Why Cars Are Like Guns — And Why That Should Change How You Drive

Summary

In this final episode of 2025, The Car Chick® takes a more personal turn—sharing how recent firearms training led to a powerful realization about driving safety.

This episode is not about politics or gun rights. It’s about responsibility, training, and what happens when we treat powerful tools too casually. From overwhelming choices and “gear over skill” thinking to why training matters more than gadgets, LeeAnn draws clear parallels between firearms safety and everyday driving.

She closes with The Car Chick’s 4 Universal Rules of Driving Safety, a framework every driver should carry with them—especially during busy holiday travel.

Takeaways

• Cars and firearms are both powerful tools that require training and responsibility
• Skill and training matter more than equipment or “mods”
• Random opinions aren’t a strategy—clear priorities are
• Situational awareness prevents emergencies before they happen
• Driving deserves the same seriousness we apply to firearm safety

You can view a full list of resources and episode transcripts here.

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Work with LeeAnn:

• Course: The No BS Guide to Buying a Car
• Car Buying Service

Copyright ©2024 Women’s Automotive Solutions Inc., dba The Car Chick. All rights reserved.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Personal Responsibility and Safety
• 1:43 Training and Self-Defense Insights
• 3:58 The Parallels Between Firearms and Cars
• 7:35 The Importance of Personal Needs in Shopping
• 9:08 Adapting the Perfect Car Questionnaire
• 12:03 Researching and Evaluating Options
• 14:13 Test Driving and Hands-On Experience
• 16:19 Learning and Skill Development
• 22:38 Safety and Responsibility in Ownership
• 31:28 Conclusion and New Year's Resolutions

Transcript

LeeAnn Shattuck (00:00)
Hey everyone and welcome back to The Straight Shift, the podcast that cuts through the bullshittery and helps you be a better driver, car shopper, and car owner. But because of that, sometimes it's not appropriate for children. And this is going to be one of those podcasts, not necessarily because of the language, because this topic is going to be a little bit different than my usual. This is going to get a little more personal, a little more philosophical, but I think the perspective is going to be useful.

This is also going to be the last podcast of 2025 as we are heading into the holidays. And I think that kind of feels fitting given the topic. A lot of us are going to be getting in our cars, going over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house for holiday travel. Emotions are running high this time of year. So I think this is just a really good time to take a moment and stop and think about safety, about responsibility,

and what we owe to ourselves and the people around us as humans. So let's end this year on a slightly thoughtful note. I recently made the decision to purchase a handgun for personal protection. No judgment, please. And before anyone jumps to conclusions and shuts off this podcast, I want to be very clear about something. This podcast is not about gun rights versus gun control. It is not about politics. It is about

safety and my goal is to get you to think about your car and your driving in a different way than you probably ever have before and hopefully in doing so it might make you a safer driver. So, I hope you will stick with me and learn why I think cars are like firearms. So let's get into it

For about the last nine or 10 months, I have been training Krav Maga with a group here in my hometown called Treadstone Defense Tactics. If you're not familiar with Krav Maga, it is a real world self-defense technique. It's not a sport, it's not a traditional martial art, but rather it pulls from all those disciplines, but it's about actually surviving real world hand-to-hand combat situations or self-defense situations.

And aside from being really fun and a great workout and a good source of new bruises every week, one of things that I have learned pretty quickly is that no matter how much training I can get, no matter how much of a ninja I might potentially become in the future, women, especially small framed women like me are still at a huge disadvantage in self-defense scenarios. Strength matters. Size matters.

And sometimes no matter how much training you have, there's just nothing that can overcome the disparity of force between, you know, one or more big guys and even the most highly trained woman. So Treadstone also does tactical firearms training. The owner of the company trains law enforcement all around the world. He's just the nicest, scariest guy you'll ever meet. And I decided to add that training to my repertoire as well.

