‘We can’t be afraid.’ In a Cincinnati church basement, black women take a class together: learning how to fire guns
‘We can’t be afraid.’ In a Cincinnati church basement, black women take a class together: learning how to fire guns
Ariel Gresham, left, and Nancy Robb, both of the Cincinnati area, hold unloaded revolvers during an all-female concealed carry and weapons class Saturday, February 8, 2020, at New Prospect Baptist Church in Roselawn sponsored Arm the Populace.
Kai Brown of Bond Hill gets instruction on how to hold a gun from Timm Penrod and Henry Ware, right, with Arm the Populace during an all-female concealed carry and weapons class at New Prospect Baptist Church Saturday, February 8, 2020.
By Sharon Coolidge
February 21, 2020
CINCINNATI – New Prospect Baptist Church has one of the largest black congregations in Cincinnati. On any weekend, you’ll find weddings, funerals and three Sunday services.
On Feb. 8, you would have found 179 women firing .22-caliber handguns in the church basement.
The church had opened its doors to what state officials believe is one of the largest women-only, concealed-carry certification classes in the state.
Over and over, the women cited the same reason for taking the class. They were tired of being scared — of guns, of being alone in a home, of walking in some neighborhoods.
Karen Bolden, 56, was so scared of her husband’s guns that she asked him to get rid of them when they married two years ago. He did, but she’s working to conquer her fear. When Bolden’s sister alerted her to the class and suggested they go together, she jumped at the chance.
“This is why this class is so important,” Bolden said. “We can’t be afraid.”
The class was organized by two men: the church’s pastor, the Rev. Damon Lynch III, and Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Pastor, a Republican who appeared at the class sporting a T-shirt reading “All gun control is racist.”
The 179 women showed varying comfort levels with guns. Some had never touched one. Others own a gun but wanted the license needed to carry it. Some came because their mothers or sisters or friends suggested it.
The class was taught by Cincinnati-based Arm the Populace, a certified concealed-carry licensing business. The intense nine-hour class used a shooting range created just for the class in an empty storage area above the church’s community center.
Women paid $25 each to cover the cost of the space; that’s cheaper than the typical $65 class fee.
Arm the Populace donated its time.
A Pew Research Center report in 2017 delved into “America’s complex relationship with guns.” It found that gun ownership varied considerably by race and gender. Among men, 39% said they owned a gun, compared with 22% of women. And while 36% of whites reported that they were gun owners, only about a quarter of blacks and 15% of Hispanics said they were.
In the Cincinnati church class, 169 of the 179 women were black.
The class was broken into five groups, rotating into lessons about safety, laws, how to get a CCW license, which only a sheriff can issue, and then target practice.
Douglas Cooper, Arm the Populace’s founder and chief instructor, started the class by explaining: “The Second Amendment is for everyone,” he said.
Instructor Bill Maltbie then told the class why women-only classes are important.
“We do them so there are no men sitting there ‘mansplaining’ because they’ve played a lot of video games,” Maltbie said. “We’re not here for ‘Call of Duty.’ I just want to make sure I can go home at night and see my family.”
The pastor, Lynch, is not a proponent of guns, but he said: “New Prospect Baptist Church is more than a church. It’s the heart of the community.”
Without a recreation center, the church serves that need.
“I’m not a gun lover; I don’t own any guns, but people have Second Amendment rights to own a gun,” Lynch said. “In the African American community, the conversation is usually about buying guns back. But if people are lawfully trained and learn how to be responsible, they will probably never use one. It sets them on a different course. As opposed to a person who gets a gun and thinks, ‘I have to go shoot.’”
And that, Lynch said, “is a good thing.”
The shooting range was built with input from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It was bare-bones: a sheet of wood tacked to a wall, on which targets were placed.
Tape was passed around. Bolden used it to hang her target on the wall.
Arms straight. Legs apart. Ten shots. An instructor guided her stance. She hit the target within a centimeter of the bull’s-eye.
Her sister, Sonya Jackson, was next. Same stance. An instructor lightly guided her arms into better position. Two bullets hit the target.
“I didn’t have my glasses,” Jackson noted to her sister.
Bolden told her, “You’ll just have to go with me to the range. Practice. Practice. Practice.”
Using a gun for self defense is real female empowerment in action, and I invite anti-gun activists and left wing feminists to explain why this particular example should be illegal
I’ve posted this meme before – it’s one of my favorites. (I would give credit to the person who created it, but I don’t know who that is.)
Update: Thanks to gdruzek for posting the following in the comment section:
The lady is Betty and the photographs are by Oleg Volk. I hope you can amend your article to reflect that. Oh, and he also writes for the Dillon Precision “Blue Press.”
I used google and found this link, which does indeed give Oleg Volk credit for the image:
http://www.militia-of-florida.com/rkba_images2/index2.html
This article from Fox News descrbes a real life example of the meme in action. You can even see it in the security video at the link (which can’t be embedded here.)
And please note that the trigger was never pulled. Just showing the gun was enough to scare the bad guy away.
In the video, the guy is clearly pissed off that the woman had a gun.
This is real female empowerment in action, and I can’t understand why anyone who calls themself a feminist would be against it.
If anyone here opposes the use of a gun in this particular instance, then please offer an alternative (in the comment section) for what the innocent people should have done instead. And please keep in mind that during the several minutes it takes for the police to respond, this scumbag could have killed this innocent person.
