An Interview with Alex Ooley
by Gila Hayes
The Network team attends conventions for the joy of talking with our people. Earlier this year, I took advantage of traveling to Atlanta, GA for the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting to catch up with Network Affiliated Attorney Alex Ooley and ask him about the adaptations and self-defense preparations armed citizens face as they become new parents. If you enjoy streaming video, there’s longer, informal version of our interview on this topic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRLHUz7Ju44 .
eJournal: I’m pleased to have the opportunity to again learn from you, Alex. Last year, you shared insights about teaching self-defense preparation to people in the 30-something age cohort (https://armedcitizensnetwork.org/reaching-young-armed-citizens). This year, we have a great reason to explore a new set of concerns affecting preparation and self defense because you are now a father! This raises new concerns. Now, it’s not just you and your wife taking care of yourselves. Now, there are three of you and the little one didn’t arrive fully capable of taking care of himself. I’d love it if you could share some of the lessons and the concerns that arise as young armed citizens first become parents.
Ooley: Yes, the most exciting news in my life since we last spoke is that I’m now a father. Our son is almost 16 months old.
eJournal: That great! Before going into how self defense and safety scales for a growing family, we should introduce you to members who may have missed your previous interview. Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your profession and then let’s talk about becoming a family man.
Ooley: My name is Alex Ooley and I’m an attorney in southern Indiana. I do mostly criminal defense work which includes self defense. With my father, Mike Ooley, who is also an attorney, I’ve been affiliated with the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network for quite some time. I first learned of the Network in a class with Tiger McKee (who, unfortunately is no longer with us), the instructor at Shootright Academy in Alabama, who handed us one of your brochures. Reading it and going through that course influenced me to go to MAG 40 with Massad Ayoob.
At the time, I was contemplating whether to go to law school and I decided it was an area of the law in which I had a really genuine interest. Part of my rationale for going to law school was having gone through the course with Tiger McKee and MAG 40.
eJournal: You were born into a military family, and your parents are armed citizens, so you came to this life almost genetically.
Ooley: Yes, it’s very nearly genetic. I became very passionate about helping people become responsible armed citizens and that includes not just the firearms training aspect but also the legal aspect and being prepared to address the self-defense question and anything that might come in the aftermath. The Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network is obviously very valuable for the educational component. I think it really augments the firearms training that people receive because it’s not just about the gun; it’s about the mind and the mental preparedness to be responsibly armed.
eJournal: Ironically, mindset is the hardest to teach because you’ve got to get into people’s psyches and motivation, and say, “Safety requires you to turn away from some of the things you do.” John Farnam calls it “repenting” when he teaches that if we want to keep ourselves and our families safe, we have to make changes in our lives. That’s tough.
Ooley: It takes a great deal of humility and I think that humility is often lacking, especially in gun owners. You hear about the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people lack confidence when they first are introduced to a subject but then shortly after, they think all of a sudden that they’ve become experts. They’re unconsciously incompetent and I think to get beyond that state of unconscious incompetence you have to have a degree of humility. The more training you get, the more education you pursue, the more humility you tend to instill in yourself because you realize that you don’t and can never know everything.
It requires a great deal of training and education to be responsibly armed as an individual, but it really complicates things when you add a spouse or a child to the mix. The dynamic changes significantly and while I wouldn’t hold myself out as the expert on this issue, I’ve given it a great deal of thought in anticipation of a child. Now, having had a child, it is something that really matters to me. Obviously, something I prize most in the world is my son and, of course, my wife. My thinking has evolved just in the 16 months that we’ve had our child, even though I did give it a great deal of thought beforehand.
eJournal: To be fair, you didn’t bring a baby home one day and say, “Oh, my goodness, now what do we do?” You began problem-solving during the pregnancy.
Ooley: There are all sorts of things that you’re anticipating and thinking of when you’re about to have a child. How are we going to coordinate childcare? How am I going to change a diaper? I thought, I’ve never changed a diaper. There’s no such thing as a tactical diaper change, by the way, there is nothing cool about it and no way to make it cool.
Before I became a father, I read an article on Greg Ellifritz’s Weekend Knowledge Dump about a scenario where you are faced with an armed robbery while you have your child. What really stuck in my mind about that article was that your first instinct is to protect or guard your child, but that may not be the appropriate action in that moment. Think about if you’re in an armed robbery: if the armed robber has a firearm, holding or trying to get in front of your child, could actually put them in danger, so depending on the scenario, he advocates that, if at all possible, you need to create distance between you and your child, especially if it’s an infant.
eJournal: Boy, is that counterintuitive!