It was not a snap decision. This was something that I really thought through very, very carefully. And I would not do it if I didn't have access to this level of like law enforcement level training. And what I kind of learned in the process of this last few weeks, I had a huge light bulb moment that cars and firearms actually have a lot in common. So I wanted to share this journey with you today and hopefully give you some good

tips that I have learned in these aha moments going through this journey of beginning the training and purchasing a firearm and how I found that it directly applies to cars. So I started this journey knowing pretty much exactly diddly squat about firearms, particularly handguns. I had never fired a handgun in my life. I took rifelry as a gym class in high school.

about 100 years ago because Wisconsin is where I grew up and yes we had a gun range in the high school because of all the hunter safety stuff there. Hello Wisconsin. But these were single shot bolt action rifles that I'm pretty sure were left over from World War I. But I haven't shot a firearm since then.

And when I started training with Treadstone, I started training with one of their SIRT guns, which is basically a fancy laser pointer that happens to be the exact same shape, size and weight of an actual handgun. In this case, a Glock 19. But everyone else that I train with there uses their personal firearm with something called a barrel block that allows for totally safe dry fire training. It's great. And this is kind of where the first parallel hit me.

It's really, really important to train with the firearm that you are actually going to carry every day or use at home for home defense. And I have always felt that that is true with the driver training that I have done. You need to get to know your daily driver car as well as possible and be as good at driving it as you can possibly be. This is why I have never had a dedicated track car... that and money. But when I go to the track,

I drive Maggie and granted Maggie's not entirely stock and she does have a few little things for the track like harnesses. But you know, for driving track days, I want to have my daily driver because learning how to drive her at the extremes on a racetrack make me a much better and safer and skilled driver every day in Charlotte traffic.

That real world training is just so critical because you have to know how your car works, how it's going to perform under emergency conditions. If someone cuts you off and you have to slam on your brakes or if you lose traction because it's raining and you hit a slippery spot. All these situations that happen in the real world, they happen extremely quickly. And so you have to have trained on that scenario

to really know how to react. And I've learned it's exactly the same in firearms training because you've got to know that weapon, you've got to know how it works, and you've got to be proficient at using it under real world scenarios. And that's not just standing at a table at a range, taking your time and punching holes in a paper target. That is drawing from your weapon under an emergency situation. You have seconds to react.

You know, have all these legal parameters that you have to fit in to be able to use deadly force for self-defense. So I made the decision to purchase my own firearm to train with it,

because I'm going to train a whole boatload before I actually will be willing to carry it for self-defense. And so I didn't know much about guns. And there are so many options out there. It's ridiculous. It's very similar to cars. There are so many different makes and models and different shapes and sizes. There's like a whole new set of vocabulary

that I have had to learn and it's just, it's been very overwhelming. And I realized, wow, this must be how most people feel when they go car shopping and why my clients come to me. And I realized I was making the same car shopping mistakes when I was gun shopping that most people do. And I asked around and well, that's not a bad thing to do. And I asked my friends in my training group, you know, what they carry, what do they like about it?

I asked my brother who's a cop. But I also realized that I was also asking people who had some different needs than me. And this is what happens when people realize they need to go car shopping. Very often they will ask friends, they will ask family and worse....

They will get on social media and post, I need a new car. What do you guys like? I see this every day in a lot of the Facebook groups that I am on. And they're just asking a bunch of random people who one are probably not car experts and two know nothing about their specific lifestyle and their needs and what they need this tool to do for them.

You've got to always take that advice and those recommendations with a really big grain of salt because only you know what your needs are and your priorities are, which means you need to take time to think through that when you are car shopping.

You need to write that down. I go through it with the perfect car questionnaire with my clients by asking all those questions and forcing people to think about it and prioritize what is most important to them. What are deal breakers? What are not? Tell me about how you are going to use this vehicle every day.

And so I realized I needed to do the same thing for myself when it came to figuring out what was going to be the right firearm for me, especially since I was starting at ground zero with my research. So I actually grabbed my perfect car questionnaire and adapted it to a firearm

and asked myself all those same questions. And I came up with a list of what I really needed this tool to do for me based on my lifestyle, my budget, and not necessarily personality, but physical characteristics and limitations. And I realized that my priorities were I needed something small enough that I could carry every day on my relatively small female-shaped frame.

