After the Aurora theater shooting, this grandmother started a $3m gun academy

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In July 2012, in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., a mass shooter killed 12 people watching The Dark Knight Rises. At the time, it was one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, though it has since fallen off the top 10 list. The Aurora shooting sparked intense political debates and some gun control laws in Colorado, and some pro-gun Republicans lost their seats. Nearly a whole country away, in Raymond, Miss., Kim Condon, had a different reaction: She thought about the movie nights she took her grandchildren on, and decided to learn to shoot. “I knew then that we weren’t living in Mayberry anymore, and I HAD to overcome my fear of guns . We have frequent movie nights with our grandchildren, and I decided at that moment that I would not allow myself to become defenseless in that type of situation,” she wrote.

The youngest person who died in Aurora, Veronica Moser, was only 6 years old. Her mother was left a parapalegic and miscarried a week after the shooting. Condon asked her husband, a doctor and firearms enthusiast, to teach her to shoot. They flew to a training center in Arizona. “That week was life-changing,” she said. She felt empowered when she knew how to use a gun. Feeling equipped to defend herself, she flew back home. But she was required by state law to take another eight-hour training course to carry a concealed weapon. When she’d seen the facility offering it, and contrasted it with the luxury she’d experienced in Arizona, she knew she had a business opportunity, and found she wanted to help “Harry and Henrietta Homeowners, so there was an opportunity for professional education in the South.”

Boondocks Training Academy was born. She and her husband invested $3 million in a property they already owned for deer hunting. They’d nicknamed it “the boondocks,” – hence, the name of the academy. Built of reclaimed wood at the end of a long gated driveway, the academy is designed to help women feel at home. Women are a promising market for gun makers and businesses like Condon’s. Though the percentage of American women who own guns isn’t rising, it is holding steady, which means a growing number of women own guns, according to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey. The ranges are outdoors (the environmental laws regarding lead dust are less onerous in outdoor ranges). About 3,500 people have trained there since it opened. “There was no opposition from the rezoning of the land, to obtaining the permits and getting approval from the board of supervisors to build the Boondocks… which told me IT WAS MEANT TO BE! The only challenge was weather- we couldn’t get it built fast enough,” she told me via email.

Courses, many of them eight hours and for $200, vary from pistol shooting (including some for women only) to a course to learn to shoot an AR-15. There are others on hand-to-hand combat and protecting a house of worship. Condon not only became a gun business owner after she learned to shoot – she’s become an ambassador, and traveled up to Washington D.C. this past week with women from each state to visit Congress people and their staffs. “We don’t lobby,” she said. “The idea is to build relationships, to show that I’m a real person.” “The Democrats want to argue just to argue,” she said. “I’m not like that.” One Congressman from Mississippi refused to meet with her, she said, but she did meet with his aide. “I felt the tension at first,” she said. “By the end of our conversation, he was like putty in my hands.” The question of guns has not historically been as divided along party lines as it currently seems, I reminded her. “Think of Lloyd Bentsen,” I said, naming a pro-gun Democrat. A pro-gun Democrat, Mike Espy, is currently running a centrist campaign for the U.S. Senate in Mississippi.

Though gun ownership and training are a go-to solution for some people who worry about mass shootings, there is no statistical evidence that using a gun against a mass shooter, or any kind of shooter, will help, according to David Hemenway, Harvard public health professor, who also notes that some evidence suggests that you're more likely to die if you use a gun in self-defense, and less likely to be injured. Condon, and the other gun owners and gun business owners in town to meet with politicians try to establish the basis for a conversation with people with different opinions about guns and gun control. Most everyone wants to be safer, for instance. Most everyone is fearful of the mass shootings that America seems unable to stop. Having a gun gives some people a sense that if the worst happens, they won't be unprepared.

“My BEST moments are when I see a new female shooter have that “Ah-Ha” moment that they too can handle a firearm safely and effectively,” Condon said by email. “It is a journey and at that moment they have started on that path.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethm ... academy/2/
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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