Why it matters: Gunsmithing is the trade that keeps the rest of the industry's promises. Where the next generation learns it, and who can afford to advertise the answer, decides whether the guns people buy keep running.
The Silly War Pirates video runs 104 seconds and covers a lot of ground: reload ammunition in the morning, shoot it on the campus range in the afternoon, eat barbecue with the college president in the evening. It is a love letter to Trinidad State College's summer gunsmithing program in Trinidad, Colorado, published September 5, and its central claim is that this is the real thing while the program advertised across gun YouTube is not. We think the video is right about Trinidad and wrong about how to say so.
A disclosure before the argument. Silly War Pirates is the channel of Strategic Weapons & Preparation, which buys a sponsor card on this site. That bought them nothing here. The desk picked the video, the sponsor did not see this piece before it published, and a rival's video would get the same read, praise and complaints included.
What Trinidad State's gunsmithing program actually offers
Start with what the college says about itself, because the record is better than the hype. Gunsmithing has been taught at Trinidad State since 1947, when P.O. Ackley designed the first courses, and the college calls it the oldest active gunsmithing school in the country. There is a two-year associate degree, and there is the NRA summer program the video is about: nine weeks of one-week classes, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, one class per student per week. The 2026 slate ran from welding and basic machine shop in late May to benchmetal in July, with bluing, single-action revolver tuning, color case hardening and a Smith & Wesson armorer's course in between. Basic Machine Shop costs $400 or two credit hours and is capped at 14 students. On the college's own schedule, Introduction to Gunsmithing, Advanced Machine Shop and Metallic Cartridge Reloading are all marked full.
The instructors the video praises without naming are easy to find on the college's roster. The machine shop instructor is Logan Schmit, a 2010 graduate of the program who built precision bolt rifles at GA Precision, ran barreling and custom builds at Mile High Shooting Accessories, and joined the faculty in 2018. The reloading class belongs to William T. Falin Jr., who by published accounts spent nine years as the ballistician at Accurate Arms and has a long-range loading book to his name. Ryan Newport, who teaches alternative metal finishes among much else, spent years as a repair gunsmith at Browning. The video calls the reloading instructor the former chief ballistician for the largest powder company in the world. Whether Accurate Arms was ever that is a stretch we would not make, and the résumé does not need it. The video also says the machine shop instructor sometimes stays 16 hours. We cannot verify the number, but the college does schedule weekend machine-lab sessions so students can finish projects with the instructor on hand, which is the same point made without a stopwatch.
The best evidence for the program is the least glamorous document on its website: the tool list for Basic Machine Shop. It opens with a required machining textbook and assigned pre-reading, then runs through center drills, a half-inch endmill, lathe tool blanks, an EDM stone, a dial caliper, a dial indicator with a magnetic base, a center gauge, a 115-piece drill index, layout dye, a thread pitch gauge, a deadblow hammer and a toolbox to carry it all in. Please note that this list is bare minimum, it says. You can never have too many tools. The video is right that the lists are daunting. That is the point. A school that hands you a list like that is telling you what the trade is: hours at a machine, under someone who has done the work, with your own tools in your hands. You cannot ship a lathe, and the whole argument comes down to that sentence.
The weakest part of a strong case
So why does the video undercut itself? Two ways. First, the aside about university professors, who in the video's telling turn up for two hours a week to teach students to hate the country and aspire to an adult-content career. Nobody in Trinidad's machine shop needs that line, and the viewer it is aimed at, an adult deciding whether to spend $400 and a week of vacation on a lathe, does not need it either. It dates the video and spends credibility the rest of it earned.
“You cannot ship a lathe, and the whole argument comes down to that sentence.”
Marcus Hale, The ReticleSecond, the word fake. The video does not name the program it calls fake on camera, but its description does: Sonoran Desert Institute, the online school whose ad reads run on some of the largest channels in gun media. Fake is a word for diploma mills. SDI is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission through June 2028, its associate degree in firearms technology is approved for the GI Bill and federal student aid, and it ships tool kits so students can do bench work at home. It is not fake. It is a different model, and in our view a worse one for learning a machine trade, because the thing it cannot ship is the thing that matters. That is a sharper criticism than fake, and unlike fake it survives contact with SDI's paperwork.
