Defend Yourself & Your Loved ones: Women-only Protection/Home Defense Courses

We are passionate about teaching women to protect themselves–and their loved ones.

We teach Women-only Protection and Home Defense courses. Our classes are small, and our instructors are all certified. You get personal attention and tailored instruction that helps you learn to shoot in a safe, fun environment.

We want every woman to have the confidence to embark on their next adventure knowing they are safe and secure.

During the past three years we’ve taught over 700 women in Basic Protection and Home Defense. Many are brand new to shooting. Some are survivors of domestic violence, violent home invasions, car jackings, and more. Their stories are heartbreaking, but their subsequent triumphs are inspiring. They say post-training that for the first time in 20 years they’re able to feel some measure of peace. In 14 months, our first-time shooters are now competing in USPSA & 3Gun, and some are even new instructors. Many have become strong 2A advocates, and some have even testified in Washington legislative hearings.

Are you are interested in protecting yourself or your loved ones? Are you new to firearms?

Then we look forward to having you join us in our upcoming Women-only Basic Protection course!

And once you’ve developed the skills, as a graduate you’re invited to join our Women-Only Home Defense course.

Purchase a Firearm: Concierge Firearms Dealer for Women

Fed up with the traditional gun store vibe? Us too.

We make buying a firearm a great experience–just like shopping at at your favorite department store.

Whether you’re looking to purchase your first firearm or your fifth (or more!), we offer a concierge buying experience especially tailored to women and particularly new shooters.

Come in for a fitting! We’ll help you find the firearm that perfectly suits your needs and your hands. And we’ll find a holster, purse, and storage options that will give you ready access while keeping your firearm secure.

And we’ll help you find custom range bags, sleeves, loading devices, cleaning supplies, and other accessories that will make your life so much easier!

We’re open by appointment only to best serve you. Please contact us to make an appointment for a fitting.

We can do transfers from online retailers, but you must contact us before ordering.

Learn more

Women-only Basic Protection and Handgun Selection Class

Join us for a women-only basic protection and introduction to handguns course!

About the Women’s Basic Protection Course

If you’re looking for an opportunity to join other women in learning the basics about firearms, this Women’s Basic Protection and Handgun Selection course is for you.

This course is small and intimate—and just for women. When you join us in this course you’ll enjoy:

  • Increased self-confidence and self-awareness
  • Greater ability to ensure your loved ones are safe
  • Confidence in choosing pistols that fit you perfectly
  • Increased appreciation for a competitive sport

Our courses are small, so we can focus on your safety, provide personal attention, and help you learn to shoot in a safe, fun environment.

We’ve taught over 1200 women during the last 4 years and we LOVE seeing them thrive after our course, developing huge confidence as a result of their dramatic increase in competence.

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What you’ll learn:

This course is a blend of classroom and practical on-the-range instruction in which you’ll learn:

  • Basic firearm safety rules and safe gun handling
  • The parts and operations of both semi-automatic pistols and revolvers
  • The fundamentals of shooting: grip, stance, aiming, sight alignment, trigger control, and follow-through
  • Ammunition types and selection
  • How to choose a firearm that fits you—you might be surprised at what you’re most comfortable with!
  • Numerous tips for situational awareness, avoiding conflict, and personal protection

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Course Specifics

The course runs from 8:00 am to 5:30 pm. We would love to have you join us at 7:45 am for amazing coffee to fuel our chit-chat so you can get to know your soon-to-be-best friends! You’ll begin with instruction in a well-lit and comfortable classroom, with very clean restrooms. In the afternoon, we’ll move outdoors to the covered pistol shooting bay. You’ll begin shooting with .22 caliber pistols. These are super easy to handle and fire—and they help boost your confidence. If you’re comfortable doing so, you can shoot larger defensive rounds such as .38, 380, 9mm, and .45 caliber pistols. If the weather is cold, we’ll warm up between shooting with a portable heater.

We will provide coffee, water, snacks, as well as a hot and hearty home-cooked lunch-this is not to be missed!  We’ll provide handguns and ammunition. You are welcome to bring your own handgun and ammunition but please, do not feel you have to purchase a handgun for this program. We’ll also have hearing and eye protection for you. Feel free to bring your own if you already have them.

Upon completion, you’ll receive a certificate of course completion. 

