UA student starts Second Amendment club to educate about firearm safety

By STEPHANIE CASANOVA Published September 30, 2013 at 12:19am Updated September 30, 2013 at 12:19am

A UA student is working on starting a non-partisan Second Amendment club.

Cale Lyford, an economics freshman, said he got the idea of starting Student Second Amendment Union about a week and a half ago. Lyford began to recruit students on the UA Mall and emailed the UA College Republicans and UA Young Democrats asking to promote the club at their meetings.

The clubs mission is to create a positive attitude toward firearms and educate people on how to properly use them, according to Lyford.

In order to reach this mission, club members would take trips to a shooting range, Lyford said, adding that through these trips, members would learn the importance of owning a gun and not being afraid of firearms.

Second Amendment is traditionally a contentious issue and used between the two sides, Lyford said. But I think if your goal is education, then youre going to want to attract people from both sides.

Zoey Kotzambasis, president of UA College Republicans, said the idea of a club that trains its members how to shoot is fantastic. The College Republicans plan a trip to a shooting range every semester.

A lot of the people who come with us have never shot before, Kotzambasis said. Once they learn how to use them, they realize its really not scary [like] how they thought it was, and I think its very empowering for a lot of our members.

While he said he supports anyone trying to start a club on campus, Nick Mahon, president of UA Young Democrats, said education about guns should include facts about deaths caused by gunshots.

If youre going to have a club that explicitly talks in support of firearms and youre not dealing with this kind of darker side of fireams, Im still skeptical of it, Mahon said.

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UA student starts Second Amendment club to educate about firearm safety