It's kind of like getting a car that fits in your garage and in the parking space at work if you park in a tight parking garage. And I needed something that would comfortably fit in my smaller hands,

and something that I could easily operate and control, like racking the slide, changing the magazine, pulling the trigger with my hands, which have some chronic tendonitis and possibly arthritis in my wrists and my thumb joints. So I knew I had that physical limitation. So this very much like someone who has back problems, neck problems, shoulder pain, needing really comfortable seats with a lot of adjustments and good ergonomics in a car.

I also realized that I would need something with enough stopping power. Like a little 22 was just not going to cut it for a self-defense situation. But I still needed it to be controllable for me. So there was a balance.

And capacity mattered, which is kind of like the fuel tank size. You know, I need to have enough rounds to be able to stop a threat if I'm ever in that situation. It's like, if you drive a lot, you want to be able to, get around without having to stop at the gas station constantly.

I also realized that of course I wanted something reliable and easy to maintain. That's just totally true in everything in my life. But I also needed something that had really good sights on it. And I'm talking iron sights. I'm not going to cheat yet and go to the red dots and all the little laser sights, because that's just who I am. I'm going to learn to use this tool stock to the best of my ability. But the reality is I wear multifocal contacts.

And while my new ones suck less than the old ones, multifocal contacts just kind of suck. So I'm never going to have a super crystal clear picture of that front site or the target. So I needed them to be as good as they could possibly be as visible as possible, especially at night to compensate for the age of my eyes. So that's kind of like needing some blind spot monitoring and maybe some of the other driver safety aids in the car just to help you as best you can.

And that's okay, as long as you are using those as a tool in addition to your own skill. So once I understood what my needs were and I wrote them all down and I prioritized them, and which is a deal breaker and which is not, then I had to start doing all of the research and learn all the manufacturers, all the different models.

I figured out that caliber kind of translates to engine size, at least in my brain. But even so, there are still tons of different variations on the same model gun. There's the XP and the Plus and the Pro and the Comp, and I'm like, what is all this? And I realized it's very much just like trims and packages on cars, which can be terribly confusing, especially if you don't live it and breathe it every day.

So I started doing all this research.

And then I made a short list of those use cases and things that I wanted to evaluate on each firearm when I went to the store just to hold it. Not firing, just holding it. It's like

going to the car show and being able to just sit in a bunch of different cars to see how they feel. Is it comfortable? How do the seats feel? How do they adjust? What is the technology like? Is it easy to use? Is it easy to reach? Are the seats easy and quick to fold down? You're going through all the things that are important to you. So when you go to look at cars for the first time, don't necessarily even plan on test driving your first round.

Just bring that checklist with you and sit in several of them. Touch them, have them show you the technology and go through your use cases. Like, do I need four kids to be able to get in and out of the car quickly in the carpool line? If you have a tall family member, bring them with you, test fit them in the car. Do you need to fit a dog crate in the back? Bring the dog crate, make sure it fits.

Need to get two hockey bags back there? Bring both hockey bags, test, fit them.

You have to really stay focused on what your needs and priorities are because salespeople, whether they're gun salespeople or they are car salespeople, although I did find the gun salespeople to be a lot more laid back, no pressure at all, but they still tended to want to show me, have you thought of this model? Have you considered that model? I really like this. Let me show you this one. Maybe you haven't considered that.

And I get that and to a certain degree it's helpful, but they're showing me what they like and their use cases are different. Their bodies are different. I'm like, that is a, looks like a great gun. Where the heck am I going to carry that? Your body is built like a column. You can carry that bad boy on your hip under a loose shirt and yay, you're concealed. Yeah, that doesn't work for women.

So I realized that I needed to stay focused on my priorities and go through my checklist and not get distracted by what the salesperson wanted to show me. And one of them did show me a gun that was not on my list. It was a Walther PDP and there is a female version that's a little bit smaller. And I did, I got a little bright shiny object syndrome for a minute because...

