This is Ashley Perks.

Ashley wrote a long article on xojane on her experience firing a single shot out of a Glock 9mm at a gun range in Maryland.

Her story is interesting.

It takes me eight tries to pick up the gun.

Each time, my hand gets closer.  Sometimes my hand touches it, but then I quickly pull it back.  My peace-loving brain cannot process this information — there is a weapon on the table that people use to kill other people and not only am I supposed to touch it, I’m supposed to FIRE it.

Finally, I pick it up.

It is heavy, much heavier than I thought it would be.  It smells like metallic smoke.  I raise it up.  Jim tells me to look through the sights and aim for the red.  He tells me I can do it, that he believes in me.  My boyfriend is nothing if not overly supportive.  Before I realize it, I’ve squeezed the trigger.

I see a flash and my hands jerk back, the gun falls sideways.  I immediately set it down on the ledge and shake my head no.  I want nothing else to do with this.  I feel tears starting to build in my eyes and I tell Jim to just finish shooting the box of bullets so we can leave.

And he does.  And we do.

If you read the entire article, you’ll see that Perks readily admits that she can’t handle change of any sort very well. She has led and prefers to lead a very sheltered and cautious existence, and does not function well if things aren’t just “so.”

So why was it that when she decided to go shoot, that she threw herself into the proverbial “deep end of the pool?”

Sadly, I suspect that she was determined to sabotage herself. And so she did.

How could she have handled this better?

When someone decides to drive, they don’t generally hop in the first car they see car and tear off down the nearest highway. Well, at least they don’t do it twice.

No, at the bare minimum, most will find a more experienced driver to give them lessons and explain how things work. They will then start out driving slowly in a large, deserted parking lot or quiet, rarely traveled side street.

Others (often by state law) will go a more formal route, and find a driver’s education class with a professional instructor who will teach students the rules of the road, how various parts of the car function, etc, before taking students out slowly, to build up their experience and competence over time.

No matter which path you took, it was only after you had considerable training that most drivers took to the road alone.

Ms. Perks broken her own rules that she created to fit her personality and comfort level, and jumped into shooting a centerfire handgun without any sort of prior training, education, or familiarization. That she chose shooting as her activity that day is almost irrelevant; she likely would have been just as traumatized and miserable doing anything else that far outside of her comfort zone, from stepping into a boxing ring to take a jab, to going to a 500-mile NASCAR race and sitting in the front row of the grandstand, to hosting a game show in front of a live audience.

I have to think that if she followed her own tendency towards extensive planning and preparation, that he experience would have been a vastly more satisfying one. If Ms. Perks had started with a a basic firearms safety course, then worked her way up to a simple .22 rifle or pistol course, do you think she would have been traumatized by her first shot?

Or do you think that once properly mentally prepared for the experience, and truly anticipatory instead of terrified, her first shot would have been followed by that grin that we like to see on the faces of new shooters?

Please keep in mind that one of the best ways to defend our rights is to convert non-shooters into shooters. Starting small and building towards the more complex is perhaps the longest known teaching method known to man, and  should apply to gently breaking in new shooters as well.