Ooley: It is totally counterintuitive, and I was thinking about this as I was holding my child during church, shortly after we hosted Ed Monk’s active shooter response seminar. If an armed attacker came into the church, what would I do with my child? If I’m going to engage the attacker, I do not want to be holding my child.
eJournal: But are you going to set him down on the floor and go across the room?
Ooley: Those are the scenarios you have to think about, whether it’s the armed robber in the gas station parking lot or the shooter that’s walking into your congregation during a church service. How will you handle your child? You have to think it through ahead of time.
What you do may depend on how old the child is: it will be much different with an infant than if you have a 4- or 5-year-old or older child who may be able to take some direction, who you may be able to drill ahead of time. I think you can practice these types of scenarios with older children. It is incredibly important to practice awareness because we talk about awareness and avoidance so much.
If you can avoid a situation, you should do that! I think you can instill awareness in children at a young age without instilling fear. It may be as simple as playing an old game that my brother and I used to play: “I spy.” You look around your environment and you say, “I spy …” and describe whatever the thing is, and the other player has to figure out what you described. Maybe awareness wasn’t our intention in playing that game, but the practice instilled awareness and cognition of our environment. You can do those sorts of things with your child to instill awareness.
eJournal: We work to keep our hands free, wearing a backpack even if it looks dorky, but we carry babies in our arms. How are you dealing with having one hand tied up holding him the whole time and then, what do you do about the diaper bag in the other hand?
Ooley: You need to think about whether you can handle your firearm one-handed if there is a situation where the threat is imminent. Can you draw? Can you engage the attacker one-handed? Even so, if you can get distance from your child, that’s ideal, but if it’s an infant and if you can’t, how are you going to handle that situation? Are you equipped from a skill standpoint? It’s incredibly important to train and think about situations while you’re training.
Speaking of trying to have hands-free, I was gifted a baby carrier that looks relatively tactical: it has Molle attachments and a patch that says “Come and Take It” in the shape of a milk bottle, so I’ve embraced the dorkiness. The difficulty and something you have to think through is getting separation if your child is literally attached to you. That presents another layer of difficulty and is something you have to consider.
eJournal: We shouldn’t overlook the debilitating effect of stress on things we normally do without thinking. The challenge is hardening our minds to accept that we may need to fight, and the baby may be in our care at the time. What about mental preparation?
Ooley: My dad and I teach a five-hour legal class about armed self defense and talk about this. One of the things you hear routinely in the aftermath of a shooting, or an attack is how people felt overwhelmed to the extent that they thought, “This is surreal. I never believed that this could happen to me!” None of us can practice that, without going through it. I mean, you can do it with airsoft or with blanks…
eJournal: …but your brain still knows they’re blanks.
Ooley: Yes, training can only go so far to replicate stress. The best thing you can do, aside from force-on-force training, is to really think through as many of these scenarios as possible. I think that one of the best resources in this regard is John Correia’s Active Self-Protection . He has reviewed thousands of attacks from armed robberies to mass shootings. Watching those situations, and thinking through how you would respond, helps to mitigate or minimize that feeling of being overwhelmed, that feeling that this is surreal, and rather instills a mindset that, “I knew this could happen. I’ve seen this before and I know what to do.” Mental preparation can help you to fight back and have the capacity to think, “How am I going to address this? How am I going to escape this situation,” rather than potentially having the freeze response to overwhelming stress.
eJournal: In what detail do you and your wife plan defense responses ahead of time? Do you talk about, “Well, we’re going down to the stadium tonight and here’s what …” To what granularity do you strategize, detailing who does what and how it works once an emergency is underway?
Ooley: Being on the same page with your spouse is important in lots of areas but I think that there tends to be this sense that, “Oh the man’s just going to take care of it or the woman, if she’s the one that’s trained…”
eJournal: Let’s just admit that we are very, very culturally predispositioned to think defense is the man’s job.
Ooley: Yes, the division of labor tends that way. That can be okay, but I think that both spouses need to be prepared to do the other’s job. If I have the child, I may be the one who needs to leave the situation or if I can, pass him off so that she can leave with him. I think that communicating ahead of time about how you would handle that is incredibly important. It can get to a significant degree of granularity, but it’s going to be situationally dependent. Is it at the Little League baseball field? That’s going to be much different than if you’re in church, for instance, or in a public space like the convention floor we’re on today. It is going to be very situationally dependent.
eJournal: We also have to consider places like parking garages or lots where predators know people get in and out of cars and if there’s a small child involved, the parent’s head is deep inside the car strapping in or releasing the child from a car seat. Talk about vulnerable!
