Gun Women

Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America

Mary Zeiss Stange, Carol K. Oyster

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814739914
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women, we are told, should not own guns. Women, we are told, are more likely to be injured by their own guns than to fend off an attack themselves. This "fact" is rooted in a fundamental assumption of female weakness and vulnerability. Why should a woman not be every bit as capable as a man of using a firearm in self-defense?

And yet the reality is that millions of American women--somewhere between 11,000,000 and 17,000,000--use guns confidently and competently every day. Women are hunting, using firearms in their work as policewomen and in the military, shooting for sport, and arming themselves for personal security in ever-increasing numbers. What motivates women to possess firearms? What is their relationship to their guns? And who exactly are these women? Crucially, can a woman be a gun-owner and a feminist too?

Women's growing tendency to arm themselves has in recent years been political fodder for both the right and the left. Female gun owners are frequently painted as "trying to be like men" (the conservative perspective) or "capitulating to patriarchal ideas about power" (the liberal critique). Eschewing the polar extremes in the heated debate over gun ownership and gun control, and linking firearms and feminism in novel fashion, Mary Zeiss Stange and Carol K. Oyster here cut through the rhetoric to paint a precise and unflinching account of America's gun women.

1 “High Noon at the Gender Gap”

Feminism and the Firearms Debate

Picture a gunman. What do you see? Probably someone on the dangerous, sinister side. A terrorist in a ski mask, perhaps, or a blackhooded sniper. A bank robber. A gangster. A Mafia hit man. Or maybe an outlaw, or a vigilante. A member of the posse. A gunslinger. Shane. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. A commando. Rambo. A dark stranger lurking in the shadows (“Your money or your life”). A cowboy. A revolutionary. An assassin. Lee Harvey Oswald, smiling with his Mannlicher-Carcano. David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”), smiling in the back seat of the patrol car. A criminal. A member of a street gang. Maybe a cop. A member of a SWAT team. A militia man. A desperado. Jesse James. Dillinger. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . . .

Images abound, don’t they? Now, picture a gunwoman.

It’s much more difficult, isn’t it? Calamity Jane comes to mind. Belle Starr. And Ma Barker. Bonnie Parker, of “Bonnie and Clyde” fame (but that was really Faye Dunaway, wasn’t it?). La Femme Nikita. Thelma and Louise. Patty Hearst, in her “Tanya” phase with the Symbionese Liberation Army. Perhaps Manson follower Lynnette “Squeaky” Frome, in her bungled assassination attempt against then-President Gerald Ford. And that is about it, when it comes to conventional images of women “armed and dangerous.”

Or at least it has been, until fairly recently in American cultural history. We live in a “gun culture,” a “gunfighter nation.”¹ Firearms have shaped this society, for better, and sometimes for worse. In the popular imagination, these firearms have always been, and belonged, in male hands. If this has been true of the outlaws among us, it is even truer for those whose legitimate gun use forged American democracy: the Minuteman, the lawman, the soldier, the pioneer.

In these male hands, the gun has served a symbolic function that exceeds any practical utility. It has become the symbol par excellence of masculinity: of power, force, aggressiveness, decisiveness, deadly accuracy, cold rationality. These are not things generally believed to be available to, let alone desirable for, women. Annie Oakley, whom Sitting Bull nicknamed “Little Sure Shot” and who managed to project an aura of petite femininity even as she outshot every male opponent who had the guts to take her on, looks, if anything, like the rare female exception that proves the gender rule.

But of course, as Oakley herself knew, gender rules are made to be broken. And, as even a cursory study of American social history bears out, gun use has never been solely the prerogative of men. Here, as elsewhere in the tangled history of gender relations, popular myth flies in the face of historical fact. There have always been gun women: pioneers, hunters, adventurers, defenders of their homes and families. There have been some outlaws, too, although as with their male compatriots, the vast majority of gun women are, and have always been, law-abiding citizens who possess and use firearms for an array of legitimate purposes.

It is true that the number of female firearms users has always been smaller than the number of men. It is equally true, however, that women have been an increasingly visible component of the gun-owning population since the 1980s. If, as conventional wisdom has it, women and guns don’t mix, then how can we account for the fact that today in America, one in four guns is being purchased by a woman?²

The Decade of the Gun Woman

The 1990s were the decade in which the American gun woman began to assert herself as a cultural force. Women and guns became big news. Several gun manufacturers had, in the 1980s, brought out handguns specifically designed for women. The guns proved popular, and one of them, Smith & Wesson’s LadySmith revolver, was a spectacular success. The firearms industry at large was aggressively targeting a female market that had more disposable income than ever before. The National Rifle Association (NRA), eager to increase its female membership, established a Women’s Issues and Information Office and developed a women’s self-defense seminar series called “Refuse to Be a Victim.” The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), a marketing group, underwrote the creation of the Women’s Shooting Sports Foundation (WSSF). Hit films Thelma and Louise and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (both 1991) featured strong, gun-toting women and spawned a succession of “bad girl” movies. An action film noire, La Femme Nikita (1990), became the basis for a popular cable TV series about a female hired gun. The magazine Women & Guns hit the newsstands. A revival of the musical Annie, Get Your Gun was a smash hit on Broadway.

