27 July 01

On training women, from a friend and trainer on the East Coast:

"I was training two women in defensive handgun technique last week on our indoor range.

One of the women, with long nails, was shooting her new Kahr P9 when she suddenly shrieked that she had broken a fingernail. When I looked at her hand, I could see that her trigger finger was bleeding profusely from the area under the broken nail. I took the gun from her hand and secured it. Then, I looked at her finger. Nothing serious, but there was a lot of blood!

The gun had not malfunctioned. She had just inadvertently tried to pull the trigger with her fingernail instead of the pad of her finger.

We called it a day, but she was back the next day, with a bandaged finger and newly clipped (short!) nails, and we continued."

Lesson:

For anyone, male or female, who is serious about learning to shoot defensively, long fingernails have to go! We've seen this before. If the above incident had happened in the middle of a real fight, it could have cost the woman her life.

/John