Shooting Illustrated Interviews: John Correia

What can we learned from someone who's watched over 40,000 real-world violent encounters?

by
posted on October 18, 2023

John Correia has guided Active Self Protection from being a small firearms training company to popular YouTube channel into a firearms education powerhouse. He began as an NRA trainer, and then started to integrate lessons learned from real-world lethal force encounters he would see on social media. This in turn led to his own channel, Active Self Protection, which blossomed into a new media powerhouse with over three million subscribers. Correia’s video lessons provide valuable insights for the firearms training community, because he takes the time to break down a dangerous encounter into easy to digest bits, giving us all a chance to learn from the successes and failures of people who have had to deal with the harsh reality of violence in America. 

In recent years, Correia has extended that knowledge-based approach to firearms training into a training program of his own, and now Active Self Protection has its own smartphone app, created to help bypass the social media censors who clutch their pearls at the thought of an armed and competent populace. 

We talk with him about how he keeps his content fresh and up to date, as well as his background as a trainer and what we can learn from his experience watching over 40,000 lethal force encounters.

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