Watch: Pistol-packing waitress defends George Webb co-worker during attack
July 8, 2018
A waitress with a concealed carry permit defended her co-worker after an irate customer went behind the counter and punched her, newly released video reveals.
The attack at George Webb restaurant in Milwaukee on June 28 could have been much worse, according to Alderman Bob Donovan, who made the footage public.
“I thank God the other waitress had a concealed carry weapon, has a permit… I shudder to think, had she not been there and had she not had this weapon, what this guy might have done,” Donovan told Fox 6.
The suspect, who is a regular at the restaurant and reportedly had been cursing at his server throughout the night for taking too long with his order, came behind the counter and punched her in the face.
Within seconds, the woman’s colleague pulled out a handgun from her waistband and pointed at him until he backed off.
Although the suspect has not been arrested, Fox 6 reports that Milwaukee police know who they are looking for and that the man is allegedly a drug dealer.
According to local media, the victim is back at work and she said the restaurant’s owner allows employees to carry a concealed weapon as long as they have a permit.
“It is sickening to see this unsuspecting worker assaulted so brutally by this individual,” Donovan said. “For a man to do that to some innocent woman, it’s just beyond me.”
Here is another bogus claim that a gun “accidentally went off”
Here is another bogus claim that a gun “accidentally went off.”
The claim is wrong.
That is not what happened.
What did happen is that some idiot human being pulled the gun’s trigger.
This moron, who shot and killed his own four-year-old daughter, violated all three of the three most important gun safety rules:
1) Always assume that the gun is loaded.
2) Never point the gun at anyone you don’t intend to shoot.
3) Don’t put your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.
Concealed-weapon owner shoots hatchet-wielding attacker in Wash. 7-Eleven
It’s a good thing this store clerk was working in the U.S. instead of in one of those countries like Sweden or Japan where guns are banned:
Concealed-weapon owner shoots hatchet-wielding attacker in Wash. 7-Eleven
March 14, 2016
A masked man burst into a 7-Eleven near Seattle early Sunday morning, swinging a hatchet and slicing the store clerk.
Before the masked man could seriously hurt anyone, though, a customer who was drinking his morning coffee pulled out a concealed weapon and fatally shot the attacker.
Authorities did not name the attacker or the customer, but they did hail the concealed weapon owner as a hero.
“This could have been disastrous,” King County Sheriff Sgt. Cindi West told KIRO7. “Had this guy not shot, who knows what would have happened? We might have a dead clerk right now, and instead we have a dead bad guy.”
The clerk, Kuldeep Singh, suffered minor cuts to his stomach. He, too, thanked the customer for saving his life.
“He [was] killing me,” Singh, 58, said of the hatchet-wielding attacker. Singh added that the customer was a “nice guy.”
West said that the incident will be investigated fully but that the 60-year-old customer was currently being considered a Good Samaritan.
The “customer, the shooter, is shaken up but from everything that we see right now from the scene – there’s no wrongdoing on his part,” she told King 5. “In fact, he probably saved a life in this case.”
With easy gun access, and 26,000 people, Squirrel Hill has had zero gun murders in the last decade
I live in Pennsylvania, where it’s very easy to get a gun.
My neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, in Pittsburgh, has 26,000 people.
In the last 10 years, there has been only one murder in my neighborhood. This gives it an annual murder rate of 0.4 per 100,000 people. If my neighborhood was its own country, it would have the sixth lowest murder rate of any country in the world.
That one murder consisted of a burglar bludgeoning a 90-year-old homeowner to death. He was convicted after just 14 months, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The burglar was from another neighborhood.
Lest anyone think it is a rich, exclusive neighborhood, the rent for my one bedroom apartment is only $725 a month, and there are quite a few vacancies in my building every summer, as many of the tenants are graduate students from all over the world, who only live here for a few years.
Anyway, I think it’s interesting that in my neighborhood of 26,000 people, where it’s very easy to get a gun, there have been exactly zero gun murders in the past decade.
Armed guards protect Senate Democrats as they demand new gun-control laws
I would like to thank these Senate Democrats for proving that guns do indeed have a legitimate use.
The Washington Times reports:
Armed guards protect Senate Democrats as they demand new gun-control laws
October 8, 2015
Senate Democrats gathered Thursday on the steps of the Capitol surrounded by about a dozen armed guards to announce a new push for tougher gun-control laws.
The officers from the U.S. Capitol Police, who carried sidearms, were in addition to the regular detail patroling the Capitol grounds due the large number of elected officials attending the event, according to a officer on the scene.
About 27 Democratic senators attended the event.
They announced a set of priorities for combating gun violence, which centered on measures to expand and strengthen background checks for gun purchasers.
They echoed calls by President Obama following the mass shooting last week at a community college in Oregon in which he urged Americans to put pressure on lawmakers to take action to stop the scourge of gun violence in the country.
“We are asking, as the president said, to make their voices heard,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, “We expect there will be a groundswell.”
The Democrats’ priorities for gun control, which also closely mirrored the plan rolled out last week by Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, included:
*Closing background check “loopholes,” such as stopping criminals from buying firearms at gun shows or online;
*Improving background checks to include barring domestic abusers and stalkers from buying guns;
*And shutting down the “illegal gun pipeline” by making straw purchasing of guns and gun trafficking a federal crime.
“The victims and their families deserve better than a Congress that shrugs its shoulders and waited for the next tragedy,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat. “They deserve action.”
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 