Mary Zeiss Stange - Gun Women: Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America

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Gun Women

Gun Women

Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America

MARY ZEISS STANGE AND CAROL K. OYSTER

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London

Copyright 2000 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stange, Mary Zeiss.
Gun women : firearms and feminism in contemporary America/
Mary Zeiss Stange and Carol K. Oyster.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8147-9760-1 (acid-free)
1. Gun controlUnited StatesPublic opinion. 2. WomenUnited States
Attitudes. 3. Firearm ownersUnited States. 4. Women huntersUnited
States. 5. Public opinionUnited States. I. Oyster, Carol K. II. Title.
HV7436 .S73 2000
363.330820973dc21 00-009690

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for Doug always, and in all ways

and

for Katherine, my daughter, an aspiring gun woman

Contents

Snapshot
Mary Zeiss Stange, Trajectories

Snapshot
Carol K. Oyster, Rings on Her Fingers, Shells in Her Gun

1 High Noon at the Gender Gap
Feminism and the Firearms Debate

Snapshot
Peggy Tartaro, The Arms of Venus DeMilo

2 Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves
The Question of Womens Armed Self-Defense

Snapshot
Vivian B. Lord, Becoming a Police Officer1975

Snapshot
Jennifer Gwyn, Becoming a Police Officer1999

3 In the Line of Fire
Women in Law Enforcement and the Military

Snapshot
Susan Ewing, A Womans Place

4 Babies and Bullets in the Same Conversation
American Women and Hunting

Snapshot
Abigail Kohn, Cowboy Dreaming: Guns in Fantasy and Role-Playing

5 Sometimes Girls Just Want to Have Fun
Recreational and Competitive Shooting

All illustrations appear as a group following .

Acknowledgments

Gun Women, in one sense, is the product of a two-year collaboration between its authors. Yet, in another and broader way, it is the result of a decades worth of critical conversation about women, guns, and feminism. We thank Don B. Kates, Jr., for initially involving each of us in that conversation, for serving over the years as a near-inexhaustible source of information on gun-related issues, and especially for introducing us to each other in 1997 on the hunch that we might hit it off, and setting the stage for this collaboration. Others who have helped shape our thinking about women and firearms, and without whose insights or scholarship this book could not have happened, include Mark Benenson, Kitty Beuchert, Paul Blackman, Robert Cottrol, Jan Dizard, Frances Haga, C. B. Kates, Gary Kleck, David Kopel, Nicholas Johnson, Alan Lizotte, John Lott, Gary Mauser, Joseph Olson, and Penelope Ploughman. We also must thank Martha McCaughey, both for her scholarship and for the faith she gives us that Third Wave feminism indeed has a future!

Our special gratitude goes to the women who contributed the personal narratives that precede each chapterSusan Ewing, Jennifer Gwyn, Abigail Kohn, Vivian Lord, and Peggy Tartaroas well as those who are the subjects of Nancy Floyds photographs. Their voices, along with those of the many women we interviewed and surveyed for , added untold richness and depth to our thinking and our writing. This book is, ultimately, theirs.

Additionally, Mary Stange wishes especially to acknowledge the following: Shari LeGate of the Womens Shooting Sports Foundation, Diane Lueck of the Becoming an Outdoors-Woman Program, and Peggy Tartaro of Women & Guns magazine for information they provided along the way; Sandra Froman and Edie Reynolds for getting questionnaires into the e-mail boxes of gun women across the country; and Eva Hatenboer and Rebecca Burnham of the Philosophy and Religion Department of Skidmore College for providing research assistance and clerical support.

Carol Oyster is especially grateful to Paul Petterson for providing me with contacts such as Aaron Zellman and the important work on police responsibility, Joe Roberts of the National Rifle Association for searching the archives to provide me with historical references and contacts, and Special Agent Roger Trotter of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for facilitating my access to the remarkable women of the FBI. Thanks, too, to Gary Kleck and Gary Mauser for helping sort out the literature on defensive gun uses.

We are deeply grateful to Niko Pfund at New York University Press for his patience, humor, and editorial guidance that improved the book while keeping it true to our original intent, and preserving our voices as authors. Thanks, too, to NYU Presss managing editor Despina Papazoglou Gimbel for the care with which she guided the manuscript through publication. We are indebted to Douglas C. Stange, for coming up with the books title, as well as with the idea on which the cover design is based.

Portions of originally appeared, in different form, in Arms and the Woman: A Feminist Reappraisal, in David B. Kopel, ed., Guns: Who Should Have Them? (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995).

Introduction

Pro-Firearms, Pro-Feminist

This books authors are gun women. We own and use firearms for a variety of good reasons. We know many other women who do, too. Like most of those women, we are concerned about knee-jerk anti-gun rhetoric, and the tendency for the debate over guns and gun control to degenerate into name-calling between bleeding-heart liberals and gun nuts. Like other gun women, we are also concerned about the potential erosion of our right to keep and bear arms. This does not mean we are opposed to reasonable gun control. Indeed, quite the opposite. Like most gun ownersthe law-abiding majority, at any ratewe accept and affirm that reasonable forms of firearms regulation are necessary and important. However, the arguments for and against specific forms of gun control fall outside the scope of this book. Somewhere between eleven and seventeen million American women currently own guns. We are interested in the positive impact of firearms on the lives of these women.

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