MN Firearms Safety

It appears we are going to have another exciting class this year.  We have a good mix of students, quite a few younger kids, a good group of 16-25 year olds and a few parents.  As has been quite consistent over the years, the females are nicely represented too.  Heads up for all the guys, the girls generally outshoot everyone on range day!

Amid the chaos of late registering students, Bob and I were able to successfully get set up for the first class in a timely manner.  Ricky was not able to join us due to a tennis tournament, but he provided me a quick lesson on how to get the DVD player and projector synched so there wouldn’t be any problem showing the video planned for the night.  As with anything electrical though, we did have a slight delay (according to Bob, because we are over 30 and not technically advanced enough), but were saved by student assistance.  One thing to keep in mind with electronics, if it won’t work properly, unplug it and start over.

This year’s guesses on the percentage of population that favors hunting and that are anti-hunting was really quite inconsistent with prior years.  Prior years generally produced very mixed results from the study groups, with ranges of anywhere from 10% to 90% pro-hunting, but this year the group guesses varied from 40% to 60% pro-hunting and the overall percentage ended up being about a 50-50 split.  While it is nice to have that perception, I think as the groups discussed reasons why people have certain attitudes; it became apparent that media outlets generally portray firearms in a bad manner.

Another interesting concept was the student expectations, but it wasn’t a huge surprise.  Many different expectations were provided by the group, but maybe it was the excitement of the first class, but it seems the students never mention that “getting certified” is an expectation. It’s kind of nice having a classroom full of students that are more concerned with learning how to safely handle firearms and not so concerned about getting that bright orange certification card!

As promised, Bob and I got right into the hands-on portion of the class when we had each group figure out how to find the manufacturer, model, gauge/caliber and serial numbers of each of the firearms.  Then some quick instruction on the proper handling of the firearms and it was off to handing them off to one another.

The class time flew by and it was soon time to case up all the firearms and get them put away.  We thank everyone that stayed after class and helped us clean up the classroom and put stuff back into our trucks.