I love the line at the end: “When most women carry guns, most rapists
will masturbate alone in the dark.”

>http://www.backwoodshome.com/cgibin/rd/rdain.cgi?n=AYO_Armed+and+Female&url
>
> ARMED & FEMALE
> By Massad Ayoob
>
> I didn’t come up with the term “Armed and
>Female.” Paxton Quigley did. She’s a neat lady. I know her, trained her,
>taught with her, and have the privilege of recommending her book to
>people, because it’s an absolute manifesto for women who take control of
>their surroundings. In fact, I borrowed the title just to get your
>attention.
>
>Which, now that I have it, shall be directed to the concept of women and
>defensive firearms. I
>remember one of my first female students. She was in her sixties, an
>accomplished academician and author
>with strong roots in what was then called “women’s liberation.” She had
>considered the gun to be a hideous
>side effect of testosterone poisoning. Then, she was assaulted by armed
>criminals and nearly died. “It
>occurred to me,” she told me later, “that I had neglected one element of
>my empowerment.”
>
>She bought a .38 Special. She came and took our training. We got her into
>a better .38 Special
>and showed her how to use it. That one phase of missing empowerment was
>now complete.
>
>End of story.
>
>Yes, dammit, it is that simple. I am an unlikely feminist, but a feminist
>nonetheless. I have knowingly risked my career more than once to testify
>for women, in a world where I was a firearms instructor dependent on cops
>coming to me for training and I was testifying against police departments
>that wrongfully fired female officers for not “qualifying” with their
>department’s male-oriented guns, holsters, and shooting techniques. When I
>testified against the FBI in 1980 for the women in the class action suit
>of Christine Hansen, et. al. V. Federal Bureau of Investigation, I was
>told it would be the kiss of death to my career. So be it. The women were
>right and the Bureau was wrong, and I couldn’t have looked my then
>three-year-old first-born daughter in the face had I not gone there and
>spoke the truth.
>
>
>
>
>I testified. The court listened. The court found in favor of the women,
>and the Bureau was ordered to “revise and update its obsolete and sexist
>firearms training.” The Bureau’s sweeping revisions followed in 1981,
>bringing them solidly into the mid-1960s, but by the Year 2000 they were
>back at the cutting edge for the first time in half a century. Some of the
>old heads still hate me for it. Tough ____ (you supply the word).
>
>For more than a century, the handgun has been
>called in American lore “the equalizer.” There is truth here.
>The sad part of the truth is that a gun makes an emotional
>dwarf like Sirhan Sirhan equal to the destruction of a giant
>like Robert Kennedy. The happy part of the truth is that a
>handgun makes a petite and gentle female equal to the
>destructive power of an enraged adult male, or a gang of
>them.
>
>Remember back a quarter century to the murder of
>Kitty Genovese in New York, stabbed to death before the
>eyes of at least 38 witnesses who did nothing. Their
>statements afterwards made “I didn’t want to get involved” a
>catch-phrase for the downslide of American values.
>Remember the incident called “the wilding” in Central Park
>much more recently, a brilliant Manhattan woman
>gang-raped and beaten into profound brain damage by a
>gang of “youths” armed only with their physical strength.
>Remember these, and tell me again that women have no
>need for guns.
>
>Isolation factor
>
>When we return to values of the past, we must remember the priorities of
>those who lived that life and made it work. If we escape the modern
>lifestyle for the “backwoods home,” we need to remember how those before
>us made that lifestyle work. Oh, yeah: grow your own food. Oh, yeah: can’t
>be dependent on constantly-plowed roads and constantly-running
>electricity. Oh, yeah: can’t be dependent on instantly-responding
>emergency services. Services like firefighters?paramedics?and police.
>
>If you needed fire extinguishers and battery-powered smoke alarms in the
>city, you really need them in the hinterlands. If you needed emergency
>medical skills in the city, you need them far more when ETA (estimated
>time of arrival) of EMTs or paramedics is measured on the minute hand or
>maybe even the hour hand instead of on the second hand.
>
>And, if you need cops-armed men and women prepared to use force to protect
>you against the most violent armed criminals that roam abroad in
>society-well, sad to say, the same need for self-sufficiency is stark.
