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Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Sharp Shooter: High school senior Rhianna Colli won the Gold Award--the Girl Scouts' equivalent to the Boy Scouts' Eagle Award--for teaching firearms safety to girls.
Arms and the Woman
Marksman and gun safety advocate Rhianna Colli is a passionate believer in the Second Amendment
By Sarah Gaffney
Presentation High School senior Rhianna Colli has two passions in life: collecting comics and shooting firearms. Atypical hobbies for a typical teenage girl, but then who said Rhianna was typical?
"I collect comics and I do target shooting, which are basically male-oriented things," says Rhianna, who at almost 6 feet tall was blessed with the typically male tall gene. "But, believe it or not, even though I do a bunch of men things, I played with my Barbie until like sixth grade ... I still have my 'bride' Barbie."
And she still participates in the Girl Scouts, her primary hobby for the past 11 years. She recently earned the Gold Award, the most prestigious of all Girl Scout honors, equivalent to the Boy Scouts' Eagle Award.
Earning the Gold Award, an honor reserved for high school-aged Girl Scouts, typically involves three years of hard work. Candidates must complete a litany of prerequisites, such as community service, volunteering, leadership roles and career exploration, which culminate in the development and implementation of a community service project. For Rhianna, there was no doubt her project would involve the use of firearms.
"I decided that I wanted to do something that I loved doing and that would give girls a chance to do something they had never done or usually don't do," says the effervescent teen. "So, I taught 26 girls how to shoot .22 firearms safely and responsibly."
As unusual as it may sound, the Girl Scouts Gold Award review committee unanimously approved the project. According to Michele Harms, a member of the six-person committee, "Certainly hers was very different. We get a lot of projects that cover familiar territory. Rifle safety and the responsibilities of working around firearms is a different topic for us. I don't remember there being any resistance, because she came in very well prepared ... her original project proposal was very well written and well thought out."
The project was a two-day event held last January at the San Jose Municipal Firing Range. Rhianna recruited 26 girls, ranging in age from 14 to 18, to participate. The first day involved classroom instruction on firearms safety and basic marksmanship principles. The following day, each student received one-on-one instruction from a qualified range master and participated in a one-hour marksmanship session. Rhianna helped organize the donation of all firearms, ammunition, targets and range time through the Santa Clara Valley Rifle Club and a grant from the National Rifle Association.
Bill Edwards, a retired Navy small-arms instructor and Colli family friend, served as instructor for the project.
"Working with the girls was great. Girls don't get to shoot much. It's something that you don't see a lot of girls doing, so they don't have bad habits, because they haven't done it before," says Edwards, who has taught shooting to Boy Scouts for the past 10 years. "It was one of the best groups of kids that I've instructed. Ever."
Rhianna's interest in shooting began when she was 10, when she began taking annual summer camping trips with her father and younger brother in remote areas of the Stanislaus National Forest. There, with Edwards and other Boy Scouting families, they'd target shoot.
Says Edwards, "She was just another one of the kids, you know, nothing special during all that time, but she sure did like shooting ... and as she grew up, she just liked shooting even more, and it seemed like that was what she looked forward to every time we'd go on that trip."
For Rhianna, shooting was and has always been a sporting activity. "Why do I like it? It's a challenge, like any sport. Why does anyone do a sport? 'Cause it's fun and they enjoy doing it. Although it's definitely not a typical girl's sport."
In honor of achieving the Gold Award, Rhianna's parents gave her a .22 Ruger match pistol. The Friends of the NRA gave her the opportunity to attend their annual five-day Youth Education Summit in Washington, D.C. Edwards wrote a personal letter of recommendation for Rhianna to attend the summit.
"There's probably not a lot of females with the enthusiasm that she has shown for shooting," says the retired Navy chief. "Teaching these girls that shooting is fun and can be safe and is not a bad thing, to me made her a perfect candidate for that program."
Along with 39 other high school students from across the United States, Rhianna spent her five days in the nation's capital meeting Oliver North, touring national monuments and studying the Second Amendment, something she believes in fervently.
"I agree with our right to bear arms and I think it's really sad that people take advantage of that by going out and shooting people. ... I can not stand it," says Rhianna. "I feel if the government takes away the Second Amendment ... you're just taking it away from people who are responsible, who obey the law. Even if you can take it away from all the bad guys, they're still going to pick up knives. They'll find something."
And for Rhianna, who has been exposed to firearms and shooting most of her life, guns have never been tools of violence, but tools of sport.
"If my life was being threatened and I had a gun in my hand, I would do everything possible not to shoot it off," says the gun-safety advocate. "I do not consider guns as a means of safety, as protecting yourself."
Edwards, a proponent for educating children about gun safety, agrees.
"I think that by educating our kids, if they come across guns or they come across other kids with guns, first of all they're going to understand that, hey, this is something that we don't want to mess with," says Edwards. "I think it would just help our society as a whole if our children understood about guns. Guns are not bad. Positive firearms training for all kids is a necessity."
Firearms training in the Girl Scouts is a new goal for Rhianna. Shotgun- and rifle-shooting merit badges have long been standard in the Boy Scouts. Why not the Girl Scouts?
"If it was within my power right now to go down to the office on Bascom Avenue and say, 'You need to put a rifle range or a BB range up at our Girl Scout camp,' I would do it," Rhianna says. "But it takes a lot of work and I don't have the time to do it." The determined target shooter is now busy completing applications to serve as the head of a Boy Scout firing range next summer.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
