While attending the 2025 SHOT Show, we had a chance to talk with Amanda Suffecool. Suffecool, an NRA board member, is a firearms instructor, activist, and the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, Eye on the Target Radio.
Suffecool talks to us about her journey as an advocate/activist as well as her many business endeavors.
Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity and readability.
Petrolino: I know that you sometimes refer to yourself as “a woman of a certain age.” That’s your words, not mine, right? But I want to ask you about your entrance into the world of guns. I heard a tale that you were born with a rattle in one hand and a Ruger in the other. Tell me…
Suffecool: Not far from that actually.
Petrolino: Tell me about gun life for Amanda.
Suffecool: Well, as a child, my mother taught some hunter safety.
My grandfather shot trap in the circuit from Vandalia, Ohio, down to Florida and back. Some of my earliest memories were actually going around with a pillowcase, picking up wads from the trap fields, before plastic wads were commercially available. They were only available if you bought brand new shells, shot them, and then the wads were in the field. So we would go pick them up, go to my grandparents house, wash them in a special wash machine that my grandfather had picked up at a yard sale, and then we sorted them on the ping pong table.
My father collected Ruger 357’s. By the time my father died, he had 37 of exactly the same gun in every manufacturing variation. Anything that was made from – because the 357 was Ruger’s first center fire pistol – anything that was manufactured between 1955 and 1973. It kind of tied the beauty of firearms and just just how they are and how they look, and all the design stuff to my love of manufacturing and putting things together and assembly. It just resonated on a lot of levels.
Our family had a lot of conversations about guns and the Second Amendment. Dinner conversations revolved, in a lot of cases around guns and collecting and gun collecting friends and the Second Amendment, and the beauty of all of that. It’s just – it truly is in my DNA.
Petrolino: Was there a definitive time where you’re like, “Okay, I’m a gun girl. I’m in this”?
Suffecool: Yeah, and it was unintentional. What had happened was I married a car guy. I went from a gun family to a car family. From 1984 to 2004, I – my family shot. There were events, periodically, you’d go to a picnic and everybody would go to the range, but it really wasn’t the center of my world.
I was the plant manager at a company, and I lost my job. The company did a transition. They dumped all of the entire middle management. I’m sitting there going, “okay, here I am. I’m 40 years old. What do I want to do when I grow up? What do I want to do? What do I want to be?” And my brother, who I’m really tight with, he sees me that I’m in this quandary. I don’t know what I’m doing.
At that time, Rob was very involved in community organizations, the Lions Club, the festivals that were local to the community. He was going to an affairs and festivals meeting. He said, “Would you like to ride along?” We actually went to the Pumpkin Festival. It was a couple hour drive. I don’t know what I’m at this turning point, what do we do? Where do we go? Am I my career? Am I my own person? You know that thing where you go through these questions?
And he said, “Well, if I got to do anything, anything at all,” he said, “I would open a firearms training business.” I’m like, “There’s no money in that.” And he said, “Oh yes, there is.” And I said, “No, there’s not.” And he said, “Oh yes, there is.” So I sat down and wrote a business plan to show him he was wrong.
Petrolino: How’d that go?
Suffecool: We got into business. It was prepped that Ohio was passing their concealed carry bill and so it just, it all kind of went together.
We wrote a business plan about how to be concealed carry instructors and how to provide the best experience for students and how different students learn, and some are visual, and some some want the written word, and some want the screen, and some want stories. Providing a multimedia experience for concealed carry students is kind of how we started, and that took us down this path.
The law that Ohio passed was 168 pages long. Many people in the state were like, “How did you find out this?” And, “How did you find out that?” Well, because we read the law. Rob and I sat down, went through the law, and said, “Well, what does this mean? And how does this tie to this? And you know, 29 23.125 section, G through J, what? What does that really mean, and where is it?”
People started asking us questions, to the point that the sheriff’s department called us and said, “You know you’re saying, you know this. Well, how do you know this?” How do you not? It just started there.
Petrolino: Okay, and then at one point or another, you guys owned a gun shop?
Suffecool: In that same time period we thought about it and said, “Well, if you’re selling training, where do you want to sell training?” You need to sell it somewhere. We found an opening at our range that there was a building, and so there had been a gun shop there at one point, and it had gone out of business, and we looked at it and said, “You know, we really don’t want to be in the gun shop business, but what if we used a model and we built a gun shop like an antique mall and there’s 14 different kiosks within there that everybody owns their own kiosk, and it’s a centralized thing.”
We were going to do a kiosk version gun shop with four sections, and four different owners.
Petrolino: Their own little bubbles…
Suffecool: And everybody had their own little bubbles, and we’d have one centralized book. Each person would work the store a certain number of days. We got three other partners, and they all said that they were in. The lawyer was writing up all the paperwork, I went and signed the contract with the landlord, and we’ve got it all working out. We went to sign the paperwork, and they all folded up, one by one.
Here I am sitting with a concept, no partners, and lease for a gun shop.
Petrolino: You had one partner, didn’t you?
Suffecool: Well, I just had my brother. It was my brother and I. We were supposed to be one quarter of this, right? There was supposed to be three other groups.
Okay, what do we do? Because we don’t have any money. But we had guns. We took guns from our own collections. We took guns from our own closets. We took everything we had that we were like, “Okay, I can live without this one. I can live without this one.” And we stocked the store with $3,000 worth of stuff from Midway and the guns from our own house. That’s how we started. We ran a gun shop from 2004 to 2016.
