From TTAG:
Groups like Everytown’s “The Smoking Gun” project are calling out gun companies for daring to market to women. Their big gripe? That the firearm industry is trying to “normalize” women and guns.
Damn right we are.
In my earlier, busier times, I must have taught about four- to five hundred women to shoot — my record being a class of over twenty, at a schutzenfest in southern Virginia (or Tennessee, my geography was kinda scrambled by the time we got to the “range” at some guy’s farm).
All my teaching sessions involved starting off with a .22 pistol or revolver (usually one of mine, unless they’d brought their own), and a gradual transition to something a little more powerful, each woman at her own pace of acceptance, familiarity and acquired skill. All the ammo was on me, and I refused to accept payment.
As a rule, I find it easier to teach women to shoot; they’re more attentive, more obedient and less squeamish about asking “stupid” questions than men are. Men are all tangled up in both testosterone and, I think, embarrassment (at not knowing how to shoot), so they tend to be more difficult pupils. Where possible, I segregated the men from the women.
Also, quite a few ladies didn’t want their husbands or boyfriends to teach them; they preferred a neutral third party to avoid any impatience or emotion. That’s a very mature attitude.
The best part of teaching Teh Girls? That look of quiet confidence, of self-assuredness and self-reliance they get after they’ve become comfortable with The Gun Thing. (One woman, who’d been fleeing from an abusive ex-boyfriend for over two years, later wrote to me and told me that after the last of our classes — as I recall we’d had half a dozen — she’d had her first proper night’s sleep in years. Her gun? A Ruger SP101, loaded with .38 Special+P hollowpoints. Pity the fool.)
Golden moments… it’s too bad they don’t happen as often as they used to.
