Thanks to everyone who showed up and helped out. The day began at 12:30pm with Richard teaching safety guidelines and handling techniques. We had a break to give an interview with KIRO 7 and the Seattle Times. After that, we continued our meeting with Richard leading the discussion on legal issues, ramifications, and several case studies of self-defense scenarios. Overall, yesterday was a great forum in raising our awareness of gun rights and safety, and ended with us shooting at the range. Special thanks to Black Dawg for their pro-bono training and Champion Arms in Kent for hosting us.This is what I sent to msgun Monday:Next time, we will try to have an event closer to campus. If we had one on campus, there would definitely be a large turnout but we would all have to go unarmed because of the regulations there.
I attended—free training, not too far way (~30 mins), what's not to like?, plus I wanted to meet some of the people in the group.The session Sunday got the group some better coverage; the image now should be of a group of serious people armed and able to protect themselves and others from grave bodily harm. DVDs finished: Butterfly Effect: Revelation, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.First, the group has indeed toned down. There was some hare-brained scheme proposed in the Facebook group to cruise around with a "decoy" wearing an iPod and several other shadowy figures with nonlethal weapons ready to pounce, so I did my best to shoot that down (no pun intended) and point out its many flaws (you're not the police, you're not trained, if you're in fear of grave bodily injury you don't want to bring anything less than deadly force, you could be hurt/killed, you could hurt someone else, jail, civil court costs, even with a "good shoot", etc.). The original poster agreed that his was a foolish idea.
Second, this training outfit looked legit—Rick Walker (http://www.blackdawgpartners.com - not the most pro site in the world though) is a class act and knows his stuff, ex-military (weapons expert), certified as instructor by several reputable groups, etc. He teaches various courses including the Utah permit course. He went over some basics of weapons and CCW with a PowerPoint deck in a classroom at Champion Arms (they offered the room free)—starting from Cooper's 4 rules, then things like where you may or may not carry, Castle doctrine, reacting to scenarios—run if you can, call 911 if you're not in immediate danger; importance of practice; all stuff I've seen but nice to have it all in one place. He went over some cases, what people did, what they were convicted of, and their civil costs. I can reproduce the quiz he passed out before the class and discussed if people want. I believe it was sufficiently sobering to cause the "Defenders" to change their course, which is great:
more armed good guys on the streets that know the law and practice with their particular defense weapon is a good thing .I also talked to him about doing training for a Microsoft group; he said he could do something similar (a basic CCW class) for just cost of gas and materials; perhaps if we were interested he could give us a rate on doing a Utah permit course or something else for those interested.