 Hey, guys, Dylan Schumacher with Citadel Defense. One of the things that I do is I allow people who are anti-gun to audit some of my classes for free. So you can show up. You can take my class for free. If you're like, you know, I don't like guns or whatever. I just don't think you'd own them. You can come up and you can come to my classes and you can audit them for free. And the reason I do that is a couple of reasons. I mean, the biggest reason is I think the biggest reason that people are afraid of guns or the biggest reason that people are opposed to guns is because of ignorance. And I don't mean that in the insulting fashion. I mean that in just the plain being of the word. Like, they simply do not know. They're ignorant. And we've all heard the maximum that ignorance breeds fear. And I definitely think there's some truth to that. So they don't know guns. They just know that they kill people and they go off and people get shot and they die. And that's all they know. And that's their only reference point. Before I married my wife, we lived in this tri-tier house, like a triplex. She lived on the middle floor with some girls. I lived on the top floor with some guys. And one of the guys there had gotten a Glock. And we were sitting in his room and he had it disassembled, in pieces, like slide is off, spring is out, barrel is out. I mean, in pieces. And we're sitting around talking or whatever. And he was cleaning it. I can't remember why it was disassembled. But it's disassembled. A couple of us in the room. And my wife, we were not dating at the time. We were just friends. She walks in the room and she says, you know, is that a gun? And we said, well, yeah, that's a gun. And I kid you not. She turns around and runs out of the room. Just turns around and runs just out. She'll tell it different. She'll say I'm lying. But she's not here to see my version. And I just thought, that's ridiculous. That's a little crazy, right? But later we dated and then we got married. And I came to learn that she just didn't know. She just didn't know. All she knew was that guns killed people. And that was a gun and she better get out of the room before she dies, because she just didn't know. And I think that that's a lot of people's starting point. They just simply don't know. They don't know how the gun works. They don't know how it feeds. They don't know what triggers do. And I'm not being hyperbolic here. I had a class recently and we were talking about negligent discharges. And someone said, well, yeah. But how do negligent discharges happen? And I said, they happen because someone puts their finger on the trigger and pulls the trigger and points the gun at themselves. That's how they happen. And he's like, oh, well, you know. And another person told me, well, you know, I had a buddy and he was like, he was cleaning his gun. I said, he was cleaning his gun and he shot himself. He didn't unload the gun first. There are clearly steps that happen and they just don't do it. And I think that, in part, because there's a lot of untrained people out there, or just, I should say, stupid people who don't obey the four gun safety rules, and they end up doing stupid things as a result. And so I think that's our issue. And I think, in large, we in the gun world do a lot to correct that. A lot to correct that. And I think that's great. But I think just kind of your average person who might be slightly anti-gun, they just don't know. And they don't know that they don't know. And so the reason I let people come audit some of my courses for free is because I'm trying to break through that barrier to get them the knowledge of how these guns work, how to operate them safely. When I started taking training courses and I started watching and reading a lot of gun safety material and then gun working material, one of the first things that my wife noticed, just from being out of the room when I'm watching the stuff or reading the stuff, is that there's a safe way to hand the guns. And she'd never heard that before. And it was a brand new concept to her. So I'm trying to get that concept through to people. Like, there's a way we in the gun world do this stuff. There's safe ways to draw and shoot and operate guns so that they only go off when you want them to. Go off when you want them to. There's a way to do that. And so I think the biggest thing that you can do next time you end up in a conversation with someone who is slightly anti-gun or whatever, is really find out how much they know about guns. Do they know that every time you purchase a gun, you have to pass a background check anyway? I bet you they don't. I bet you they think people are just out there getting all kinds of guns without background checks, which I'm against background checks, but that's a different story. They just don't know the current rules and regulations that it goes through to get your FFL license, to actually sell guns. That's a big deal. They don't understand that. They don't understand that there are ways that we, again, we operate and use these guns to save lives and not needlessly just accidentally take lives, right? They don't get that. So I would ask them, when have they shot a gun? Where did they learn to shoot a gun? Who were they with? What did they do? Did they were hearing protection when they shot that gun? And I'm not being hyperbolic. When I grew up, I grew up with my dad, my uncles, and I think back to it now, and I think, wow, that was really dumb. We would go shoot a trap and we wouldn't hear, we're hearing an eye protection. Stupid, right? I mean, just baseline like that. You should always wear hearing eye protection when you shoot guns, but we didn't. Because, well, my dad didn't tell me and I was young boy and I didn't know. I mean, you know, so you just, again, that's what you, he probably didn't know, to be honest, but that's the kind of stuff where when people grow up in those contexts and they just don't know, it breeds this fear because there's this deep ignorance. So I'd find out how much do they really know about guns? And my guess is next to nothing, right? And because they know next to nothing, they're afraid, right? That's why they end up using phrases like fully semi-automatic. We got to get rid of these fully semi-automatic guns. My wife and I joke around the house about that one all the time. You know, we got to get rid of these guns and it's like, well, what? Like they genuinely don't know what they're talking about and these are the people that are calling their representatives. These are the people that are the representatives that are trying to pass laws to get rid of your mind's rights because they don't know, right? So I think one of the barriers to break through that and I think the most effective way for especially the most people, let's make up a number, 80% of people can be reached through just simple means of education. Simply explaining how guns work and what they do and the actual literal mechanics of the gun and the safety rules that we follow, that's gonna alleviate 80% of people's fears. And I just think we in the gun world need to realize that education is one of the biggest bridges across that gap because once people are empowered and they know and they realize they can use this tool to save their life, they're gonna be a lot more receptive to it and they're gonna be a lot less hating on it. And once you start telling them about certain laws that already exist in the books, like if you're going to New Jersey and you have a gun, boom, instant felling. I don't care who you are, I don't care where you're from, just instant felling, right? People, every time I tell some of that, they're like, wow, like really? That's ridiculous. And I'm like, yeah, it is ridiculous. Do you think we need more gun laws like that? And they're like, well, no. I mean, I've never had anybody argue that with me, right? So again, I just think it's this matter of education and explaining and helping people get to that place where they know, and that's gonna solve a lot of our problems. So share this video with someone that might not know and or do your best to humbly, helpfully, not in an argumentative or a caustic sense, educate them so that they won't be so ignorant so that they won't be so afraid. Two brave deeds and endure.