Anything that grows shooting sports is a good thing. New shooting sports competitors often mean new shooters. New shooters mean new voters to defend our Second Amendment rights. It’s generally a good thing, as a general rule.

It’s even better when it’s a group of people who most don’t think of when they think about shooting sports competitors.

Excerpts from a new research project released on Tuesday show the number of women involved in the shooting sports has increased over the last two years with some shooting disciplines seeing as much as a 189 percent boost. Shoot Like a Girl, which offers gun-training classes geared towards women across the country, released some of the details of a survey it conducted in 2017. The company said its findings were compiled with data from more than 2,600 women shooters. It said the number of women who completed its survey allowed it to generalize the results to all women shooters with a 99 percent confidence level and 2.6 percent margin of error. The company said the results are evidence that the number of women interested in guns and the shooting sports continues to grow each year.

This is welcome news. The only aspect of this that wouldn’t count as such would be a reduction in your ability to get a lane at your local range or something, but even that is a good problem to have in the long run.

The growth of female competitors represents a growth of female shooters. Women who compete serve as ambassadors to other women, a way to illustrate that no, shooting isn’t just for me. As a result, more and more women are buying guns and learning to shoot.

From a political standpoint, this is a net win as well.

Women tend to vote democrat. In 2016, 54 percent of all women voted for Hillary Clinton, an avowed anti-gun crusader. Women are considered a stable source of votes for anti-gun politicians. They count on this.

However, as more and more women take up shooting for personal defense and recreation, suddenly the anti-gun position becomes far more untenable. Even Democrats will have to take a step back and dial down the anti-Second Amendment rhetoric. They’ll have to or risk losing votes.

Once that happens, we can ease back just a bit. If politicians are terrified of threatening the Second Amendment for fear of angering their base–politicians on both sides, mind you–then they simply won’t do it. Whether it’s because they believe in the Constitution or because they’re too scared of losing reelection, either way, the result is the same.

Further, as more women shoot, other demographics may view shooting sports as something not exclusively the purview of white men. They may take on more and more roles within the firearms community, making it even more politically untenable to threaten gun rights.

Then, of course, there’s a more personal aspect to more women shooting. For those of us who are married, it means range trips can become family affairs. I don’t know about you, but my wife tends to be far more understanding of me taking time to hit the range when it’s something she can come along with me and do as well.