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Course requirements

This course is for women only, age 18 and above (we may make exceptions on a case-by-case basis-contact us to discuss).

Tuition

Tuition for the course is $295* per person. We love it when you bring your friends with you!

*** PLEASE NOTE ***

*Ammunition prices have skyrocketed. To make sure we have the ability to replenish our ammunition for all our classes this year we’re forced to raise our prices slightly. We hate doing it but we have to purchase ammo for you to shoot with!

Why the shortage and price hikes? There are more than 7 million new firearm owners last year (and LOTS of them are women!). If each of them bought two boxes (100 rounds) of ammo, that equals a demand for a minimum of 700 million rounds of ammo. The manufacturers simply cannot keep up and prices are skyrocketing. Here’s hoping that things will return to normal soon.

2023 Schedule

We’re SO excited to have you join us!

Below are the upcoming course dates. Don’t delay. We have a huge waiting list of women, and more calling every day. So many women have delayed only to come back later and find everything is completely full!

May 6, 2023 SOLD OUT!
June 3, 2023 SOLD OUT!
July 8, 2023 SOLD OUT!
July 22, 2023 SOLD OUT!
August 5, 2023 SOLD OUT!
September 9, 2023 SOLD OUT!
October 7, 2023 SOLD OUT!
March 2, 2024 15 Spaces remaining Register Online
April 6, 2024 15 Spaces remaining Register Online
Gift Certificate 12 certificates available Register Online

Or, you can send someone a gift certificate! When you purchase we’ll send you a certificate with the recipient’s name on it and you can share it with them for that special event! All they have to do is contact us to redeem and choose a date that works best for them! Certificate holders get first dibs on any new courses added!

If the courses are all full or you aren’t able to attend one of the scheduled programs,  contact us and we’ll notify you the moment a new course is added.

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY:

Payment is due at the time of registration. Our facilities and instructors are pre-paid, so we cannot allow rescheduling or refunds. Upon registration, you will be asked to fill out a waiver and attest that you are eligible to handle firearms (i.e. no felonies).

Location

All courses are taught at our super comfortable and private classroom in Enumclaw. The shooting portion will be at a nearby range. Shortly after lunch we’ll shuttle to the range for our shooting portion and then return to the comfort of the classroom.

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Who are your instructors?

We are passionate about teaching women to protect themselves and their loved ones, enabling them to embark on their next adventure with confidence and security. All four of us are certified NRA instructors. We’ve been teaching classroom and practical programs for nearly two decades.

Curtis is the lead instructor, with nearly 20 years of training experience with people of all ages. He is an NRA-certified instructor for NRA Pistol, Home Defense, Personal Protection Inside the Home, and Black Powder programs. He is also an NRA-certified Range Safety Officer.

Becky is the reason we started all of this. She was tired of being dismissed in firearms training courses and having to prove that she was a better shot than the instructor before she was welcomed into the club. She is adamant that women just need the opportunity to learn new skills in order to perform comparably. She has a degree in psychology which she leverages heavily to help women understand how to defend themselves. Becky is an NRA-certified instructor for NRA Pistol and is assisting in this course.

Kelsey has been shattering stereotypes her whole life. She enjoys challenging assumptions of what women are capable of doing. When not in business dress, she does 50-mile hikes and enjoys shooting the largest production revolvers and semi-automatic handguns available in the US (truly ‘big-ass’ handguns!). She is an NRA-certified instructor for NRA Pistol and is assisting in this course.

Katon is our resident armorer and firearms expert. He has been actively shooting for nearly a decade and enjoys defensive and competitive shooting. He is a Master-level USPSA competition shooter, an active mini-3-gun competitor, and actively teaches others how to compete effectively. He is an NRA-certified instructor for NRA Pistol and is assisting in this course.

We look forward to having you join us!

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Women-only Home Defense Class

Join us for a Women-Only Home Defense Class!

NEWLY UPDATED!

You may have seen more reports of armed home invasions in the news headlines where an armed woman shoots an escaped inmate after he breaks into her home. Or a mom shoots home intruder after he kicks in the door.

But that isn’t anywhere close by, right? How about the elderly Renton man killed to steal his house? Or even closer? Remember the Maple Valley man defending his family in his home from armed attackers?

