PA Bill Number: HB1661
Title: Further providing for schedules of controlled substances; and providing for secure storage of xylazine.
Description: Further providing for schedules of controlled substances; and providing for secure storage of xylazine. ...
Last Action: Act No. 17 of 2024
Last Action Date: May 15, 2024
Armed Ladies are prepared, and there are more of them :: 08/15/2016
Tammi Erdman was raised believing no one should go into the southwest Florida Everglades without a firearm.
At her father’s house where she grew up, the nearest neighbor, who was once robbed and shot in his home, lived 15 miles away. Her mother cautioned her with stories of corpses being used to smuggle cocaine. As Ms. Erdman tells it, there’s nowhere to go in a bad situation, and, if you do get somewhere, nobody to help. She said the area is “the perfect place to get robbed.”
As an adult, Ms. Erdman is a firearms expert. She’s been an NRA instructor in Holland for three years, and she’s the Maumee chapter leader of the national Armed Lady shooting club. In the Everglades, Ms. Erdman would say it’s one’s responsibility to be “Armed. Confident. Prepared.” — which is the motto of the Armed Ladies. Now, she teaches people how.
The Armed Ladies meet monthly at the Henry County Sportsman Club, a shooting range tucked between farmland near Liberty Center, Ohio. In the summer, it’s balmy, and little drowns out the sound of a rifle blast besides a buzzing mosquito. Here, it’s easy to notice that Ms. Erdman, 52, is in charge.
“What I say goes,” she says about the range. “If you’re acting like a fool, I will kick you off of it.” Her belt holds a handgun, two spare magazines, multiple knives, and a pair of camo cargo pants. Her shirt, which she says she would never wear in public, reads “Girls With Guns” in rhinestones. (But it’s blue, not pink — she hates pink.)
Most importantly, the other women — seven at a recent session — trust Ms. Erdman. They stand in a circle around her as she explains the drill they’ll start out with: It’s called the 5x5, and it has them shooting five rounds at five-inch-diameter circles, all within five seconds.
“You’re asking a lot,” a member named Ashley Stevens says. “I’ve been at work all day.”
“Then it’s good stress relief!” responds Michele Jeffries, another instructor and Ms. Erdman’s assistant.
Still, Ms. Erdman is in a certain minority. Out of the 6,304 NRA instructors in Ohio, only 8.6 percent are female, according to the group’s Institute for Legislative Action. The image of NRA members evoked during gun-legislation arguments is often rural, white, and male.
NRA wants women
But that idea is changing. The gun industry and the NRA want women like Ms. Erdman — women who not only buy guns and attempt to master them, but women who believe it is necessary for their protection in America. To Ms. Erdman and those who agree with her, their neighborhoods are filled with unstoppable threats: mass shootings, terrorism, abductors, among others.
As a woman, she believes she is especially at risk, and the only way to stop these forces is by arming herself.
“It’s not just about how to shoot a firearm — it’s about how to keep yourself safe,” Ms. Erdman says. “Every part of town is a bad part of town these days.”
Ms. Erdman can remember the first time she learned how to point a firearm. It was a .410 shotgun, she was 5, and the “range” was her father’s backyard. While notable, the memory doesn’t stick out to her as different from, say, first learning to tie her shoe.
“When you’re that young, and you just grow into it, those milestones really don’t get to you,” she said.
Along with its political position, the NRA appeals to people like Ms. Erdman by hosting programs meant for women. One, called “Refuse To Be A Victim,” is centered on crime prevention without a firearm, ranging from self-defense to cyber security. Some of the Armed Ladies have taken the course, and the NRA says hundreds of law enforcement officials use the program in their community policing initiatives.
Ms. Erdman respects both faces of the NRA, and she’s thankful for their strong stance on gun legislation. “Am I glad I have somebody fighting for my rights? Yeah,” she says. “I can’t do it.”
She sees herself contributing to the NRA’s mission by causing a ripple effect of responsible shooters. Ms. Erdman loves shooting guns, but she says her main objective, as an instructor, as a mother of two, and as a recent grandmother, is to educate. She rarely talks about her connection to firearms without mentioning the hours she’s put into different kinds of training.
Starting out young
“If you start a child out young respecting guns and keep it going, you have less of a chance of an accident happening,” she explained. That education, though, is for the purpose of protection, even if the situation seems unlikely. One of the people at the Armed Lady meeting was Mira Parsons, a 16-year-old. During the “Chaos Drill,” she shot at imaginary enemies’ heads 15 times in rapid succession.