Ooley: That’s a great scenario to talk about. It’s incredibly important to think in advance about where I am going to park, especially if I’m by myself with my child. How to mitigate the danger there? Maybe I can park in a place where there’s nobody behind me or park against a wall. If your significant other is along, they’re the person who can stay aware of the surroundings, because when you’ve got a baby who’s crying who doesn’t want to go in the car seat and you’re focused on that task, it’s nearly impossible to be aware of what’s going on around you.
eJournal: Going places by yourself with the baby has got to be an order of magnitude more difficult and challenging. Even just driving safely if the child is upset – where does your focus go? That brings us to something else you hinted at that earlier: how parents’ safety-focused lifestyle concerns much more than guns. As a parent now, what do you do if there’s a natural disaster? Does having a family change decisions about whether to shelter in place or run for it? More generally, how does the prepper’s life change when babies come along?
Ooley: There’s obviously a lot that can go into considerations about natural disasters. During the first year of our child’s life, we had to be concerned that we had enough breast milk or formula available in the event that we couldn’t get any. Babies can’t eat solid foods, so what are you going to do? There’s that sort of preparedness. Then there are questions about whether we have a generator to keep him warm if we lose power in the middle of winter and it gets cold. All those things become much more important when it’s not just you.
There are other considerations like the internet, social media and online activities that make identity theft, for instance, very prevalent and another danger in the new world. You have to be worried about your child’s identity, privacy, and security. I’m not a tech expert, but you have to think about the access you give your children. What sorts of things can they post on social media? Are you going to post about traveling for vacation and give the world notice that your house is going to be vacant? That might compromise the security of your family, for instance.
eJournal: What if grandma likes to post baby pictures? I know your mom, so obviously not her, but some grandmas might not even realize that can attract a predator. I don’t know how young parents are supposed to put their foot down with their own Mum.
Ooley: Those are all things that I’ve considered and there’s more that adds complexity to a preparedness lifestyle when you have a child. I don’t have all the answers, but those are things that people should think about and talk through with spouses because having a unified approach is incredibly important to preparedness and to marriage in general.
eJournal: Good point! Now, think about this: what happens when you have two little ones? Or three?
Ooley: I think that as your child gets older there are things the older child can do to help with the younger child. We live in a time where we have so much wealth and prosperity that children often can coast through life. They’re coddled and don’t have much responsibility, but earlier I alluded to teaching children awareness and avoidance; it’s also important to teach them to take responsibility.
What can the older child do to help with the younger child? Maybe the four or five-year-old is old enough to know if daddy says “Emergency,” that means go to the safe place and take your younger brother or younger sister. I think instilling that sort of responsibility in them at an early age helps cultivate a child who is empowered, who can turn into a responsible adult.
eJournal: You’re building a cadre! I wonder about facing the complexities that increase with the child’s age. Do you let him go to playgrounds or from your earlier example, go to Little League? Places where children gather attract predators, but we shouldn’t restrict wholesome activities. What will you do when the child wants to sleep over at a friend’s house?
Ooley: Are we going to send him to a school? What sorts of concerns are there with government schools or private schools? What sorts of security measures do they have? Do they have a school resource officer? Do they allow their teachers to be armed? You don’t want to deprive your child of an education, but you don’t want to engage in unreasonable risk, either.
eJournal: I’m such a fan of homeschooling, which has gained acceptance over the past several decades. Quite some time ago, there was a tremendous stigma against home schooling. Now, there are a lot of resources.
Ooley: I’m a huge fan of homeschooling, too. Its flexibility is incredibly important. You can teach the values and the principles that you want for your children. As a matter of fact, this weekend at the NRA Annual Meeting I’ll be talking with creators of the Tuttle Twins book series that are tailored to young children about the principles and ideas of liberty and freedom. (Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50uwhtxd3xA) You certainly don’t get that sort of education in a public school or even most private schools.
There’s also the benefit of knowing what sort of security you have, the sorts of adults that are going to be around your children, and the sorts of ideas to which they will be exposed. Are there sexual predators around? Are there violent people around? When you send your child to a school, you don’t know.
I gave an example earlier about starting to instill responsibility in the child. Homeschooling can teach children to take responsibility for their own education, as well. You could do it without homeschooling, too, with things to augment or supplement what the child is doing during the day, but I think instilling that passion for learning and self-learning is incredibly important not only for general knowledge and thinking about the world, but also for preparedness and self defense.
eJournal: Really, you’re showing children everything’s not going to be handed to them ready for consumption. They have to figure out things for themselves. Maybe they don’t want to be an attorney; they want to be a physician. Well, they better start studying the sciences, not the humanities.
One thing you do that I really value is your podcast, Forge of Freedom, where topics sometimes parallel books and articles that I’m reading, or I see something new in your commentary or you cite links that reveal a whole new resource. I also detect a philosophical foundation there that I’d like to know more about. Would you talk a little about podcasting?
