ignoring these extra steps, but for me, it is not a chore, but something to enjoy.

We in the gun community know that honest data and knowledge are key to our safety and success in a self-preservation paradigm.  It makes very little sense to base our wellbeing or the wellbeing of our loved ones on a guess. We need to know, not maybe think what is. 

The problem though is that few people know how to judge what is true. Gathering data correctly must be done first, and then the analysis can only proceed from there. The issue that scientists have dealt with for centuries is that this seems really simple, but in actuality is incredibly difficult. The Scientific Method was developed over those centuries to try to ensure that what we think we are seeing is truly what we are seeing. 

Unfortunately, not many people in the gun community have much, if any, training in the Scientific Method. There are a great deal of experts in the community that are incredibly intelligent, and have high level degrees, but rarely are those degrees in an area where a grounding in the SM is a thing. Engineering, history, marketing, theology, etc. are all challenging fields of study, but they have little to do with a deep grasp of real world data gathering. 

I am going to do some articles on the Scientific Method and hope to bring up the level of discourse and analysis, and why understanding the SM is so crucial. But today I am just going to touch on what is probably the biggest understanding gap that happens again and again in the gun community. 

Many commentators like to point out a handful of real world incidents and then proclaim some overriding dogmatic statement of fact based on what they have seen. This is a fallacy. Looking at a small data set that has not been scientifically gathered negates any definitive factual conclusion. Essentially, what we see is not the totality of what there is. 

In other words, just because in the set of data you have you see – or don’t see – X, that does not mean that X does not exist. The scientific way to express this is “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. 

Last year, I discussed the concept that some commentators online pushed that physical fitness does not matter in self-defense. They would then point out a small number of cases where that was true. To them, because the tiny amount of videos or documented cases they looked at supported their preferred narrative, they then made absurdist dogmatic statements that it did not matter. I then showed multiple cases where it did absolutely matter. But my point was not (and I never stated thai at any point) that fitness was a crucial prerequisite for successful self-defense. I did not make the mistake they did. I merely pointed out that there were cases where it mattered deeply. 

I could have argued using their method, and based my conclusions solely on the cases I presented, but I understood that said cases were only part of the puzzle. Sometimes fitness matters a lot, sometimes it does not matter at all. Because that conclusion is what the actual data supports, not a cherry picked set that only serves to preserve the narrative I prefer. 

So before you make blanket statements, make sure you have true, scientifically valid data first. And in further articles, I will talk about ways we can accomplish that feat.