Hunter Constantine Talks Making Grand Master, the Belt Bounty & His First, Last, Next Guns

We sat down with Hunter Constantine, the USPSA Grand Master, content creator, and belt builder who turned a cubicle job and a single Google search into a full career in firearms. Hunter talked about making Grand Master in 14 months, the concealed carry belt he built out of pure frustration, the Belt Bounty that has handed shooters tens of thousands of dollars and a couple of Corvettes, and the 82-year-old chrome plated 1911 he bought five days before this episode.

On this episode of First Last Next, Elliot sat down with Hunter Constantine live from the Silencer Shop booth at SHOT Show 2026. If you have spent any time around competition shooting or gun content over the last few years, you already know Hunter. He is the guy with the silly jokes, the camper bolted to his truck, 165 pistols (mostly M&Ps), and the kind of energy that makes a whole squad want to shoot better.

Elliot and Hunter go back about five years, all the way to when Silencer Shop first tried to hire him. Hunter decided he wanted the freedom to go and shoot as much as possible, so he went a different direction. But he still did a TON of work with us, from copywriting to content creation, and we continue to sponsor him now.

From a Cubicle to USPSA Grand Master in 14 Months

Here is the part that surprises people: Hunter did not grow up shooting. He fired his first gun at 18, owned a couple of guns through college, and did not really get serious until he moved to Tucson in his mid-twenties. The thing that actually kicked off his competition career was not a mentor or a family tradition. It was a Google search. He typed in how to shoot competition because it sounded interesting, and that was the launchpad.

He had first heard about USPSA from, of all people, his accounting professor. The two had met at the NRA National Convention in Nashville, where Hunter was wearing a gun shirt and the professor struck up a conversation. As it turned out, the professor had an FFL, and he ended up walking Hunter through buying his first suppressor, an Omega 9K that Hunter still owns a full decade later. So Hunter took the advice, found his local match, and showed up. His own summary of what happened next is hard to improve on: “I suck. I put in some effort to get better. Putting a lot more effort. Get good.”

Fourteen months after that first match, Hunter made Grand Master. For anyone outside the competition world, Grand Master is the top classification in USPSA, the absolute ceiling, and Hunter pointed out that when he earned it there were fewer than 75 Grand Masters in his entire division out of somewhere around 8,000 to 9,000 shooters. Reaching that in 14 months, with no childhood background in the sport, is not normal. His only regret is that he did not start four or five years sooner.

Turning New Shooters Into Lifelong Competitors

Making Grand Master got Hunter noticed. It brought free ammo, free gear, and the attention of brands. But the thing he actually cares about is bigger than a classification. Hunter believes competition shooting is the single best way to make someone safer and more efficient with a firearm, and he thinks it is the best tool we have for chipping away at the stigma around guns. He has watched that happen in real time, taking friends from the opposite side of the political spectrum to a match and seeing their whole opinion flip in a single afternoon. His favorite version of that reaction: “Wow, you guys aren’t hillbillies shooting cans.”

Two of his stories drive the point home. The first is about a coworker from his commercial real estate days, a former college football player and a big athletic guy, who showed up to a match with exactly one goal. He just did not want to finish last. There were 45 shooters that day, he finished 44th, and Hunter said he was the happiest person on the range. He came back and shot more after that.

The second is what Hunter calls his proud dad moment. He instructed for two or three years, and he always gave students the same advice: do not drop a thousand dollars on a weekend class, spend it on ammo and local matches instead and you will get far more out of it. One day he rolled up to a match in Phoenix and saw a full squad of his former students shooting together. They had traded numbers after his class, started shooting as a group, and never stopped. Most of them are Master class shooters now, and a couple are knocking on Grand Master. That is the echo effect, and it is the reason Hunter does what he does. It is the same Hunter at a match, talking to his grandpa, working the SHOT Show floor, or ordering at In-N-Out, bad jokes included.

The Concealed Carry Belt Hunter Built Out of Pure Frustration

Hunter became a business owner almost by accident. When he started shooting seriously he was on the road constantly, so he bought a camper, dropped it on his truck, and spent 8 to 10 weeks at a time chasing matches around the country. The entire time, he was annoyed by his belt. He tried everything, and figures he burned through around $2,000 on different belts and designs before admitting that none of them worked. The stretchy belts were comfortable but would not hold a loaded gun in place, and the rigid belts held the gun fine but felt terrible to wear all day.

