Search girls and guns online and you’ll find plenty of sites--most of them depicting the two as favorite objects of men. But what about guns for girls? And for women too. That’s a tougher search. Even when you find sites catering to women, they often mimic the rough jargon and male bravado of other gun sites. As if that was the only way to teach and talk about firearms.
My client Barry Hammond questioned this. Why should women who wanted to learn proper firearm usage have to put up with a bunch of redneck rhetoric, military posturing and right wing politicking? Were these high testosterone trappings in any sense innate to firearms training? Or were they just baggage that got in the way of women feeling comfortable with learning how to handle guns?
Barry’s belief was a resounding no. And he wanted to build the brand to prove it. To develop his brand positioning, we took the novel step of actually speaking to women. We learned that the vocabulary of aggression might be more than adequately replaced with the promise of empowerment. That safety and personal responsibility, and yes, the sexiness of stepping over a traditional gender boundary, were all points of intersection where women and firearms might comfortably meet up.
So we’ve begun to rethink the firearms training proposition from the point of view of serving women. As Barry, who is an experienced instructor, points out, most women come to be comfortable with guns by way of a man in their life—a father, a husband, a boyfriend. But once this occurs they can be just as proficient as men. A la Annie Oakley. So why not bring the access to women directly?
This brand is a work in progress. You can see an early iteration at www.forcetrainingsystems.com
as if that WERE the only way
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