Meanwhile, anti-gun groups like Handgun Control, Inc., and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence gained national prominence. From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, a number of anti-gun public health studies, authored by Arthur Kellermann and colleagues, were published by the New England Journal of Medicine. Public concerns about gun proliferation were exacerbated by the standoff between federal law officers and the Randy Weaver family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the tragic outcome of the siege at the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas. In both cases, women and children figured prominently as victims. In 1993, Colin Ferguson shot twenty-three people, killing five, on a Long Island Railroad commuter train. Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was murdered and whose son was permanently disabled in the attack, was subsequently elected to Congress on a gun control platform. The Brady Act, mandating a background check and five-day waiting period for the purchase of a handgun, was signed into law in 1993. It was followed by the federal “assault weapon” ban, outlawing certain semi-automatic rifles and large-capacity ammunition clips, in 1994. The 1996 massacre of a kindergarten class and their teacher in Dunblane, Scotland, led to a ban on handguns in the United Kingdom. A rash of school shootings in the late nineties led anti-gun activists to call for a similar ban in the United States.

A Harris Poll published in 1993 predicted that gun control might well become “the next great women’s issue in the country.”³ That statement proved prophetic, though in ways not necessarily envisioned by the pollsters. While many women were asking “Why guns?” for many others the big question had become “Why not?” The number of women hunters jumped dramatically, from approximately 3 percent to more than 10 percent of the total hunting population. Recreational and competitive shooting rapidly grew in popularity among women. So did classes in women’s lethal-force self-defense.

Analysts hotly debated whether the number or proportion of women gun owners was actually growing or merely seemed to be (a question of statistical sleight-of-hand to which we will return in the next chapter). But whatever the numerical realities, by the early nineties it was, quite simply, no longer possible to ignore the fact that millions of American women were buying and using firearms. Virtually every major newspaper, broadcast network, and news magazine routinely carried stories by turns celebrating and condemning the new trend toward female gun ownership.

Most of these stories treated women’s gun use as at best a mixed blessing, at worst a disaster waiting to happen. “Should you own a gun?” asked a typical news item in Glamour magazine. “The answer is probably no,” the piece began, and went on to enumerate several implicit disincentives to gun ownership, among them “Are you willing to kill someone?” and “Have you considered the likelihood of a tragic accident—for example, suppose you shot a so-called intruder who turned out to be a family member come home unexpectedly?”⁴ An article entitled “What You Know about Guns Can Kill You” in Vogue even more flatly ruled out firearms possession as a reasonable option for women: “The familiar argument says guns don’t kill, people do. But scientists now see violence as a disease, guns as dangerous in themselves—and women as especially vulnerable.”⁵ An editorial in USA Today put the case even more baldly. It read, in part:

Women of America: Watch out. The National Rifle Association is increasing its focus on you as gun owners. More of you and your children are going to die. . . . [A]n accessible, loaded firearm in the home is a prescription for tragedy that is regularly filled. . . . They [the NRA, in its “Refuse to Be a Victim” self-defense program] merely encourage women to add to their daily peril. That’s a sure path to more gun violence, more spattered blood, and more pointless death.⁶

Handgun Control, Inc., chairwoman Sarah Brady told the New York Times, regarding the NRA’s “Refuse to Be A Victim” program, “They prey on fear, they prey on guilt. The newest twist is ‘Be assertive; do what the men are doing.’ Well, no thank you”⁷ Columnist Ellen Goodman argued that “women . . . have come to one of those forks in the road. Either they will work to disarm others, or more and more will arm themselves.” She concluded against the latter option: “It’s more powerful to flex our muscle collectively than to buy one more .38 caliber piece of ‘personal protection.’”⁸ Writing in The New Republic, Karen Lehrman flatly rejected even the implication that gun use might be a matter of choice for women: “All this women’s lib stuff . . . can’t obscure the gun lobby’s real agenda—exploiting women’s fears of rape. . . . The anti-date rape crowd couldn’t have said it any better.”⁹

The prevailing image that emerged from popular media depictions of the armed woman could be summed up as follows:

• She is driven by fear that, even if well-placed, is not a good reason to consider arming herself.

• She is being manipulated by advertising calculated to heighten her fears and exploit them.

• She is very likely incapable of comprehending the possible consequences of her actions.

• She is potentially dangerous to others and therefore needs to be protected from herself.

• She is trying to buy a false sense of security and personal autonomy.

• Her decision may well end in tragedy.

Or, as Peggy Tartaro, editor of Women & Guns magazine stated it: in the popular perception, any armed woman is automatically both Thelma and Louise on a very bad day, and dangerous to everyone within a 50-mile radius.

