Feminine Protection by Lynn Burke

by Lynn Burke

October, 1999

If someone told you that about 14 million women in this country share a
secret, chances are you might think it’s about sex, shoes, or obsessive
compulsive disorder. You might be surprised to hear the true secret: that
those millions of women are packing heat.

“My mother’s got a gun,” says 26-year-old Robin, who didn’t want to be
identified further. “She used to drive around with it in the car – I grew up
with it. But she’d kill me if she knew I told you that.”

Robin’s mom is like a lot of women who own guns ? she’s embarrassed. She’s
not a militia member, she doesn’t dress in camouflage. She’s an attorney
living in the San Francisco Bay Area who wants to protect herself but
doesn’t want to admit it.

“Women are supposed to be ‘nice,’ they like to think of themselves as
nurturing and they don’t like to think about hurting someone,” explains Dr.
Helen Smith, 38, a forensic psychologist in Knoxville, Tenn. Smith, who
works with violent criminals in the courts, sees the aftermath of violence,
some of it gun-related, on a near daily basis. Which is exactly why she says
she’s pro-gun.

“I see so many women shot dead,” she explains. “An ex-husband comes back to
the house, and if she doesn’t have a gun…” She says women hop on the
gun-control bandwagon because it feels right, because they don’t understand
how guns work, and because they don’t want to take the responsibility of
protecting themselves.

“When women get on their high horse, what they don’t realize is they’re
taking away someone’s right to self-protection,” she says. “If you want to
die on the street, that’s fine.”

In the most recent Gallop Poll conducted on gun ownership for the U.S.
Department of Justice, 27 percent of women surveyed said they had a gun in
the home, which means 37.6 million women have access to guns. There is no
single source of statistics on American gun owners, male or female, though
estimates of women gun owners usually range from 11 to 18 million. Though
everyone who buys a gun legally fills out a federal form indicating gender
and other demographic indicators, the federal government does not “count”
gun owners.

When women decide they’re going to get married, the first thing many of them
do is pick up a copy of Bride magazine. But where do women go who are
considering buying a gun? Or who want to read about other women who own
guns?

Many turn to Women & Guns, a bimonthly publication focused on
self-protection published by the Second Amendment Foundation, a 25-year-old
non-profit publishing group based in Washington, D.C. According to Peggy
Tartaro, editor of Women & Guns, when the magazine launched in February
1989, it had fewer than 500 subscribers. When the title hit newsstand in
1991, circulation began to climb and today stands around 25,000.

Gun journalism across the board is experiencing a boom right now. Titles
like Guns & Ammo and Rifle & Shotgun have seen circulation rates jump 4.5
and 18.5 percent, respectively, since 1994, according to the Audit Bureau of
Circulation. The same period has also seen handgun sales slump from 4
million in 1994 to 1.5 million in 1998 as the result of federal laws banning
some assault weapons.

This month, EMAP Petersen, the largest publisher of gun-title magazines,
will launch a magazine called Petersen’s Outdoors for Women, aimed at women
interested in hunting and shooting sports. Initial copies will be sent to
the 5,000 or so women who are members of the Women’s Shooting Sports
Foundation.

The trick is making traditionally macho gun magazines palpable for women.
Tartaro says Women & Gun’s success stems from its brand of feminism that
treats guns as a potential equalizer. “If you can run a car, if you can
operate a microwave, there’s no reason on earth why you can’t operate a
gun,” she says.

The magazine firmly rejects the stereotype of a the man-hating, hysterical
female gun-owner Tartaro calls a “Thelma meets Louise with a really bad case
of PMS.” Readers, she says, can flip through the pages and see women they
can recognize as real people. And the articles found in Women & Guns are not
exactly the kind one might see in Guns & Ammo. A recent issue of the
magazine contained features titled “Women-only hunt stalks feral pigs”; “Do
I still get to hunt with you? A unique father-daughter relationship”; and
“Defensive strategies: Tactics for couples.”

Readers of the magazine don’t fall into any easy category. They are usually
married or in long-term relationships, range from age 20 to 79 with most
somewhere in the middle, are college educated, and tend to live in small
towns or rural areas (not in the South), though about 25 percent live in
cities. And they’re not all Republicans. Tartaro herself is a registered
Democrat.

Some argue that gun manufacturers and marketers have targeted women as an
untapped market, and have tricked them into gun ownership by exploiting
their fears. Anti-gun advocates such as Sarah Brady point to the National
Rifle Association, the gun-lobby’s most powerful organization, as courting
women by playing on their fears. Indeed, NRA has campaigns like “Refuse to
be a Victim” urging women (apparently there are no male victims) to “even
their odds” by attending NRA-sponsored personal safety classes.

But Tartaro says this sort of logic is both flawed and sexist. Women’s
increased interest in guns was already there, she argues, long before the
male-dominated gun manufacturers paid attention. “You don’t just see an ad
for a gun and suddenly run out and buy one. It’s a very narrow kind of a
thing,” she says. “If you want to see an ad about a gun, you’ve got to go
buy a gun magazine.”

Women have always had a visible, if not exactly egalitarian, relationship
with the gun industry. Scantily clad, busty chicks clutching long thick guns
in their hands appear in glossy advertisements of gun magazines, suggesting
that the quickest virility boost is a new Glock.

And puerile fantasy litters the Internet with pornographic images proving
that women with guns have always been sexy to men–that is, as long as they
stay in the fantasy world created for them.

But this is changing; women with attitude are no longer startling. Slick,
kick-ass women such as Linda Hamilton in “Terminator 2″ or Sigourney Weaver
in the “Alien” movies have become positively mainstream. And grrrl power has
brought us female destroyers in more shapes and sizes than ever, from the
perky Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to the lean
and mean warrior princess Lucy Lawless of Xena-fame.

Just as women aren’t expected to hurl grown men through the air, they’re
also not expected to own guns. But millions do.

And as long as they remain silent, the debate over gun control will remain
incomplete.

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Lynn Burke is a Boston native living in Oakland, Calif., and writing about
housing and real estate for Inman News. Her articles have also appeared in
the Oakland Tribune and East Bay Express. If someone can locate her for us,
we’d like to thank her for being a Patriot, and tell her she can add us to
the list of publisher’s honored to share her insights with others.

Read other articles in our Women & Guns section.