It was amazing. And I loved it. You know, it felt great. I knew that I would probably be able to shoot it really well at the range. The trigger was so smooth. It's like having great throttle inputs on a car. But I not going to be able to carry that thing. It's just too much gun for what I need every day.

It's like a Mercedes. Sure. I'd love to have a Mercedes, but I don't need a Mercedes. ⁓ Mercedes does not fit my lifestyle. I need a really great Toyota. And so I'm like, okay, I need to go back and I need to relook at my priorities and put the bright shiny object away and not let myself be influenced by what the salesperson likes. He wasn't wrong, but it wasn't the right tool for me. And so you have to...

have that mentality when you go to the dealership too and really stick to what's important to you. That's why it is great to bring a checklist. I brought a checklist for every gun and I held it and I tested every little thing on my list and I made my little notes and then I left and I came home and I evaluated it and based on that I was able to eliminate it down to three. And then those are the three that I wanted to actually test drive and that's great with cars too. You want to try not to test drive more than three cars if you can

because it gets a little overwhelming. So I found a range that could rent each of these guns.

And I got really lucky. The instructor was fantastic and he taught me in the way that I learn. And I realized as he was coaching me and teaching me about trigger control and being smooth and how

slow is smooth and then smooth is fast. I'm like, wait a minute. This is exactly what I say to my students at the track when I'm teaching them high performance driving for the first time. And I think that was probably my first light bulb moment where I realized, wait a minute, this car thing and this gun thing are really very, very similar and learning to shoot and learning to drive well are also very, very similar. So.

That was really cool. And I did very well because of it. And I'm going to brag a little bit. My very first time shooting, we shot 30, 9 millimeter rounds and 29 of the 30 were all in the 10. And the one that I missed was still a nine. So.

I realized how much of my advanced driver training was translating over. And it definitely allowed me to have that moment where I'm like, okay, this is the one. When I was shooting this one particular firearm, I just got that. This is my gun. It fits my hand. I can control it.

I feel like I made the right decision. And then it came time to do the actual shopping. And just like with car shopping, you do not do it the same day you test drive because your emotions are running high. I needed to sit with it for a little bit and I needed to do my diligence, do my homework. The one I decided on was the Springfield Arms Hellcat Pro. And it's relatively new. It's only been out about three years. So.

I didn't figure I would probably get lucky and find a used one because like Toyotas, people hold onto them. So I started shopping around just like I do for cars and saying, what is the MSRP? You know, what are they actually asking for? It was going into Black Friday weekend. Are there any sales? You know, how does this process work so that I would know how to negotiate? And in my shopping around,

I happened to stumble across at the range where I did my test driving. They had one in their used case. I really think it was just meant to be. And so I was able to get a gun that was only used for a few months and then got traded in a bigger one, but it came with seven magazines instead of just the two that it came with from the factory. So this is like the situation that I love to find when I'm shopping for my clients. If I can find a car that's only a few months old.

and certified pre-owned low miles. It's better than buying a new one because you are getting a longer warranty than you would if you bought a brand new one. And bonus, this was like getting it with an extra set of wheels and tires. was like 200 extra bucks worth of equipment that came on it. So when I did all the math, I realized I was really paying about half of what I would have paid had I bought that firearm new and five extra magazines, which I never would have done. But

they're cool to have. So I felt I did my homework. I got a good deal. This is what you have to do when you are car shopping as well. Now, the first thing I did when I got it home was read the manual cover to cover. And you need to do the same thing with the car because this is where you start learning the vehicle. Yes, when you're buying a car and you take delivery at the dealership. They go over everything, but that's like drinking from a fire hose. You got to go home,

later in the day, maybe tomorrow, read the manual. Definitely leverage the YouTube videos because they tend to be more helpful than the manual when you're trying to figure out how to use things. But you need to understand how to operate this tool properly and safely and how to maintain it. So the second thing that I did was completely disassemble the firearm

I don't recommend you disassemble your car when you get it home, but do pop the hood. Look under there. Where's my oil dipstick? Where's the wiper fluid? Make sure you understand how to do the maintenance things that you should be doing and the checks that you should be doing.

