Help: Hoplophobia.

Shooting range

There are many people that have many phobias and I recently found out that one of my closest friends, Belen, had hoplophobia, which is simply an irrational fear of firearms and/or weapons. So being the person I am, I confronted her about it and after an extensive amount of arguing, I decided that the best way to settle this issue was to take her to the shooting range. This might seem an extreme measure, but there is some logic behind it. I figured that if I could show her around the range and the shooting instructors she was going to be a little more open to the idea.

When we got to the shooting range, she was very nervous and as we are coming into the store two guys were shooting high caliber guns that made a lot of noise and she was really scared. At this point even I got a little scared, but with reassurance from the instructors we calmed down. After going through the instructions o how to operate the weapons Belen became more comfortable around guns. And below are the results:

After the first shot she was comfortable shooting and holding a gun in her hands, which is a good thing. The lesson I wanted to teach her was to always confront her fears in life and I guess I was successful at it.