By Travis Bader, founder of Silvercore Outdoors.
The first firearms course I ever took, the instructor handed back our practical tests at the end of the day, shook everyone's hand, and that was it. We walked out into the parking lot licensed, and none of us ever heard from him again. For most people in this country, that's the entire relationship with firearms education. One day in a classroom, a certificate, and then you're on your own to figure out the rest.
I built Silvercore because that's a strange place to leave someone. Passing your test is just the first thing you do.
Since 1994 we've taught the Canadian Firearms Safety Course and the Restricted course to more people than I can count, and along the way we ended up training and certifying most of the instructors working in our area. That second part matters more than the first. When you train the people who train everyone else, you become the standard the others are measured against. That's just what happens when you do something carefully for a long time.
What most firearms training is, and what we decided to build instead
The honest truth about firearms instruction in Canada is that a lot of it is a transaction. You pay, you sit, you pass, you leave. The incentive is volume, and the relationship ends at the door. I understand why it works that way. It's simpler to run and easier to scale.
We went a different direction, and it started with a decision we made early about instructors. At Silvercore we look at the students and their actual objective first, then work backwards to match the right instructor to them. If we're teaching police, we tend to put a current or retired law enforcement instructor in front of the room. Teaching an Indigenous group, a women's group, a mineral exploration crew heading somewhere remote, we pair them with an instructor who shares that background. People learn faster from someone they can relate to, and they trust the room sooner. Most places can't or won't do this. They have Bob, Bob knows the material, and Bob teaches everyone the same way, whether he's the right fit for the room or not.
That same thinking is why the company grew the way it did. Once you take the relationship with the student seriously, the one-day course stops being enough.
The podcast, and why we have one at all
The podcast, and why we have one at all A few years ago I started recording conversations with the people who make up this community, and it turned into the Silvercore Podcast. We're now more than 190 episodes deep, and it's become one of the better records anywhere of what this world actually contains.
I'll give you one example of what I mean. On Episode 69 I sat down with Ilya Koshkin, an optical physicist some people know as the Dark Lord of Optics, and he told me the greatest depth of field in any rifle scope on the market belongs to a Canadian company, Tangent Theta. That sent me to Halifax to spend a few days inside Armament Technology's facility, which became Episode 90, and eventually a written review of what I found there. One offhand comment on a podcast turned into a genuine education in how the best optics in the world get built. That's what happens when you keep showing up and asking real questions instead of running ads.
The podcast grew out of the same impulse as the instruction. Take the subject seriously, talk to people who know more than you do, and bring the audience along.
The Club is the part that lasts
All of this is why the Silvercore Club exists. The Club answers the question the parking-lot handshake left hanging: what now?
For $59 a year, a membership comes with $5 million in liability insurance underwritten through Lloyd's of London, covering lawful firearms use, hunting, fishing, archery, camping and hiking, across Canada and the United States. It comes with free access to every Silvercore online course and partner pricing with companies we actually respect, from Tangent Theta to Nanuk to Marathon and others. And it comes with The Outpost, our members' side of things, where the relationship becomes something ongoing, the kind of thing I wished that first instructor had offered me.
I won't oversell it. The insurance alone costs a member almost nothing and most will never file a claim. That's rather the point. The Club is the standing relationship with the community and the company, the version of firearms and outdoor life where someone is still picking up the phone after the certificate is printed.
If you've already got your licence and you've been wondering what comes next, that's exactly the question we built the Club to answer.
Travis Bader, Silvercore Outdoors