You must always know the condition that it is in, in order for it to be safe to drive. So I made sure I knew how to do that. And then of course, I took it to the range to train with that weapon. And this is where I learned another thing that's very similar between cars and firearms. There was a young man at the range and he was hitting dead center, the X,

every single time, not just in the 10 circle, through the X every single time. Like, holy cow, how is he doing that? This is what I want to learn how to do. So I went and talked to him and nice young man, he admitted, he's like, well, it's really the sight. This sight costs more than the gun itself, but my ego just won't let me shoot with anything else because I can't hit the X every time using any other sight.

And I, okay, I'm like, you were honest, you admitted to your ego. And then I noticed a lot of the other guys there, because again, I was the only woman there. And they're all talking about their sites, their red dots, their green dots, and, you know, they missed, then they're all saying, okay, maybe my site's not dialed in. This happens with cars and driving too. The tendency is to blame the equipment for your lack of skill and your mistakes.

I see this all the time at the racetrack with my students. They're always like, what do I need to change on the car to get faster? The car's understeering. No, the car is not understeering. You are overdriving. You don't need to modify anything on this car. The car is great as it is. You need to modify the driver. We call it the driver mod.

And I'm realizing it is exactly the same with shooting. It's all about the shooter mod and investing in the training, not a bunch of gadgets to compensate for your lack of skill.

So this is why I'm going to keep my firearm stock. I'm going to do iron sights and I'm not going to fall into that trap.

This is where I really started thinking about, okay, from a safety standpoint, cars really are like handguns and there is a huge responsibility in operating both. If you're going to own

a firearm, and especially if you're going to carry it around for protection. Yes, it is your constitutional right. We said we're not going to talk about that, but it is also a tremendous responsibility. You have to train with that weapon all the time and under realistic circumstances, not occasionally, not going to the range a few times a year and poking holes in paper, real world, ongoing,

scenario-based training. I personally feel the same way about cars and driving. And unfortunately, it's not quite as easy to get that kind of training for adult drivers than it is to get it for firearms training. But I have found that there are more and more driving schools offering advanced training or just private lessons to adults. And so I'm going to encourage you

if you have not had anything beyond driver's ed from high school, whether that was a few years ago, or if it's so far in your rear view mirror, you can barely remember it. That is not sufficient. Just like the concealed carry class, while there's great information in it, it's not sufficient. It's just a starting place for then continuing ongoing advanced training. I feel the same way about the stupid driver's ed courses for

cars, they are not nearly enough to then just turn you loose with what is effectively a 3000 to 6000 pound weapon. And this is what I'm going to encourage you to think about differently. You've probably never thought about your car as a weapon, but it is.

A car is a dangerous tool and we just get in it every day and take it for granted and go about and do the things that we're going to do. And we don't think about it in terms of safety nearly enough.

There are four universal firearm safety rules that everybody has to learn and they drill it into you over and over and over again. And it's in 10 different ways on the concealed carry test because the stakes are life and death and you've got to know this stuff. And I feel the same way about cars. So I have translated the universal firearm safety rules into

The Car Chick's driver safety rules. So first I'm to share the firearm rules with you. And then I'm going to tell you how I've turned those into driving rules. The very first rule of firearm safety is you always, always treat every firearm as if it were loaded. I don't care if you are 99.9 % sure that it's not loaded it because you just unloaded it. You always treat every firearm as if it is loaded and you must always know the condition

of your firearm. Number two, never point a firearm at anything that you are not willing to destroy. Number three, keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you have made the conscious decision

to fire. Otherwise, you just keep that finger away from that dang trigger. And number four, be sure of your target and what is beyond it and around it because you might miss your target. So what else could potentially get hit and what is beyond it because you know bullets keep going. They don't just stop necessarily when they hit the target.

I found that these very easily translate into driver safety rules. So here are The Car Chick's 4 universal rules of driving safety. Treat every motor vehicle as if it were a weapon,

because it can kill someone, it can injure someone, including yourself and the people in your car and the other people on the road, pedestrians... Treat every car as if it were a deadly weapon because it is. Never aim your car anywhere you don't want to go because the car goes where you are looking.