Attention to detail
Ms. Erdman uses the phrase “situational awareness” a lot. It’s the act of paying attention to one’s surroundings, and she says it’s just as important in protecting oneself as carrying a gun. The technique, she says, should include watching out for strangers with shifty eyes, not looking at her phone when walking alone, and avoiding parking next to minivans to avoid being kidnapped. When asked whether she thinks this conduct is worth the energy, she stops to tell a story.
Ms. Erdman left Florida for Toledo in 1986, when her daughter was 11 months old, and took a position at the Huntington National Bank on McCord Road and West Central Avenue.
Three years later, on Dec. 21, 1989, the bank was robbed. In the case, two armed men entered, demanded money from tellers, and fled on foot.
Nightmares relived
“I travel over 1,500 miles to have a gun in my face and be robbed, when, in all honesty, it should have happened over there?” she says, speaking of the danger she thought she was escaping by leaving Florida. “I had nightmares for years that they took my kid.”
Ms. Erdman still talks about the robbery as if it were out of place, but her guns — those in her house, truck, and holster — and her strict preparation philosophy suggest a different attitude. Now, nothing is out of place to her, and she believes there’s no way to stop it without preparing herself to fight back.
While Ms. Erdman points to her own experience as justification for self-defense, many other gun owners in the United States simply point to the news.
Between January and March of this year, 36,118 permits to carry a concealed weapon were issued in Ohio, according to Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office. That’s double the amount issued during the same quarter last year.
Only 5.2 percent of the country’s population has a CCW, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, but the number is steadily growing — especially for women.
Conceal permits soar
The same study concluded that, since 2007, female concealed carry permits have increased by 270 percent nationally, likely because of mindsets like Ms. Erdman’s: The Pew Research Center reported hunting as the number one reason gun owners reported arming themselves in 1999, but self-protection was the top answer in 2013.
Ohio has a “D” rating from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Toby Hoover, the founder of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, sees restrictions as especially lax, and in some areas she says there are “practically none.”
Private gun transactions don’t require background checks, local governments cannot enforce stricter rules than the state, and there are no restrictions on ammo or how many guns may be purchased at one time. Anyone with a gun can carry it openly, and the CCW classes have also been reduced from 12 hours to eight.
Ms. Hoover says her organization’s main goals have to do with prevention rather than punishment. The coalition aims to meet with legislators about reforms such as stronger regulations on semiautomatic weapons, attempts to reduce accidental gun deaths of children, and more comprehensive background checks.
Another Ohio presence in support of stricter regulations is Moms Demand Action, a 3-year-old group with more than 3.4 million members and a part of Everytown For Gun Safety. Michele Mueller, the Ohio chapter leader, is on many of the same legislative pages as Ms. Hoover.
“We know it’s not the silver bullet that will end all, but we feel it’s our duty and responsibility,” Ms. Mueller said of trying to change gun laws.
It’s getting dark after their drills. The Armed Ladies gather in the range’s meeting house, where Ms. Erdman sits comfortably at the head of the table.
She’s flipping through the handouts she’s brought titled “Emergency Preparedness Checklist” about how to prepare for disasters. It advises families to go over evacuation plans, pack three-day stockpiles of specific foods, and collect 150 different kinds of medical supplies.
The last page is titled “How To Be Safe in Crowds” and reads, “Unless you are absolutely required to be in attendance, AVOID large crowded environments.”
Some of the women discuss their adherence to this — Ms. Erdman avoided a Toby Keith concert at the NRA convention, and another woman skipped a concert in Detroit because she wasn’t allowed to carry a gun.
In 2013, 1,289 people were killed by a firearm in Ohio. That’s 0.01 percent of the state population, and half of them were suicides. Homicides in the United States more often affect African-Americans, whereas all the Armed Ladies at the July meeting were white. It’s unlikely that they will be killed by a gun, but that doesn’t stop them from coming here.
A time to shoot
“Every single one of us who carry a gun every day has pictured it,” Ms. Erdman later says. “We’ve made peace with whether or not we could pull the trigger and live with the consequences. And I’ve often said, protection of just myself? I don’t know. In protection of my kids and grandkids? In a heartbeat.”
Ms. Erdman will vote for Donald Trump in November, the candidate officially endorsed by the NRA. She believes he’ll best uphold her right to protect her family.
In the meantime, she’ll keep driving to the Henry County Sportsman Club.
“You can come out here, away from the world, and think about all the peace there is and forget about all the ugliness everywhere else,” she says. “That’s what I like about the woods. It’s what I loved about the Everglades.”
She says it’s the perfect place to talk to God.
