MORGANTOWN — No, it wasn’t some shoot-’em-up video game.
It wasn’t the real world, either.
Then again, though, it was pretty close, given the ballistic uncertainty of the exercise.
At Defense in Depth, the high-tech, indoor shooting range in Sabraton, Donna Hardman was working the above handgun-scenario.
It was one the Morgantown woman could have easily faced from her days years ago as a sheriff’s deputy and corrections officer back home in Lewis County.
With her 9mm handgun drawn and carrying a live clip, she worked through a maze that had a hostage situation and potential homicide lurking every corner.
Cardboard humanoid figures filled the roles of the innocent and the not-so-innocent.
It was her job to take out the latter with no harm to the former.
When it was done, and when she popped the magazine, Kayla Krausman, a WVU forensic science graduate student and Defense in Depth employee who was leading the exercise, called her over.
“Whoa. Hey, Donna. Come see.”
Hardman pulled off an unintentional trick shot, of sorts.
In the portion of the scenario that called for a head-shot of a humanoid bad guy, she landed two rounds — with the second shot going almost exactly through the same hole the first bullet made.
“I wasn’t expecting that,” Hardman said.
She joined Defense in Depth’s “Ladies League,” a competitive shooting group for females, expecting to keep her firearm skills sharp.
The league meets every week. Visit defenseindepth.pro/ for more information.
On this Sunday night, about 10 members came out to shoot.
They greeted each other with hugs, chatted about Christmas and wondered aloud what Krausman was planning for the night’s scenario: She takes the staging up to the last minute every week.
The league is open to gun enthusiasts of all levels, Krausman said.
Defense in Depth runs its leagues under the auspices of the International Defensive Pistol Association, the Arkansas governing group that runs shooting competitions across the country and overseas.
That means no weapon is loaded until it is absolutely time to shoot.
Participants must also don proper ear and eye protection. The weapons they use may not be altered in any way.
Hardman grew up with guns. Her father was a gunsmith who became a deputy. She followed him into law enforcement. The league for her is all about shooting and technique, she said, opposed to make-believe “killing.”
She did allow, though, that she liked “the adrenaline” of shooting in competition.
Her league teammate, Lisa Garlow, of Fairmont, said her respect for firearms has grown to highest caliber since she began taking part at Defense in Depth.
Garlow takes the scenarios personally. She became rattled, she said, after she accidentally “shot” an innocent bystander during a computer-simulated standoff last week.
“An innocent person,” she said, shaking her head.
Her reaction also meant it was time to draw a bead on the elephant in the room. Gun violence in America is now the norm.
And violence against women here is unprecedented.
Four years ago, in fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention charted the murders of more than 10,000 women which occurred across 18 U.S. states from 2003-’14.
Fifty-five percent of them died at the hands of someone with whom they were intimately involved, or at least knew.
And 54 percent of the charted victims were killed by a gun.
Would Garlow ever use a weapon to defend herself or to diffuse a situation?
She fired a round of reason in her answer.
“You would just have to hope,” she said, “that it would never come to that.”