You should be looking where you want the car to go. This is why we teach looking through the turn at the racetrack. So if you're over here looking at rubbernecking because there's a car crash over here, or you're over looking at the Christmas lights, then you are not driving where you're supposed to be driving. The car is going to follow you.

You're going to find that the car is veering out of the lane. This is why lane keeping is necessary because people, their attention wanders, but then the car follows wherever your eyes go. So if your eyes are not on the road, the car is eventually not going to be on the road either. Number three, don't commit to an action or a move in the car unless you're ready for the consequences. And this can be a little bit difficult, especially under emergency situations, because we don't necessarily train those enough.

And so when we get into an emergency situation, what our instinct is, in that moment of panic, that oh shit moment, is often not the right thing to do from a physics standpoint and to correct the situation. This is why I advocate the advanced training, but also, don't do anything unless you're really committed to what the consequences are going to be. And that's not just in controlling the car, but also in the safety decisions that you make anytime you are in the car.

That means putting the phone away. If you're going to be talking to people, there could be distractions. Don't do it unless you're willing to accept that the consequence of that is that you may be distracted. So just be very committed to being responsible and focused on your driving and knowing what the right moves are in that car.

Finally, always know what's around you. Situational awareness is the single most important factor to any type of safety, whether that's personal safety, firearm safety, driving safety, knowing what the heck is going on around you. What is the environment? What are the risks of my environment? Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is it foggy? Is it dark? Can I not see well? What are these other idiots around me doing? Because that situational awareness

will help you to avoid the emergency situation, avoid having to slam on the brakes, avoid having to use deadly force in a self-defense situation. And one of the things I loved about the training with my instructors was that they don't talk about gun accidents. There's no such thing as an accidental shooting. It is a negligent discharge, and it is 100 % every time caused by ignorance and or

negligence, people not knowing what they're doing or being careless. And that is 100 % true in cars. Because if you really boil down to it, and I refuse to call them car accidents, I call them crashes. Even if you weren't quote at fault under the law, under insurance, you still probably did something that contributed to it. Maybe not 100 % of the time, if you were literally just sitting there,

fully stopped, fully parked, nowhere to go, and somebody just drives into you, you may not have been able to do anything about that. But in most cases, everyone involved in a car crash played a role. So challenge yourself to what could I have done differently? If paying attention more, being more aware of your surroundings, should I have looked? People say, he came out of nowhere. No, he didn't.

It came out of somewhere. It just came out of somewhere that you hadn't bothered looking. So I will always encourage you to look ahead. Don't just get fixated on the car in front of you and be constantly aware of your surroundings and all the cars around you and what they are potentially doing, because that's the number one way to avoid getting into a car crash in the first place. So I hope that some of these tips that I have figured out in my recent firearms training

that I think apply to cars. I hope that that will help you to be a safer driver. And at the end of the day, whether you own a firearm, you carry one for personal protection, you decide not to, which is also just your right, or you are out driving, the ultimate goal and the ultimate responsibility that you have is to come home at the end of the day. And hopefully everyone else around you, all the other innocent people also come home at the end of the day. So think about your driving

not just as a right, which we tend to think of it as, or privilege, it is also a tremendous responsibility operating a vehicle that can be a weapon. So as we wrap up 2025 and we head into the new year, I would like encourage you to maybe set a new year's resolution to be a better driver, be a safer driver, whether that's, saying no phones in the car whatsoever, phone has to be locked in a purse, you just like

some states require the firearm to be locked away where nobody can get to it. Do the same thing with your phone. Or to take a driving class. Get out there and Google adult driver training in your area and maybe take an extra class. Get some more private lessons, especially if you've been in a car crash and you're nervous about driving. It's totally normal and it just takes some training to be able to push through that and you'll ultimately be a better and safer driver. So happy holidays, everyone.

Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Yule, Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, and Happy New Year. Be safe. I'm out of here.