Texas Non-Profit Giving Away Free Shotguns, Training To Residents Of High-Crime Areas

This is fantastic:

HOUSTON (TheBlaze/AP) – Houston resident Cheryl Strain’s inexperience with guns was apparent as she struggled to load shells into a 20-gauge shotgun.

Over the piercing blasts of gunfire in the shooting range, Strain’s instructor, Dan Blackford, patiently directed her on how to use her thumb to shove a shell all the way inside the barrel and feel it click.

“Now we got a round in the chamber ready to go,” Blackford said as he positioned her body on the right way to hold the shotgun. “Look down your sight, put that BB right in the middle of your target and press the trigger.”

Strain’s northwest Houston community of Oak Forest is the first neighborhood in the country being trained and equipped by the Armed Citizen Project, a Houston nonprofit that is giving away free shotguns to single women and residents of neighborhoods with high crime rates.

This program is pretty much the exact opposite of the government/law enforcement-backed gun buy back programs. Instead of taking guns off the streets, this group is putting guns on the street in the hands of citizens, complete with the training on how to protect themselves.

Law enforcement here in Minot, North Dakota, does something similar. They don’t give away free guns, but they put on regular gun training seminars. My wife and I went to one last year, and it was fantastic. It was several hours of class room training, followed by several hours of hands-on training on the shooting range with law enforcement officers and other experts on hand with a variety of different handguns and long guns.

These programs are very pragmatic. Rather than pretending as though guns could ever be removed from our society, rather than the charade of gun buy-back programs which usually see citizens (and even criminals) turning in the sort of broken, worn-out weapons that probably wouldn’t ever be used in a crime anyway, they embrace the fact that guns exist in our society and seek to teach citizens how to use them safely, and in defense of themselves and others.

You can find more information on the Armed Citizen Project, including info on how to donate, here.