So he built the belt he actually wanted: real stretch for comfort, with a rigid section to lock the gun where it belongs. His first prototype came together around 2018, and then nothing happened for three years. It took until October 2022 for Hunter to sell his first belt, and that first batch mostly went to friends who bought one just to support him, right up until those same friends started telling him the belt was actually good. Which, as Hunter pointed out, was the entire point of building it.

From there he kept reinvesting, year after year. Three-plus years on, the belt has sold tens of thousands of units, and there are people all over the country carrying concealed more often because of it. Last year it finally made enough to pay Hunter a comfortable living. The Constantine Carry Belt is legit, most of the Silencer Shop crew uses them, we love them, get one if you need a good everyday belt.

Inside the Belt Bounty: Cash, Suppressors, and a Drift-Built Corvette

This is the part that makes Hunter different. From his time at Silencer Shop and from consulting for other companies, he took careful notes on what good brands do. Silencer Shop, in his words, has a heartbeat to the customer, with free tax stamp promos, free suppressor giveaways, and real support for the community. Hunter decided he wanted that same instinct built straight into his own brand, and that became the Belt Bounty.

It started small. In year one he gave away around $7,000 in cash, handing a stack of singles to any shooter who ran concealed at a match, mostly because a fat stack of ones looks great on camera. Year two grew to roughly $26,000 across more matches, and he started bringing partners in. Silencer Shop covered tax stamps for donated suppressors, Smith & Wesson and Walther donated guns, Tier One donated holsters, and Vortex came in with optics, until suddenly there was a full prize table.

Then 2025 happened. Hunter gave away $64,000 in cash straight into shooters’ pockets, plus a 1984 C4 Corvette and a Honda Grom, on top of roughly another $100,000 in prizes. The Grom was peak Hunter. A buddy needed to offload one, so he bought it for about $2,000, rode it to the gym and the grocery store for a couple of months, then gave it away at a National match. He also sponsored 110 matches that year and handed out close to 1,500 belts for free.

There is a reason the shooters keep coming out ahead. The competition world is funded almost entirely by the shooters themselves, with very little outside money flowing in, so Hunter set his priorities in a deliberate order: never run out of belts, then pay the shooters and build awesome prizes, then pay himself. He even ran a public version of the whole thing, pulling two random YouTube subscribers, flying them to Tucson on a fully covered trip, and putting them head-to-head in a competition for cash. One went home with about $2,100 and the other with around $1,600. He described the energy as MrBeast style, just aimed at the shooting community.

This year’s grand prize raises the bar again. It is a C6 Corvette getting a full drift build, with coilovers, a wide body, wheels, tires, seats, and a harness bar, built with help from pro drivers Caleb Quanbeck and Travis Reeder, and the winner gets flown to Tucson for a private drift lesson on a private track before they ever drive it home. If you want to know how Hunter feels about Corvettes, he kept it simple. The C6 is the best car you can buy for the money. His has 350 horsepower, a manual V8, and just enough room in the back for two rifle cases, and in his words it is America’s car and you were wrong if you bought anything else. He has already accepted that he will probably buy another C6 next year and build the exact same car again, because he likes it too much to stop.

Hunter’s First Gun: An FN Five-Seven and a Counter-Strike Habit

Technically, Hunter’s first gun was a Rock River AR with two mags, a gift from the uncle who got him into shooting when he turned 18. But the first gun Hunter bought with his own money, at 21, makes for a much better story. He walked into the shop fully intending to buy a Glock 19, the responsible first time buyer move, and he knew it. Then he spotted an FN Five-Seven on the shelf.

He had the money, and he had also played a lot of Counter-Strike, so it became a pure game day decision. He asked to see the FN, asked if they had ammo, bought it, and walked out, with no convincing, no questions, and no talking himself out of it. He just wanted the gun he had been running in a video game. He ended up carrying that Five-Seven for about a year and a half before he bought anything else, and he still has it today. In true Hunter fashion it has not been left stock either, since it wears a red dot now and the barrel is threaded so he can rotate cans onto it.

For the record, this was the first Five-Seven anyone has brought on First Last Next, which feels overdue. Hunter loves the cartridge, with almost no recoil and 20+1 capacity, and he thinks the guns chambered for it are just plain fun to shoot. He liked it enough that he picked up a P90 last year and plans to build it out, we’re pumped to see it.

