As I said yesterday I had arranged to take a new shooter to the range this evening.
She was a little nervous and at first you could even see her hands shake when she loaded the magazine of the Ruger Mark II. When she did some dry fire exercises I could see the gun shake as well. It wasn’t all nervousness though. She has very slender arms and the longer she held the gun out at arms length the more it shook and the more she bent her elbows.
Still, when she fired her first shots at about 10 feet away they were all “in the black”:
After several ordinary targets I put up a slightly used USPSA target and said, “This is a bad guy.” Here is the A-zone. Keep all your shots in the A-zone while shooting as fast as you can.
She had some problems. Many of the shots were going way low. I moved the target in very close about two feet from the muzzle and told her to point and shoot as fast as she could–the bad guy was very close. She shot fast and all the bullets were A-zone hits.
She wanted the target further away so gave her another slightly used USPSA target and she moved it to about 15 feet away and opened fire:
This time nearly all the shots were solid A-zone hits and she had a big smile on her face (Update: she didn’t like any of the pictures of her face so that photo has been removed).
I showed her my Gun Blog 45, hollow point bullets, FMJ bullets, and emptied a couple magazines. One at slow speed with maximum accuracy and one as fast as I could shoot and keep them on target. She declined to shoot the .45.
I showed her a S&W .22 revolver and let her shoot that. She much preferred the semi-auto pistol.
We had a long talk about self-defense and “who needs a gun”. She explained that in India it is very difficult to get a gun and very few people have them. Here many people have them and people use them to hurt other people. Why is it that people can get a gun so easily here?
I told her it was a choice everyone needs to make for themselves. She lives across the street from work and goes to work and gets off during daylight hours. It is in a nice part of town. She has no abusive ex-boyfriends. Other people may go to work or get off work very late at night in a very bad part of town. Everyone needs to make their own decisions. I told her of one of my first students who was a very petite middle-aged woman who told me she was a judge and some of her “customers” were very unhappy with her decisions. She had seen some of these people watch her as she left the courthouse. She had never considered owning a gun before let alone carry one when she went to/from work or when she went to the store. She sometimes traveled on her job and would spend the night alone in a motel many miles from home. She and her husband decided she needed to have a concealed carry permit, a gun, and training. She bought a gun and I taught her to use it defensively. The sheriff issued her a permit and she now carries the gun. I think she made the right decision. I told her of the person searching for “what means of self defence will you use as a woman when you are been raped by a man” who found my blog. And I told her of John Fogh’s advice for such a situation.
I told her of my Just One Question and what the numbers were on criminal use, defensive use, and suicide. I told her how a gun made it possible for a weak 85 year-old woman to defend herself against a large young man.
She said she had a wonderful time and I dropped her off at her apartment–she took all the targets with her.
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