>Welcome, not just to American society, but to the Planet Earth.
>
>Face the reality. Perhaps the meek will inherit the earth, but not until
>those of us who ain’t meek are done with it.
>
>It is not a choice of being predator or prey. A lot of people miss that,
>including one otherwise intelligent reporter who went through my school
>recently. If you become a wolf to ward off the other wolves, you have
>defeated your own purpose. You have, as my generation learned to say,
>destroyed the village in order to save it.
>
>No. The ideal is to be the sheepdog. You did not come with intent to harm.
>You came with intent to protect. If the wolf approaches your flock, you
>will bark to warn him off. If he comes closer, you will threaten with your
>more aggressive presence. And then, if he is stupid enough to attack, you
>will do what instinct tells you to do to a predator who is trying to tear
>your lamb’s throat out.
>
>You will interdict the predator. And you will do what you must to stop him
>from harming that lamb, even if you must tear his throat out.
>
>And in the end, if you were not born to be the protector like the
>sheepdog, it will suffice if you are a mother sheep with a .38 Special.
>Because, when you think about it, if mother sheep had guns to protect
>their lambs, they wouldn’t need sheepdogs at all.
>
>Attributes
>
>Most firearms, and most shooting techniques, were developed by males, for
>males. Females, particularly petite specimens with proportional size
>hands, have to work harder to find pistols and revolvers that fit their
>hands. Some male-oriented shooting techniques won’t work well; conversely,
>some techniques work better for women than for men.
>
>Let’s look at gun size first. In a rifle or shotgun, the most important
>dimension is called “pull length,” the measurement from the butt of the
>gun to where the finger touches the trigger. A good rule of thumb is that
>the long gun fits you if you can have your finger on the trigger and the
>butt reaches just to the inside edge of your crooked elbow. With a
>handgun, perfect fit is achieved if the web of the hand is high on the
>grip-frame, the barrel is in line with the forearm, and your finger can
>properly reach the trigger.
>
>If a woman is smaller statured, she may need a
>custom or cut-down stock. Many rifle and shotgun makers
>offer versions with a “youth stock” geared for people in the
>lower five feet of height range with proportional arms. In
>handguns, some that work spectacularly well with smaller
>hands are the GI (1911 style) .45 automatic with short
>trigger, the Browning Hi-Power 9mm, The Kahr series
>pistols, the Heckler and Koch P7, and the J-frame Smith &
>Wesson revolver.
>
>Now, let’s look at techniques. The average
>woman’s fingers will be shorter by about a digit’s length than
>the average man’s. She will have less upper body mass and
>strength than her brother. Thus, some shooting techniques
>may work better for her than for him, or vice versa. For
>example, most men operate a semiautomatic pistol by
>holding the frame in their dominant hand, and reaching
>across their chest with the free hand and grabbing the slide
>to “rack” it back. This is an upper body strength intensive
>technique, pitting arm against arm, and a lot of smaller or
>older women can’t do it well with many pistols. They’ll have
>better luck with the “slingshot” technique, in which the
>support hand firmly grabs the slide and pulls back while the
>gun-hand is pushing forward. This can be combined with a
>turn of the hips that puts the entire body weight into the
>movement, making it happen almost effortlessly.
>
>The trendy Weaver Stance is not ideal for most
>women. Centering on an isometric push of the gun hand
>against the pull of the support hand, it puts a heavy value
>on upper body muscle tone. If a woman is not especially
>athletic, she will often be better served with the Isosceles
>stance, in which both arms lock straight out ahead of the
>body. The Isosceles is a skeletal support intensive
>technique, and works irrespective of size or bulk.
>
>Most women also adapt to shooting behind cover
>better than men. This is because, even if the height is the
>same, they have a lower center of gravity than their
>brothers. A she has about 30 degrees more pelvic flexibility
>than a he, and is generally more limber. “Position rifle”
>shooting matches that involve such postures as sitting and
>prone are routinely won overall by woman shooters. Women
>are noted for better fine motor skills, which adapt directly to
>manipulating a trigger. Shooting has been described as “10% physical, 90%
>mental,” and any high school teacher can tell you that females tend to
>have better concentration than males.
>
> Management of crisis? Hysteria and
>”getting the vapors” are strictly cultural predispositioning things.
