If you’re a single woman in modern America, then no doubt you have a list of complaints about what it’s like to date in the age of hook-up apps: From the difficulty of encapsulating your entire personality in a 100-word introduction, to the shocking lack of manners of some of your would-be suitors, it’s enough to make an eligible bachelorette throw up her hands. The good news is that, if you’re a single NRA Woman, you already have at your disposal one of the best dating venues in the world: your local gun club. There are three reasons why the gun club is a great place to find romance—or just a great new set of friends.
1. Gun Club Guys Are Polite
In a recent (and a tad tongue-in-cheek) article, we talked about the four kinds of guys you’re going to meet at the gun club … and, of course, Number Four is the guy who is interested in taking you out on a date. In that article we touched briefly on this phenomenon, but I’d like to take a moment to expand on it: Gun club guys are polite.
They’re polite when they approach you; they’re polite when they ask you out; and (if you decline the date) they’re polite about rejection. (And if you’re wondering why that’s such a big deal, you’ve obviously not been single for a while.) I don’t know if it’s simply that gun-club guys were raised better than the modern average, or if it’s that there’s something about watching a woman drill a 1-inch hole in the X-ring from 25 yards that demands a certain amount of respect, but gun-club guys have impeccable manners when it comes to asking a woman out on a date.
2. Built-In Dates
Speaking of dates, the gun club isn’t just a great place to find a date—it’s a great place to have that date. As single women know, the first couple of dates with a new potential beau come with some built-in risk. That risk is greatly mitigated when you’re meeting your date for a round of trapshooting. By all means, continue to work your first-date safety plan (letting your friends know where you’ll be and so on), but the firearm(s) you brought along to shoot with your date seem to boost the effectiveness of that plan.
It’s not just about your safety, of course. You can learn a lot about a man (or anyone, really) by watching them shoot—and I don’t mean their skill level. If he makes a bad shot, does he handle it calmly or does he start blaming everything and everyone else? If you outshoot him, does he congratulate you or sulk? If he outshoots you, does he gloat or does he offer (constructive) criticism?
There’s one more reason why having your first (second or third) date at the gun club will make life less stressful for you: You don’t have to worry about what to wear. Everyone there will be wearing sneakers, jeans and T-shirts, except for the people who are wearing tactical pants, boots and T-shirts.
3. There’s No “Awkward Moment”
The “awkward moment” is the point during the getting-to-know-you process when you, the NRA Woman, reveal to your date that you’re a gun person. If your date isn’t a gun person, your date might turn into a political debate…and who has time for that when they haven’t even served the soup yet? There are two ways to ensure you don’t have to deal with the hassle and embarrassment of discovering that your date is terrified of firearms (and you). The first—and I personally had a lot of success with this before I abandoned my profiles—is to simply include a few pictures of yourself holding guns and shooting in your dating profile. That tends to weed the “hoplophobes” out.
The second way, of course, is to find your dates at the gun club. Not only don’t you have to carefully explain what the Second Amendment means to a terrified skinny-jean-wearing dude … you won’t find any terrified skinny-jean-wearing dudes.
Some gun clubs and shooting ranges have already caught on, and are offering singles’ nights or ladies’ nights … but even if they don’t, you’ll learn something very quickly once you start visiting your gun club regularly: Dating is much more fun for an NRA Woman.