The negative popular image of the gun-armed woman was reinforced in the academic and professional literature. Most notable were the Kellermann studies, which provided much of the pseudofactual grist for the anti-gun mill.¹⁰ Among the findings of these studies were such now-familiar factoids as these: that a gun in the house is forty-three times more likely to be used against a friend or family member than a stranger; that the very presence of a firearm increases the likelihood of its lethal use; that firearms are very seldom used effectively in self-defense; that there is a direct correlation between strict gun regulation and low incidence of gun-related violence; that guns pose an especially great danger to women and children. These “findings” have been challenged by a host of well-credentialed critics. They have never been duplicated—indeed, they cannot be, since the authors of these studies refuse to share their data with independent researchers. Nonetheless, they have appeared so often both in news accounts and in anti-gun fund-raising solicitations that they have achieved the status of established fact.

Playing on Fear

By far the most common criticism leveled at the firearms industry, with regard to its increased marketing to women, is that gun makers are cashing in on women’s very legitimate fears for their own safety. Indeed, what sociologists Margaret Gordon and Stephanie Riger have called “the female fear”¹¹—women’s pervasive and ever-present awareness of the potential of sexual assault and the negative social and economic consequences of this awareness—certainly helps to explain why women might opt for firearms ownership. And just as certainly, some of the advertisements often singled out for criticism are clearly designed to frame women’s gun ownership in the context of fear of (presumably sexual) assault.

However, contrary to what the media and anti-gun organizations routinely assert, while fear may be one among several factors predisposing a woman toward gun ownership, it appears to play a subordinate role in most cases. The results of numerous studies, regarding the precise role that fear of victimization plays in the procurement of firearms, are at best inconclusive. A widely cited 1994 study from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in Chicago, focusing on women gun owners, established that they are not more likely to have been victims of violent crime, and are only slightly more likely to live in “fearful” neighborhoods.¹² We will return to this subject in the next chapter, but it bears remarking now that, as criminologist Gary Kleck points out, “gun acquisition, even for protective reasons, may be a fairly unemotional act of prudence and planning for the future.”¹³

This is important because, in our culture, women have always been defined more in terms of emotion than rationality. Critics of female gun use are generally more comfortable seeing women in the light of conventional stereotypes. So, too, are many defenders of women’s right to keep and bear arms. Hence the depiction, in both the popular and the academic press, of women driven by fear—and often against their feminine inclinations—to procure guns. The general impression is that, as British scholar Susie McKellar concluded in her study of firearms advertising directed at American women,

the majority of American women who are arming themselves for self-defence, are scared, and are doing so reluctantly. Gun ownership amongst women is not considered an American birthright as it is for men and, consequently, does not hold the same significance that it does for men. . . . The main way gun manufacturers appeal to women is through emotive, stereotyped images of women as child-bearers, nurturers and carers and the handgun control lobbyists are likewise appealing to their sense of responsibility by using the same visual language.¹⁴

McKellar arrived at her conclusion via consideration of ads that clearly played on, or sometimes against, images of conventional femininity. One, for Colt’s compact semi-automatic pistols, depicted a mother tucking her child into bed, under the legend “Self-protection is more than your right . . . it’s your responsibility,” and likened a gun to a home fire extinguisher. Another pictured a nightstand with a photo of a mother and her two daughters, beside which rests a Beretta pistol. Noting “it’s a different world today, than when you grew up,” an ad for Smith & Wesson’s LadySmith revolver pictured a young woman at a shooting range, and asked, “What Would Mom Think Now?” An ad for a company marketing concealed-carry pocketbooks showed a lone woman crossing a darkened parking lot to her isolated car and asked, “Now that you’ve purchased a gun, shouldn’t you have it with you?”

Advertisements like these clearly can be read as attempts to exploit women’s legitimate concerns. But do they turn women into unwilling gun owners? In 1995, marketing professors Elizabeth Blair and Eva Hyatt set out to prove they did, but wound up finding the opposite. In a study of the marketing of guns to women,¹⁵ Blair and Hyatt found that attitudes toward guns varied predictably along gender lines: men were generally more pro-gun, women generally less so. But “for both men and women, respondents exposed to the advertisements are not significantly more pro-gun than those who were not exposed.” Indeed, the only statistically significant difference in attitudes they recorded was that women who saw the NRA’s “You Can Choose to Refuse to Be a Victim” advertisements were more likely to think of the NRA as “very concerned about women’s safety.” Despite criticism to the contrary—criticism with which both researchers admitted they had originally concurred—they could only conclude that “advertisements for guns and gun-related products are not likely to make a woman significantly more pro-gun.”

Could advertisements make women anti-gun? The gun control lobby surely thinks so, and has used “the female fear” in roughly the same way as have some firearms manufacturers’ ads. Take, for example, a fund-solicitation letter like the following from the Coalition to Stop Gun Viole...