>There’s reason to believe that women may actually be cooler under stress
>than men, if they are prepared and conditioned for emergencies. Tests we
>did with telemetry at Lethal Force Institute during high stress crisis
>roleplays showed that females did not elevate their vital signs in
>pressure situations as rapidly as men, and their increased vital signs
>plateaued sooner.
>
>Anyone who says “women can’t shoot” hasn’t seen skilled female gunners in
>action. Kim Rhode will smoke most any male on a trap or skeet range. I’ve
>seen Gila Hayes win the open state championship, not just that for
>females, from the men in a combat shoot with a .45 automatic. Bowling pin
>matches in Barb Budnar’s area declined in male attendance by about 50%
>after she started shooting there; that’s how many couldn’t take being
>beaten by a woman. It’s a rare police revolver shooter of the male gender
>who can keep pace with national champion Dorcia Meador, and a rare male
>bullseye shooter with a hand as steady on target as Ruby Fox’s.
>
>Furthermore, the almost unanimous consensus of
>firearms instructors is that females learn the gun faster than
>males. Quite apart from the dexterity and concentration
>factors, they are free of “testosterone poisoning.” They don’t
>instinctively balk at taking instructions from a male in a
>male-oriented discipline as if being a student was some sort
>of tribal subjugation. It clears the path for a faster learning
>curve.
>
>”She won’t dare shoot”
>
>Some men fear that women will be too
>faint-hearted to pull the trigger of a self-defense weapon.
>Faint hearts come in both genders. It’s in the mind, not in
>the chromosomes. One offender climbing through a window
>looked at the gun in one of my female student’s hands and
>said, “You ain’t got the balls to shoot me, Bitch.” He woke
>up in the hospital with his bullet-shattered arm amputated.
>Another rapist told his eight-months pregnant victim, “Bitch,
>I’m gonna f— that baby right out of you!” As he bent to
>remove his pants, she smashed him in the head with a table
>lamp, picked up his dropped gun, and emptied it into him.
>
>With equivalent training, the female may indeed be deadlier than the male.
>One good laboratory for this is law enforcement, where use of force
>training is identical between the genders. I’ve noticed over the years
>that policewomen are less hesitant than men to use appropriate force. A
>male officer may be reluctant to reach for his baton in a fistfight or for
>his gun when the opponent draws a knife, thinking that the manly thing to
>do is handle things with his bare hands. Females labor under no such
>delusions, and will be quicker to employ the appropriate “force option,”
>by and large.
>
> Suggested research
>
>Check out a new organization called MothersArms. It’s made up primarily of
>moms who use guns as one of their options to keep their children
>protected. Their website is at http//www.mothersarms.org. You also want to
>take a look at Women and Guns magazine, found on the better-stocked
>newsstands.
>
>Paxton Quigley’s book Armed and Female is the best intellectual treatment
>of the armed woman’s decision. Once an active member of Handgun Control
>Inc., Paxton assessed her position and took control of her life after a
>close friend was savagely raped. She’s now an advocate of armed women, and
>a firearms instructor who specializes in all-women’s classes. The
>aforementioned Gila Hayes is one of our premier female firearms
>instructors of either gender, and her book Effective Defense: the Woman,
>the Gun, and the Plan is must reading. Armed and Female is $5.99 and
>Effective Defense is $13.95 from Police Bookshelf, P.O. Box 122, Concord,
>NH 03302. Shipping is $4.90, which covers both books if ordered together.
>
>Owning a firearm and keeping it for self-defense is an intensely personal
>decision. That said, it has given me a measure of comfort as a husband to
>know that my wife is licensed to carry a gun. It has made me feel better
>as a father to know that my oldest daughter is licensed to carry, and the
>younger is adept with any of the firearms I keep around for security.
>Elder brat was national champion woman at the National Tactical
>Invitationals of 1996, and in 1998, younger brat and I won national
>parent/child team honors at the National Junior Handgun Championships.
>
>There has been a lot of misinformation about women and “the equalizer.”
>The bottom line is,
>against violent, lethal assault, the firearm is simply the most logical
>and effective line of defense. When most women carry guns, most rapists
>will masturbate alone in the dark.
>