So why not just call the police? Of course you call them. However, in Seattle, their target response time is 7 minutes; their average is 9 minutes and is often > 14 minutes. And in the case of the Maple Valley man, police were more than 30 minutes away. Others report having to wait up to two hours. That is an eternity when someone is breaking in your door. And even when they do show up, they aren’t actually required by law to intervene and protect you.

And recently, it is even worse with police departments being decimated due to budget cuts and staff exoduses. And unfortunate legislation passed by the ruling part in recent years has emboldened criminals so much that the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs said that murder was up 47%, and manslaughter is up 100%. Vehicle thefts are up 88%. Robbery is up 18% in Seattle, with violent crime reaching a 14-year high in 2021.

So what do you do while you’re waiting for the police to arrive?

How do you protect yourself and your loved ones in your home?

You begin by recognizing that you and you alone are responsible for your own safety. And then you attend this training class to help you learn how to keep yourselves safe until the police can arrive. And then you train, train, train to help ensure you can keep you and your loved ones safe in your home.

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What You’ll Gain

When you join us for this course you’ll enjoy:

  • Increased self-confidence and situational awareness
  • Greater ability to defend yourself and your family inside your home
  • Knowledge of when to legally use lethal force-and the steps you can take before this last resort
  • Understanding of and a plan for the legal aftermath of a home defense shooting

Students have said this class was hugely valuable because they found out that every scenario they had in their head was wrong-they wouldn’t  actually work! The course challenged their assumptions and made them rethink a lot of their strategy.

In the end, they walked away with the confidence they had all the right answers to defend their home and stay on the right side of the law.

Course Prerequisites

This course is small and intimate-and for women-only. It is only open to graduates of our Women-Only Basic Protection Course as it adds many new skills to those learned in the previous course.

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What You’ll Learn

This course is designed from the ground up to give you the tools and tips you need to defend your home from an attacker, stay on the right side of the law, give you drills you can practice upon graduation, and give you tools to harden your home against intruders, all so you can better defend yourself or your loved ones.

Our kick-ass criminal defense attorney talks in detail about the laws pertaining to self-defense inside/outside the home, and how to ensure you stay as far away as possible from anything that might sabotage your “self-defense” defense in court.

We’re delighted to welcome Attorney Andrea Kim, a practicing defense attorney with Ark Law. She will help us understand the laws regarding the use of deadly force in Washington State, your rights, and how to navigate the criminal and civil actions that may follow a defensive encounter. Andrea will share cases and anecdotes where self-defense was 100% justified and where the gray areas are.

We give you a great big bunch of ideas on how to harden your home to make it significantly harder for the bad guys to get in–and how to prepare to handle the worst-case scenario.

We’ve removed the live fire component of this class. But why? Glad you asked. We’ve had literally hundreds of women who’ve attended the Basic Protection class and been desperate to immediately sign up for this Home Defense Course. They’ve been a victim of a home invasion, or they’ve found someone prowling their backyard. Or they’ve been fearful when home alone with small children.

Previously we’ve had to turn them away because they’ve not yet had enough time to practice with their brand-new firearm in preparation for live fire in this course. And it has been heartbreaking. They’ve absolutely needed the content to get started in hardening their home and preparing to defend themselves and their family and yet they’ve missed the only one or two classes offered each year.

So we’ve separated home defense strategies from shooting fundamentals. We’ve replaced the live fire shooting fundamentals section with dry-fire and laser device practice so we can share legal insights and home defense strategies with more women.

Using dry-fire and laser devices actually allows us to safely demonstrate and practice more realistic scenarios. When you hear a bump in the night, how do you safely get to your children in the upstairs bedroom? How do you reach a significant other in the back of the house? How do you safely retreat to your safe room? We’ll give you a number of drills and exercises you can use to practice in your own home, and with live fire on the range.

What’s more, moving off the range enables you to review and critique actual defensive home and landscaping improvements and identify areas for improvement in your own homes and yards.

With the  blend of classroom and practical on-the-range instruction, you’ll also  learn:

  • Psychology of situational awareness and self-defense
  • Strategies for protecting yourself and your loved ones inside your home
  • Considerations for selecting a home defense handgun and ammunition
  • Numerous tips for situational awareness, avoiding conflict, and personal protection
  • Ideas for products you can use to harden your home against intrusion
  • Recommendations for landscaping adjustments to make it harder for intruders to hide and gain entry

You’ll truly walk out of this class with a detailed action plan and tons of newfound confidence in your ability to defend your home and loved ones. 

