Matt Landfair | Primary & Secondary Founder

Organization: Primary & Secondary
Primary specialties: Law-enforcement curriculum development and instruction, firearms and use-of-force training, de-escalation education, professional networking, long-form technical discussion, subject-matter-expert identification, information analysis, and professional-community development

Official website: Primary & Secondary

Professional Biography

Matt Landfair is a law-enforcement officer, firearms instructor, curriculum developer, founder of Primary & Secondary, and host of the Primary & Secondary ModCast. His work combines direct instruction with an unusual ability to identify knowledgeable people, connect them with one another, and make their experience accessible to wider professional and public audiences.

Within law enforcement, Landfair has created and taught curricula covering subjects ranging from de-escalation and professional communication to firearms, decision-making, and use of force. This experience requires more than technical familiarity. Effective curriculum development means organizing policy, legal principles, operational experience, and adult-learning methods into instruction that officers can understand and apply under pressure. His teaching work provides a practical foundation for his broader interest in training quality, professional development, and the responsible evaluation of information.

Landfair is also an accomplished professional networker. In ordinary terms, networking is one of his defining abilities: he recognizes expertise, develops professional relationships across otherwise separated communities, and brings together people whose experience can complement or challenge one another. In more technical terms, he functions as a connector, curator, interviewer, and knowledge-network builder. Both descriptions refer to the same strength—knowing who possesses relevant experience, creating the conditions for useful discussion, and helping that knowledge reach the people who need it.

Primary & Secondary

Landfair created Primary & Secondary after becoming dissatisfied with firearms discussions dominated by unsupported opinions, personality-driven recommendations, and information repeated without adequate context. In a 2019 AR Build Junkie interview, he described recruiting trusted professional contacts as moderators and allowing those experts to introduce other respected specialists. The network eventually grew to more than 100 moderators representing law enforcement, military experience, competition, firearms instruction, medicine, gunsmithing, equipment development, and other technical fields.

The value of that network was never simply its size. Landfair’s goal was to create an environment in which people with relevant experience could compare observations, question assumptions, and explain why a technique, policy, or piece of equipment might work in one context but not another. Primary & Secondary subsequently expanded from social-media discussion groups into a website, forum, written archive, video content, long-form podcast, and in-person training events.

Landfair’s contribution is not a claim to universal expertise. It is his ability to identify people worth listening to, bring complementary specialties into the same discussion, ask productive questions, and preserve the resulting exchange. That networking function has helped expose local officers, instructors, competitors, armed citizens, agency decision-makers, and developing educators to specialists they might otherwise never encounter.

The Primary & Secondary ModCast

The Primary & Secondary Podcast developed from private conversations among the organization’s moderator network. Rather than using a conventional host-and-celebrity format, the ModCast commonly places several knowledgeable practitioners together so they can compare experience, clarify disagreements, and identify the circumstances that change an answer. The name “ModCast” originated because the early panels were drawn primarily from Primary & Secondary moderators.

By August 2026, the numbered series had exceeded 460 ModCast episodes and remained active after more than a decade. The catalog covers firearms, tactics, training methodology, law enforcement, medicine, armor, equipment, professional culture, decision-making, and other subjects related to armed-professional competence. The long format gives guests enough time to address exceptions, history, tradeoffs, and uncertainty that short-form content often loses. As a result, the ModCast also functions as an archive of how professional ideas, equipment, and practices developed over time. The podcast is available through Apple Podcasts and other major platforms.

Training, Curriculum, and Institutional Influence

Landfair’s curriculum-development and teaching experience anchors his understanding of how information becomes professional practice. He has developed and delivered instruction across a continuum that includes de-escalation, communication, firearms, decision-making, and use of force. That breadth reflects a central principle of his work: professional competence cannot be reduced to shooting performance alone. Sound training must connect judgment, policy, communication, tactics, and force options rather than treating them as unrelated subjects.

He has also advocated for training beyond minimum organizational requirements. Primary & Secondary frequently exposes officers and instructors to outside perspectives, national-level specialists, evolving equipment, and training methods that can challenge closed local information loops. This work is especially valuable when it reaches instructors, range staff, administrators, and policymakers whose decisions affect entire agencies.

Primary & Secondary Training Summit

The Primary & Secondary Training Summit extended the network from online discussion into physical instruction. The event brought together specialists in firearms performance, armorer work, medical care, equipment, criminal behavior, and tactical training. Landfair also sought to make improved practices available to law-enforcement administrators, policymakers, and lead firearms-training personnel who influence equipment, curriculum, and training decisions. Independent accounts, including a 2021 Primer Peak after-action review, documented both the formal instruction and the additional educational value created when instructors and serious students shared the same professional environment.

Information Philosophy

Landfair’s approach emphasizes asking why, identifying the problem a technique was intended to solve, testing what can be tested, comparing notes with trusted practitioners, and recognizing when context changes the answer. Reputation may help identify a relevant source, but it does not prove every claim that source makes. His preferred model is therefore not “an authority said it, so copy it,” but “understand the reasoning well enough to evaluate the next problem independently.”

This philosophy appears throughout his written work and interviews. It favors understanding over blind product recommendations, nuance over unnecessary certainty, and visible professional disagreement over artificial consensus. It also explains why Primary & Secondary panels often include people from different disciplines: an officer, competitor, instructor, engineer, armorer, or medical specialist may each see a different part of the same problem.

The Roland Special

Landfair is historically associated with naming and helping popularize the Roland Special, a modified Glock 19 configuration that became influential in modern concealed-carry and pistol-optic culture. The underlying configuration originated with Chuck Pressburg, known online as “Roland.” Landfair copied the concept, coined the name, and helped amplify it through the Primary & Secondary network. His role is most accurately described as naming and distributing the concept rather than inventing the technical configuration.

The episode illustrates Landfair’s broader influence. A useful idea may already exist, but a memorable name, an engaged professional network, and serious discussion can make that idea easier to examine and share. Landfair’s early article about the Roland Special also used the pistol to discuss source credibility, professional reputation, logic, signal-to-noise ratio, and verification—principles that remain central to his work.

Professional Assessment

Matt Landfair’s professional work combines three related forms of influence. He develops and teaches law-enforcement curriculum. He builds and maintains professional relationships across the firearms, training, military, law-enforcement, competition, medical, and technical communities. Through Primary & Secondary, he converts those relationships into public discussions, written resources, training opportunities, and a durable archive of specialized knowledge.

The clearest description is that Landfair did not build Primary & Secondary around the idea that he should personally provide every answer. He built it around finding people who genuinely know the subject, connecting them through effective professional networking, asking questions that reveal their reasoning, and making the resulting knowledge available to others.

Matt Landfair — Primary & Secondary Founder, Law-Enforcement Instructor & Curriculum Developer