Why gun video knows one school and not the other
The video's last line is its truest: this may be the only video you ever see for a residential gunsmithing program. That says less about the schools than about the medium. SDI reaches viewers because SDI has money to spend on reach. A report by Guns Down America, a gun-control group working from Education Department and Veterans Affairs data, put SDI's GI Bill and Defense Department tuition receipts above $22 million in the 2022-23 school year and counted more than 3,400 GI Bill students among roughly 4,000 enrolled. The group's politics are not ours, and nothing in those numbers is improper; veterans' benefits exist to be spent at accredited schools. But the figures explain the ad reads. A rural community college's marketing budget is a registration PDF. And the GI Bill is not an argument for the online model in particular. Trinidad's summer program takes it too, which means the money can follow a veteran to a milling machine as easily as to a shipped kit.
Trinidad is also not alone, whatever the video's title says. The Colorado School of Trades in Lakewood has taught gunsmithing since the same year, 1947. Pennsylvania Gunsmith School runs a 16-month diploma. Montgomery Community College in North Carolina and Murray State College in Oklahoma offer NRA short-term classes of their own, and an Arkansas technical college joined the NRA's affiliated list this spring. The only real fast gunsmithing program is enthusiasm, not a survey. The honest version is that residential programs exist across the map, they are small, they fill up, and almost none of them can afford to tell you so.
Which leaves the advice the video gets right. Plan early, because three of this year's classes are marked full on the college's schedule and the video says they fill months out. Buy the tools and read the assigned chapters, because the instructor will assume you did. Book the hotel. Then hold every gunsmithing program, residential or online, to one standard: hours on the machines under someone who has done the work. Trinidad clears it without breaking a sweat. That case did not need a villain, and it did not need a joke about professors. It needed the tool list.
For context
- Trinidad State College in Trinidad, Colorado has taught gunsmithing since 1947, when P.O. Ackley designed the first courses; the college calls it the oldest active gunsmithing school in the United States.
- The NRA summer program runs one-week classes from late May into July, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., at about $400 per class; for 2026 the college's schedule marks Introduction to Gunsmithing, Advanced Machine Shop and Metallic Cartridge Reloading as full.
- Sonoran Desert Institute, named in the video's description, is an online school accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission through June 2028; its 60-credit associate degree in firearms technology ships tool kits and is approved for GI Bill and federal student aid.
- Strategic Weapons & Preparation, which runs the Silly War Pirates channel, is a sponsor of The Reticle; sponsors have no say in what the desk covers or how it reads.
Themes in the source
Room for disagreement
The strongest case against this piece is that it grades a distance school with a machinist's ruler. Most people who want gunsmithing instruction will never run a lathe for a living. They want to service their own guns, do armorer-level work, and maybe open a shop that fits stocks, mounts optics and swaps parts, and a kit-based online program can teach that on a schedule that fits a deployed sailor or a nurse with two kids. It is accredited, GI Bill approved and answerable to the same federal machinery as any community college. Trinidad's summer program caps its machine shop class at 14 seats and has three classes full this year; a national trade cannot be staffed one June at a time in a small town in southern Colorado. Residential training also carries costs the video skips: a week away from work, a hotel that books out months ahead, and a tool list that can cost as much as the class. And the sponsorship point cuts both ways. The video that prompted this piece is itself marketing, made by a crew with commercial interests of its own, published on the platform whose incentives it complains about. If online schools should be judged by their graduates' work rather than their ad buys, a two-minute video with no numbers in it should be judged the same way.
The bottom line
Trinidad State's summer gunsmithing program earns the video's praise on the strength of its shop hours, its instructors and its waiting lists, and none of that needed a villain. The standard for judging any gunsmithing school is time on the machines under someone who has done the work, and by that standard the online model still has the most to prove.
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The Only REAL Fast Gunsmithing Program - Trinidad State College Gunsmithing School
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