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Course Logistics

The course runs from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm. Please join us at 8 am for amazing coffee and pastries to fuel our discussions so you can get to know your soon-to-be-best friends! You’ll begin with instruction in a well-lit and comfortable classroom and after lunch, we’ll take an indoor and outdoor guided tour of the facility. We’ll also do active dry-fire exercises within the facility.

We will provide coffee, water, and snacks, as well as a hot and hearty home-cooked lunch-this is not to be missed!

Upon successful completion of the program, you’ll receive a certificate of course completion.

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What to Bring

Please bring the following:

  1. Your driver’s license for ID verification
  2. Your own semi-automatic pistol in .380, 9mm (or greater). Ideally this will be the handgun you intend to use for home defense. (If you don’t yet have a pistol, we can provide you with a 9mm pistol–let us know via email)
  3. At least two magazines for your pistol (This is for practice only-ammunition is NOT required)
  4. Pen/Pencil
  5. Shoes/boots suitable for walking outside.
  6. If you have a MantisX or Mantis Laser Academy, feel free to bring it!

And as the forecast requires:

  • Rain protection
  • Cold-weather clothing

Tuition

Tuition for the course is $295 per person. We love it when you bring your friends with you!

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

Payment is due at time of registration. Our facilities and instructors are pre-paid, so we cannot allow rescheduling or refunds. Upon registration, you will be asked to fill out a waiver and attest that you are eligible to handle firearms (i.e. no felonies).

Course Schedule and Registration

We’re so excited to have you join us in this next step of your self-defense journey!

Below are the upcoming course dates. Don’t delay. We have taught more than 750 women and these courses have filled very rapidly with our Basic Protection course graduates! So many women have delayed only to come back later and find everything is completely full!

April 29, 2023 SOLD OUT!
July 22, 2023 SOLD OUT!
September 23, 2023 3 Spaces Remaining Register Online

If the courses are full or you aren’t able to attend one of the scheduled programs, contact us and we’ll add you to our waiting list to be notified the moment a new course is added.

We look forward to having you join us!

Location

All courses are taught at our extremely comfortable and private classroom in Enumclaw. All the dry-fire, laser exercises, and AP Home Security evaluations will take place in and around the classroom.

Who are your Instructors?

We are passionate about teaching women to protect themselves and their loved ones, enabling them to embark on their next adventure with confidence and security. All four of us are certified NRA instructors. We’ve been teaching classroom and practical programs for nearly two decades.

Curtis is the lead instructor, with nearly 20 years of training experience with people of all ages. He is an NRA-certified instructor for NRA Pistol, Home Defense, Personal Protection Inside the Home, and Black Powder programs. He is also an NRA-certified Range Safety Officer.

Becky is the reason we started all of this. She was tired of being dismissed in firearms training courses and having to prove that she was a better shot than the instructor before she was welcomed into the club. Becky is adamant that women just need the opportunity to learn new skills in order to perform comparably. She has a degree in psychology which she leverages heavily to help women understand how to defend themselves. Becky is an NRA-certified instructor for NRA Pistol and is assisting in this course.

Kelsey has been shattering stereotypes her whole life. She enjoys challenging assumptions about what women are capable of doing. When not in business dress, she does 50-mile hikes and enjoys shooting the largest production revolvers and semi-automatic handguns available in the US (truly ‘big-ass’ handguns!). She is an NRA-certified instructor for NRA Pistol and is assisting in this course.

Jump to registration

About

We are passionate about teaching women to protect themselves and their loved ones, enabling them to embark on their next adventure with confidence and security.

We teach very personal and individually tailored firearms safety, selection, and handling courses for women only. When you join us for a course, you’ll enjoy:

  • Increased self-confidence and self-awareness
  • Greater ability to ensure your family is safe in your home
  • Confidence in choosing pistols that fit you perfectly
  • Increased appreciation for a competitive sport

We teach at Cascade Shooting Facilities in Ravensdale, WA, one of the nicest ranges in the area. You’ll join us for instruction in a well-lit and maintained classroom, with very clean restrooms.