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Excerpted from http://www.shewire.com

Feminine Protection

by Lynn Burke

october 5, 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.

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

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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.