Ooley: I started podcasting in your booth, actually, in 2019 at the NRA Annual Meeting in Indianapolis when I was a guest with Paul Lathrop on the Polite Society podcast.
eJournal: Later, you were on The Bullet with Paul, too, right?
Ooley: Yes, after we became acquainted in 2019, we reconnected through The Bullet and the Polite Society podcasts, where I was a guest, primarily talking about firearms and Second Amendment-related issues from an attorney’s perspective. I really care deeply about the right to keep and bear arms and the Second Amendment, but I care more broadly about freedom, personal responsibility, and cultivating people who can make the world a better place from the bottom up.
I think that freedom is created and preserved from the bottom up not from the top down, not from the government. Through the Forge of Freedom podcast, I want to think through and convey these ideas to people who are interested in the same sort of world I am: one where people share and hold values about what it means to be a good person, a good husband, a good father and what it means to live a good life.
I studied philosophy in college, so I bring my passion for liberty and my passion for the right to keep and bear arms to bear in the podcast and teach people the foundational principles of liberty. I talk about a broad range and all sorts of topics. I catapulted from being the Second Amendment firearms-related guest on podcasts to the to the Forge of Freedom so I could talk about more than just firearms.
eJournal: I subscribe to Forge of Freedom on Apple Podcasts so it is easy to listen while commuting, but others might use Stitcher or other platforms. How can they find you?
Ooley: The easiest place is https://forgeoffreedom.com/ and if you want to watch it on YouTube it’s available at https://www.youtube.com/@theforgeoffreedom, Rumble, and Facebook. It’s also available on all the most popular podcast streaming platforms so whether it’s Apple Podcast or Spotify or Pandora or Amazon, it’s available there.
eJournal: The various platforms are great, and I personally like the well-maintained archives, too. A while back, when USAID cuts were a hot topic, I was looking for an episode you did about declines in charity. When I located the podcast and listened to it again, your link to a well-researched author supported the opinion. That’s just one of the values I have enjoyed being a Forge of Freedom follower. People my age are slowing down, but you and your wife coming on strong, and eventually with the parenting ethos you’re bringing to fatherhood, your son and his generation can carry the work forward.
Ooley: That’s part of the idea behind the Forge of Freedom podcast. We forge the life we want to live, and we build a community with like-minded people to spread our ideas. The way that we think leads to a good, fulfilling life for lots of other people, as well. The idea is to forge that kind of life in your own environment and that freedom more broadly will spread as a result.
eJournal: It’s interesting because, we’re not talking about herding up in compounds to associate with like-minded people. By podcasting, you have a voice that is heard by somebody in Florida and somebody in California and places in between, making the ideals you discuss so much more generally available.
You know, when I interview you, I never know what parts I don’t know [chuckling], so returning to the topic of raising children, what do you wish that we’d talked about that we didn’t this morning?
Ooley: I’m still in the same camp as you. There are lots of things that I don’t know, and I that I don’t know I don’t know. When I’m new to something or learning a new skill, whether that’s firearms or fatherhood, I try to consume as much information as I can. It’s hard to decipher all of it and to assimilate it in a way that’s applicable. You have to take your own approach, bring some critical thought to what you read, and assimilate it to your own life. I am still going through that process myself.
I try to approach any topic with humility and do the best I can. I’m not going to be perfect. Don’t get discouraged when you’re not perfect. Continue to learn and carry that humility throughout whatever process or act you’re engaged in. That really matters, whether that’s becoming a responsibly armed citizen or becoming a good father. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
eJournal: Well put, and just about the time you think you’ve got it all figured out, then you’ll have a teenager [laughing]. Any final thoughts?
Ooley: Thanks for having me on. I enjoy our conversations, last year and this time, as well, but this time, I’m a little more uncomfortable. It’s so personal; it’s also something that I’m still learning, so I’m more vulnerable in this sort of conversation. I hope that people get something out of it. To any parents out there, if you see this on YouTube or read it on the Network website, I would like to hear your thoughts, so don’t hesitate to tell me if I’m full of baloney.
eJournal: That is the power of being part of this community. You’ll support people who are wondering how to do something and then, maybe there’ll be people who can guide you and say, “Well I got through something similar by doing XYZ.” Alex, thank you so much for being part of the Network family and for sharing your family with ours.
Ooley: Thank you.
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About Alex Ooley: A Network affiliated attorney since the spring of 2017, Alex is a passionate advocate for liberty and the Second Amendment, who has helped numerous clients protect and restore their gun rights. He represents the accused in a wide range of cases, including self-defense and gun-related cases. He and his father operate Ooley Law (https://ooleylaw.com/) in Borden, Indiana. Alex is the creator and host of The Forge of Freedom podcast (https://forgeoffreedom.com/) and is a certified firearms instructor.