 Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense. I currently teach a couple different classes, but my favorite classes to teach are my kind of, you know, bread and butter, core, firearms, proficiency courses. Let's call them that. You know, I have a pistol class and a rifle class and we're on the range all day learning how to operate and use those firearms. And I've decided that I'm going to change the name of those courses. My pistol class I will now call Citizen Pistol One and my rifle class I will now call Citizen Rifle One. So I wanted to talk about the reasons why I would change the name of the course and why I would call it that. There are a couple reasons for that. The first reason is I believe in pursuing your martial American heritage. We all come from different walks of life, we all have different day jobs, we all do different things, but at the end of the day we're Americans. And part of being an American, I would argue, is pursuing that martial American heritage that amateur warriors, meaning people that don't do it full time, are the people that have done a great job of fighting for this country and we have a long established tradition of that. Not to take anything away from the professionals, but that is a significant thing we have here in America and I think even in the 21st century we should continue to embrace that. The second reason I call it that is because I've decided that I really do hate the word civilian and in the gun industry world that word gets thrown around and used a lot. You have the middle spec version and the civilian version. And usually what that means is just another way of saying the good stuff and the leftover crap. That's usually what it means, right? And if you think about it, what does the word civilian even mean? The word civilian means someone who's not in the military and I think kind of post 9-11 we've now adopted it to mean not in the military or police, firefighter, EMS, whatever. We kind of get those people get added to the not civilian. So it's a negative definition word. The only other word I can think of that's like that and I'm sure there are a couple others but the only one I can think of is atheist, right? It's defining you by not being something else. It's not a word that establishes a sense of principles or beliefs or whatever. It's a word that says, no, I'm not that, right? And that's what I don't like about the word civilian. The truth is, civilians, which I meet the definition of, we need just as good skills and equipment as anybody else because it is of small comfort to me or to you I would assume that when my life or your life hangs in the balance you just have the lesser than, right? Well, I don't need to be as good with my gun as so and so because I'm just a civilian. Well, again, when all of a sudden it's your life on the line, all of that goes out the window and is a very small comfort. So I don't like this word. I wanna get away from this word because what I believe in is capability is a skill set that you can use no matter who you are, no matter what you do. And what I want to do is I want to help train people to that level of capability. I want to empower all of us no matter what our job is, no matter where we're coming from to have a high level of proficiency and to have a high level of skill and capability. And lest you think, oh, Dylan is really just using the citizen word because he doesn't like the word civilian and he doesn't want anything to do with like professional military police, whatever. Let me assure you that's not the case. I use the word citizen because it's all encompassing, I don't care what your job is if you're a professional police person or a military person or a dental hygienist or whatever. If you value individual rights and liberty and American values in general and you want to be better prepared and know how to use your firearms in order to potentially defend those things, then I invite you to come take a class. Then of course I'm on your team. I look at the word citizen as an all encompassing term that no matter your profession, no matter your walk of life, you have stake in the fate of the nation and you wish it's best by preserving its foundation. And so that is why I named it citizen pistol one and citizen rifle one. The other reason I like the word citizen is because it implies buy-in. I'm a big fan of Roman history and in the Roman system and along with the Greeks and a bunch of other systems, right? It was the citizens who fought for the city, right? If you like Socrates fought in the Battle of Marathon and so he was a citizen of Athens, right? He had buy-in, he had vote there, he had to buy his own equipment and armor and he had to go fight on the battlefield for the city when it was needed. There's an implied buy-in and commitment in the word citizen or at least there should be. And I really appreciate that and that's another thing I want to capture. Are people that are bought in that have stake in the state of things and are willing to embrace their martial American heritage to protect and defend things? So I really like that. I think citizen encapsulates that well and that is why I've chosen to call my courses citizen pistol one and citizen rifle one. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, man, that all sounds really intense like listen, Dylan, I just want a self-defense course. You know, I just, I just want to carry my pistol to defend myself or have a rifle, defend my house or whatever. Like I just, I just want like self-defense shooting stuff. Well, you're in luck. All of shooting is the basics, right? And the people who are just very proficient are just very proficient at the basics. But it's all the same stuff, all the same skills that you would need to be a proficient shooter are all the same skills you would use to defend your house or to defend your life or to carry a pistol concealed for self-defense. That's all the same skill set. It's just a matter of how far you want to go down that rabbit hole. So if that strikes a chord with you, I would invite you to come on out to Citizen Pistol One or Citizen Rifle One and let's get better together. Let's continue to climb up that ladder of excellence and be more capable, more skillful than we were yesterday so that if our time ever comes, we are able to defend liberty in the nation. I hope that's helpful and I hope to see you in class. Do brave deeds and endure.