Petrolino: Well, that’s a serious clip. That’s not anything to laugh at for sure. Okay, so you said you were in manufacturing. You’re an engineer, classically trained, went to school for it. You have some bona fides there?
Suffecool: Well, yes, I have a degree. I worked for a company that was like a brain trust. They had this thing, that they believed that the employees as a singular were way smarter than the company as a whole. And so they gave everybody the freedom to say, 10% of your time at work you can work on something only you believe in. The company, by the time I left, it had become a multi-million dollar company. It had been bought and sold a couple times. It was, it was a fabulous experience, and it built catalytic converters for anything from restaurants to stores. If you have a grill, you have a catalytic converter to make it so that all the neighbors don’t get to enjoy your fried onions and hamburger smell, right? Apple barns have catalytic converters. Jet airplanes have ozone converters. Cogeneration power plants, all the power plants have catalytic converters. We build all those things. And so…
Petrolino: And you have a couple patents in this field?
Suffecool: I have it in hydrogen generation, heat transfer stuff. In order to generate hydrogen it takes really high temperature. Then in the high temperature stuff, you also have to make sure that you’re gathering everything that you want to gather and all the pipes expand. My area of expertise was working on pipe expansion and blocking the pipe expansion was something that was also able to take the heat. It was a folded, bent, manipulated kind of thing. It was filed in both the United States and in Russia. I have a Russian patent with my name written in Russian, framed and hung on the wall. And that’s just, it’s just kind of cool.
Petrolino: That’s pretty neat. Your an NRA board member. Let’s talk a little bit about that. How’d that happen?
Suffecool: I retired from engineering and in my engineering, I did catalytic converters, I did dirty bomb detection. I did sunrooms, solarium glass. I did manufacturing of military gloves and high heat suits for people that were going into the big silver suit – makes them look like a spaceman, those kinds of things. I retired doing aerospace. My elevator pitch was, I keep airplanes in the sky, right? Kind of has a level of importance.
In 2022 there was a shift. I wanted to be involved in some stuff that was happening in the Second Amendment world, and I was doing that on the side. I had an opportunity to go to New York to be interviewed for Time Magazine, and I couldn’t, because I was doing an aerospace audit. I had an invitation to go to Mar-a-Lago, and I couldn’t because I was doing an aerospace audit. I was like, “Kluck, this job thing is getting in the way of interesting, fun things that could make a difference.”
Come to find out, my friends were on the front cover of Time Life Magazine, and I was not.
Petrolino: I’ve seen it. It’s impressive.
Suffecool: It is, and I’m not there. There’s a serious level to it. Both of my parents passed away. They had strokes at 58 years old. I’m looking at this going, genetically that potentially is a time bomb, right? Do you want to spend all your time working, or do you want to spend your time making a difference, whatever that difference is? I decided that at 60 years old, I was retiring, and I did. Now I can reassess, look at it and say, “What’s my bucket list?” And…
Petrolino: You said, 60?
Suffecool: 60.
Petrolino: You didn’t say 50?
Suffecool: I said, 60.
Petrolino: Okay, keep going.
Suffecool: I am, yeah, I am past 60. We’ll say I reassessed my bucket list and said, “I want to take a couple firearms training classes someplace in the country every year. I want to get involved in some not-for-profits. I want to give people who are doing good work a hand up. And I want to be involved with the NRA.”
The NRA has been around for 150 years, I want it to be there for another 150 years, and I think the time is now. It matches my skill sets, my management, my problem solving, you know – all the things I’ve done in my career, and it kind of all comes together in this thing, that it’s the perfect storm, the perfect time, and my skills fit the need that the NRA currently has.
I ran. I put my documents together in the nomination process for four years in a row, and was passed over three of them. Somebody was like, “Well, why don’t you just go and get the signatures?” And I said, “I’m still at work. So I’m going to try this one more time through the nominating process, and then maybe next year, I’ll do it if I don’t get it then, I’ll then put in that work.”
They picked me, got me through the nominating process, and then, frankly, I think my radio listeners got me through the election, and I did very well for a brand new person running for the board.
Petrolino: Somehow we left that out radio. What the hell happened there?
Suffecool: Somewhere between the gun shop, the training and the gun shop, we started answering questions about about guns and Ohio’s concealed carry. The radio station local to us called us and said, “Would you like to come in and answer a couple questions? We’d like to do a 20 minute segment.” Sure. We came in, my brother Rob and I went into the station, and our 20 minute segment turned into three hours.
Then they invited us back a month later, and it was another three hours. Then they called us and said, “Would you like an hour long show of your own once a month?” Sure. So that was September of 2010. By January of 2011 they had moved it to an hour long show once a week. And then by September of 2018 we were doing three hours on one station, we were doing two hours on another station, and we were, we got picked up for national syndication.
Petrolino: And you’ve been doing that for a number of years.
Suffecool: We’ve been doing that since 2018
Petrolino: 2018, well, that’s remarkable. What’s the future hold for Amanda Suffecool?
Suffecool: It’s bright. I mean, there’s so much stuff that can be done. I just, I’m I’m living in the best place. I really think right now I’m doing, I think I’m doing good work. The Second Amendment is in a shift to where I don’t think that a lot of the population really understands just what’s happening at the Supreme Court level and at the concealed carry level, and at the women’s shooting clubs level. The dynamic within there is shifting, just shifting fast. To be a female that is knowledgeable about manufacturing, and about guns, and about concealed carry, and being able to be articulate and speak in public. It’s just, it’s just a great place to be.
Petrolino: Any parting thoughts?
Suffecool: No. I think I’m good.