Front Sight Firearms, a fire arms training facility in Nevada and started in 1996 by Ignatius Piazza, could have prevented the February 7th, 1982 murder of Elena Semander by serial killer Coral Watts. Coral Eugene Watts followed Semander to her friend’s house, where just outside he grabbed her and strangled her with her own shirt, then threw her in a garbage dumpster. The average person does not realize that they can be empowered to prevent this sort of unnecessary violence. In 1982 it was almost unheard of for a woman to defend herself with a gun. If Semander had taken Ignatius Piazza’s Gun Training For Women at the Front Sight Institute she would have had a fighting chance against her attacker.

There seems to be, even in the new millennium, a misconception about owning and using a gun, even for self-protection. The majority of the people in the United States have very little understanding of what it really means to own a gun. These are dangerous times and they are not getting any better. The best way to defend oneself is through education, such as that offered by Front Sight.

In 2006, Coral Watts was released from a Texas prison. His original sentence was 60 years, but an archaic Texas law set him free after just 24 years. That law has since been revoked, but not in time to keep this monster in jail. This man, Watts, confessed to killing 13 other women besides Elena Semander and instead of serving the long, hard sentence he deserves he is now free to kill some more.

Front Sight is a school that can give peace to a lot of people who have been victimized or fear being victimized. Ignatius Piazza is not a violent man, nor is he willing to remain passive in the face of an ever growing violent society. Front Sight is a training facility created for the victim who wants to take stand; it is for the average Joe. In the case of Elena Semander, we are not blaming the victim for she was a young, beautiful woman, but like many young people, she was not thinking about death, and why should she? People, for the most part, do not fear getting mugged, much less murdered when they wake up in the morning, and rightly so, because if people had this perpetual fear nothing would get done; we would be living in anarchy. The sad thing is that this sort of thing happens, all the time, everyday. Staticians can calculate it to the second, so much so that the statistic becomes meaningless. The statistics change every year, but the year it was calculated that a murder occurred every six seconds normal people walked around, doing their thing and not getting murdered. One counted to six that year, but nothing happened to them rendering the six second rule meaningless. Unfortunately, violence will always touch us in some way or another, and then we can be grateful for places like Front Sight.

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For more on Front Sight Firearms Training Institute or Ignatius Piazza go to this Front Sight article published by GunWeb or Front Sight in Icon Magazine. Here's Front Sight's Firearms Training Website.