Hunter’s Last Gun: A Chrome-Plated WWII 1911 With Zero Regrets

Hunter’s last gun did not come from a careful search. It came from a mistake. Five days before this episode, he cleaned out his truck for the drive from Tucson to Vegas, a full detail with the glove box, center console, and everything else wiped down and emptied. He got about 45 minutes down the road before he realized what he had pulled out and never put back: his carry gun. He and his videographer, who is also named Hunter, dug through the truck and came up with a single 1911 holster, so Hunter made a call. He would buy a gun on the way.

They stopped in Phoenix at a random strip mall gun shop called Bear Arms, cameras rolling for his SHOT Show videos, with a simple plan: find a used 1911 with some character for around a thousand bucks. What Hunter found was a 1944 Remington 1911, a World War Two pistol originally issued to British Commandos, that someone had nickel plated back in the 1950s. It was not a careful job either. The story going around the shop was that the work had been done at a hot rod shop, and every guy in there told Hunter the same thing: the gun was ruined, a collector’s piece destroyed, and why would he even want it. Hunter thought it was perfect.

That pistol is 82 years old, and it runs. A YouTube commenter had insisted you cannot feed a World War Two 1911 with modern hollow points, that those guns were built for ball ammo only, but Hunter ran Speer Gold Dot through it without a hiccup. As he pointed out, confidently telling a man his gun cannot do something it just did is itself a pretty solid example of a fudd, a term that earns its own section in a moment. The plan for the gun is not to preserve it, it is to keep building. Hunter wants to get the slide cut, mount an Aimpoint Acro, and add a rail, and he talked to Aimpoint at the show and plans to work with Springfield on the machining. It is an 82-year-old commando pistol, chrome from a hot rod shop, on its way to becoming a modern carry gun.

What Is a Fudd? Hunter Constantine Lets Us Know

The 1911 conversation produced the best definition of the episode, so it deserves its own moment. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, the word fudd came up, and Hunter was happy to explain it for anyone who has never had it aimed at them. A fudd, in his telling, is the old boomer gun owner who is permanently stuck in his ways. He is the guy who will tell you .45 is the only round worth carrying because it has more stopping power, and the guy who swears the M1A is the most accurate rifle a man could ever shoot in a fight and the gun he will use to defend his house, even though he cannot run a mile.

Then Hunter filled in the wardrobe. A fudd probably owns a fishing vest, probably has a goatee, and almost certainly owns at least one pair of Nike Air Monarchs. It is delivered with love, mostly, and it is exactly the kind of bit that makes First Last Next worth pressing play on. For the record, the YouTube commenter who swore Hunter’s 82-year-old 1911 could not run modern hollow points fit the description perfectly.

What’s Next for Hunter Constantine: A .50 Cal, an EOD Range & a Black Hawk

Hunter’s answer for what comes next was less about a single gun and more about a list of things that should probably worry his insurance company. He is picking up a Barrett .50 cal when he gets home, he now has access to an EOD range, which means explosives are coming to the channel, and there is hunting content in the works. A friend even got hold of a Black Hawk helicopter, so Hunter has access to that too, and all he has to do is cover the gas. He would not say what the helicopter is for yet. He has plans, he just does not want other creators stealing them.

One more thing is worth knowing about Hunter’s content. His channel runs no ads, no sponsorships, and is not monetized. He takes free product for reviews and tells the company up front that the review will be honest either way. He shoots for Smith & Wesson and still says out loud when one of their guns could have been better, and that is the whole reason people trust what he says.

Final Shot

Hunter Constantine’s episode of First Last Next is a great reminder that you do not need a childhood full of range days to build a life around this stuff. Hunter started with a Google search, made Grand Master in 14 months, and built a belt company because every other belt annoyed him, then turned that belt into a company that now hands shooters cash, suppressors, and Corvettes. He carries an 82-year-old chrome 1911 because it makes him happy, and he spends a real chunk of his own money making sure the next person who walks up to a match has a reason to come back.

He also closed the episode talking about Silencer Shop, which has been with him since day one, and the Silencer Shop Foundation’s ongoing fight against the NFA. Hunter even had his uncle buy three suppressors to help fund it, and his take, like ours, is pretty simple: you should not have to register your property in the first place. So go shoot a match, go check out the belt, and if you see a chrome 1911 at the next bay over, it is probably Hunter, and you’re probably going to have a great time.