GOA Sponsors Gun Training Event for Detroit Women

“Gun Owners of America donated the eye protection and pink range caps.”


Tanisha Moner has had a gun pointed at her twice in her life. Once by two strangers who kidnapped, robbed, and sexually assaulted her when she was 17. And, again, by another robber as she worked a management shift at a restaurant.

Tanisha Moner (far right) with a group of students / Twitter Screenshot @antonia_okafor

The traumatic experiences left her scarred, afraid of guns, shuddering at the sound of a firework and popped balloon. That changed the day she decided to face her fears and showed up for a gun-carry class at a local range.

“Succumbing to your own fear is the only thing that can stop you from doing anything you want to do,” Moner told the Washington Free Beacon.

She said that first gun-safety training class years ago helped her overcome her fear and ignited a passion to help others overcome their own fears. That’s why she says she decided to become an NRA-certified instructor. Last weekend she took part in a basic handgun safety training event where she helped to train 1,938 Detroit women—more than double the event’s 2019 attendance. The  Sunday session was so popular that the classroom portion had to be changed to an open-air event in the range’s parking lot due to overcrowding concerns and coronavirus-related precautions.

Rick Ector, a prominent firearms instructor in the Detroit area, founded the all-female training event in 2011 because of women like Moner. He said he’d seen too many stories of women in the city beaten, abused, and even murdered. He had to do something after reading multiple reports of women being brutalized and dumped in trash cans across Detroit.

“I was thinking, ‘man, somebody should do something about that’ and the more I thought about it the more I thought, ‘Why don’t I do something?'” Ector told the Free Beacon. “I’m not rich and I don’t have unlimited resources, but if you really feel that strongly about it, you can do something, right?”

Fifty women attended the first event. It enjoyed steady growth, peaking at a record 814 women in 2019, before surging alongside record gun sales and uncertainty.

GOA’s Erich Pratt (left) and Antonia Okafor (center) with Rick Ector, who is the founder of the event.

“I had no idea that women would respond in a way that they did. They showed up in one wave and that wave did not abate until the evening,” he said. “They just kept coming.”

The local gun industry has rallied around the event. Recoil Firearms Shooting Range and Top Gun Shooting Sports shut down for the weekend to play host; Fenix Ammunition, a Michigan-based manufacturer, donated the ammo; Second Amendment activists at Gun Owners of America donated the eye protection [and pink range caps]. Collins said volunteers such as Moner and Collins deserved most of the credit for the event’s success, adding that he was “overjoyed with the support” from volunteer trainers…

Read more at The Free Beacon