Train Like A
Warrior
Recreation is preparation. The skills we build for fun are the same ones that protect what matters most.
Recreation Is Preparation
We all have fun at the range, in competition, and out shooting with friends. Recreation is preparation. Those same skills are an insurance policy if things go bad: the ability to protect ourselves, our families, and our country.
Veteran, active military, cop, or civilian, we are all citizens who enjoy private gun ownership. Training like a warrior is an exercise in American freedom. It is how we, as individuals, “maintain a well-regulated militia.”
The Original Swamp Fox
That culture, and the importance of being prepared, traces back to Francis Marion, the original “Swamp Fox.” Before the Revolutionary War he was a modest commercial farmer. He also served an eight-year stint with the British military in the French and Indian War.
During that time he learned three things from the Cherokee that would define him: the value of the long gun against short-range muskets, the use of terrain for cover and concealment, and the art of the ambush against a larger, better-supplied enemy.
His story shows why we train like warriors.
The “Swamp Fox” Spirit Lives
In the war for independence, Francis Marion led his militia in lightning raids against the redcoats and their supply lines, disrupting the British “Southern Strategy” built to finish off the American colonists. By blocking the British advance north, Marion’s raids arguably kept the Crown from crushing the rebellion and ending the war.
Cut off from the Continental Army’s command and supply, he held the British down on tactical ingenuity alone, plus the sheer grit to find food, horses, ammunition, and motivation for a ragtag band of civilian soldiers. Against long odds, America became the first and last colony to fight for, and win, its independence from the British Empire.
He is considered the father of guerrilla and maneuver warfare in America, a forerunner to the Army Rangers and Green Berets. Francis Marion is the American Warrior: tenacious, resourceful, principled.
His influence ran well past the battlefield. As both a Continental Army officer and a militia leader, Marion shaped the American Warrior mindset, and his mark on the U.S. military has held for 250 years. Less understood is his effect on America’s gun culture and the tie between civilian gun ownership and freedom. Eight years after the war was won, the founders decided “the right to bear arms” needed constitutional protection, even though it was already common law. It is hard to imagine that Marion’s exploits, and the plain necessity of the militia, were not the leading reason behind the words:
A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Second Amendment: U.S. Constitution
Part Of The American DNA
Marion left behind something bigger than a war record: freedom, independence, and a warrior spirit stitched into the American character, its culture, and arguably the Constitution itself.
That spirit is part of the American DNA. We are honored to carry his nickname.
