This isn’t just a good news story, it’s a great news story, and I’m thrilled that Rick Ector is telling it on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co. I’ve known Rick for a long time, and he’s a tireless defender of the right to keep and bear arms as well as a great ambassador for our Second Amendment rights. For the past nine years he’s put on a free gun safety training class for women in the Detroit area, typically over Mother’s Day weekend, and each and every year the event has grown bigger than the last.

For a while, though, it looked like this year’s event was in trouble. Thanks to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders, it was going to be difficult to host a lot of people without running afoul of the coronavirus regulations. Reluctantly, Rick was forced to postpone the Mother’s Day training course in the hopes of rescheduling later this year.

Thankfully, Ector was able to put on the event this past weekend, and he tells me that the turnout was absolutely incredible. Expanding to two days of training sessions, Ector and volunteer firearms instructors were able to educate nearly 2,000 women over the course of two days on how to safely and responsibly handle a firearm, including a whopping 1,200 ladies on the first day!

One of my first questions to Rick was one that you’re probably thinking to yourself right now; how on earth did he squirrel away enough ammunition to put on all these training sessions? Rick gives a lot of credit to Michigan-based Fenix Ammunition, which set aside thousands of rounds for Rick back in March of this year and actually saved it for him during the past few months as he worked to put the weekend of firearms training together.

Final count from the weekend:

1,918 women trained in two days. Estimate is roughly 80% first time shooters.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this come together, including @detroitccw for being the brains behind the madness.

The 2A is looking stronger than ever!

— Fwee-nix Ammunition (@FenixAmmunition) August 17, 2020

What an amazing weekend, and how great it is to see such a strong turnout in the Detroit area. Rick Ector, along with his sponsors and volunteers, did more to promote real gun safety in one weekend than Michael Bloomberg, Shannon Watts, Moms Demand Action, and Everytown for Gun Safety have ever done in the state of Michigan (or the rest of the country, for that matter). Kudos to Rick and all of the folks who helped make this event such a success, and I’m sure that next year’s 10th annual event will be even bigger than the record-setting turnout we saw this past weekend.

Be sure to check out my entire conversation with Rick Ector in the video window above, and stick around after for even more news, like the murder suspect in Houston who was allowed to bond out of jail and is now wanted for another homicide, an Ohio homeowner who held a burglar at gunpoint until local police arrived, and a vacationing family in Oregon who were in the right place at the right time to help repair a local memorial to an Oregon state trooper.