WITH PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL
WOMEN
&
GUNS
EXPANDED EDITION
Politics and the
Culture of Firearms
in America
DEBORAH HOMSHER
First published 2002 by M.E. Sharpe
Published 2015 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 2001, 2002 by Deborah Homsher
No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notices
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Homsher, Deborah, 1952-
Women & guns: politics and the culture of firearms in America, Deborah Homsher.
expanded edition
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7656-0679-8 (pbk: alk. paper)
I. Gun controlUnited StatesPublic opinion. 2. WomenUnited StatesAttitudes. 3. Firearms and crimeUnited StatesPublic opinion. 4. Violent crimesUnited StatesPublic opinion. 5. Public opinionUnited States. I. Title: Women and guns.
II. Title.
HV7436.H66 2002
3 63.330973dc21 |
2001049091
CIP
|
ISBN 13: 9780765606792 (pbk)
It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has traveled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
Henry David Thoreau
Contents
__________________________
A list of the documents that are included
in the Appendix to this edition
appears on pages 24142.
___________________________
I wish to thank the many people who contributed to this study. Most important were the women and men who agreed to speak with me about their experiences and their opinions. A few of these individuals are not named in the text, most notable among them David Corina, a storyteller and hunter, and Marie Corina, Donna Freedline and Ray Freedline, Dr. Arthur Smith, who took me hiking to look for rattlesnakes when I thought this book would be about something else, Bebe Smith, and the guides at Turkey Trot Acres. I would also like to thank Lisa Erbach Vance, who coaxed me to expand this study at an early stage and who provided incisive editorial advice; Stuart Basefsky, whose great enthusiasm for and knowledge about online search engines guided me to a rich field of new material; Rose Batt, who suggested I contact Stuart Basefsky; Peter Coveney, my editor, who read and approved the manuscript and offered insightful suggestions; my sons, Kevin and Michael Egan, who figure significantly in this discussion, though they remain behind the curtain; and my mother and father.
Special thanks to Mark Seldenif it were not for his editing and generous intervention, this book would still be a loose manuscript in a basketand to my husband, Hugh Egan, for his abiding good sense and love.
WOMEN
&
GUNS
__________________________
Making Histories
This book is about American women in the 1990s, their experiences with guns, and their responses to the national public debates about guns and violence. It aspires to give voice to citizens who hold divergent political opinions and, in this way, to find out something about life in the country as it is perceived and interpreted by people who call themselves Americans.
The efforts of these women to define their own histories and the history of the nation based on personal experiences, political analyses, and news reports reveal politics in action at the most basic level. The women whom I interviewed commonly explained what they thought about guns in the United States by telling anecdotes. Frequently, they used popular political messages to shape or conclude these narratives. Yet now and again their own experiences proved to be too complex or contradictory to match the gauge prescribed by agendas that had been forged for political combat. When this happened, when women began telling personal stories that didnt teach a simple pro-gun or anti-gun lesson, stories that defied the established categories, I felt that I came closest to watching a citizen at work.
We live in a vast, combative democracy that encourages people to take sides. Many women I interviewed had committed themselves to one side or the other in the gun-control debates, and they had adopted the positions, the talking points, of partisan advocacy groups organized to mediate between the government and the people. These advocacy groups clearly sought to influence public policy by cultivating, and educating, a constituency, be it a constituency of hunters or concealed-carry supporters or gun-control advocates. These citizen groups were held together by friendships and get-togethers at the local level, but guided by pronouncements from various national headquarters that sought to represent their interests. I was always curious to see what happened at this intersection between the national and the localwhat messages got transmitted straight through and which were lost or altered in transmissionand also to see what happened at the intersection between traditionally masculine organizations and their female constituents. As one might expect, local women very often adapted programs to fit their needs, borrowing some sections of a platform while discarding others. Occasionally they were able to join special womens programs designed to accommodate and attract them. But individual women also adapted themselves; they shaped their identities and their visions to accord with national agendas. I believe democratic nations are created in this way. Any working definition of we the people can never fully accommodate an actual, various, changeable, motley citizenry. Somebody is always spilling (or being pushed) outside the frame. But we cant manage without a frame. To feel ourselves citizens, we must have some concept of what it means to be American or alternately, un-American. Right here, in this territory where citizens gather to hammer together the framework of the nation and of themselves, the United States is perpetually recreated.
