The pamphlet is notable for being published in 1975 by an anonymous “group of women who have spent our lives living in danger of attack from men.”

Thanks to Kathy Jackson (a.k.a., “The Cornered Cat”), a thought leader on women in gun culture, for finding her copy and sending it to me.

For more on the reasons I needed this document recently, please read on. . .

I have been furiously working on a revision of my article on the evolution of American gun culture for an upcoming issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. As noted on “Light Over Heat,” I received some excellent feedback on my original draft from an anonymous peer reviewer. One critique was that I needed to flesh out the seeds of Gun Culture 2.0 that were planted in the 1960s and 70s. So for the past week, I have launched myself down this intellectual rabbit hole like a drunk New Jersey high schooler at (Class) Action Park.

In tracing the roots of Gun Culture 2.0, I want to avoid the temptation to make it a story about the National Rifle Association (NRA). I generally downplay the importance of the NRA (perhaps too much) in my work to counteract every other scholar who overplays the centrality of the NRA.

For example, I was recently re-reading Caroline Light’s book, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense. (If you replace “history” with “critique,” you get a better idea of where she is coming from.) In any event, at one point Light writes, “Armed citizens such as Arizonan Carrie Lightfoot . . . have helped bolster the NRA’s appeal to women.” Lightfoot founded The Well Armed Woman in 2012 for reasons she explains on her website. To reduce Lightfoot’s work to bolstering the NRA’s appeal to women both slights her efforts and gives too much credit to the NRA. Sure, the NRA brought Lightfoot on board once she was already established, as they did with Colion Noir and Chris Cheng on NRATV. But all were significant figures in the gun culture outside the NRA prior to their formal association.

To bolster my own argument about the roots of Gun Culture 2.0 outside the NRA, I have been looking at women’s self-defense in the 1970s. As Caroline Light herself recognizes, a movement for self-defense empowerment for women was developing out of the Second Wave Feminism of the 1960s. Model Mugging was founded in 1971 and the Women’s Self-Defense Council in 1975. Roe v Wade was decided in 1973. The struggle for women’s bodily autonomy was a thing during that time period, as it is still today.

These are the roots of what sociologist Martha McCaughey would later call “physical feminism” in her book Real Knockouts. And this is the context within which The Woman’s Gun Pamphlet was born in 1975.

As civilian gun training became more popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some adherents to physical feminism continued to incorporate armed self-defense. After all, the legal justification for use of deadly force in self-defense includes not just the possibility of death but also grave bodily injury, which includes rape, as McCaughey points out.

As is often the case, the NRA played cultural catchup after it noticed women’s growing interest in physical self-defense. It capitalized on it with programs in the 1970s like Women in the NRA and the 1990s’ “Refuse To Be a Victim.” This led to a critical response in which anti-gun people argued that women were being “seduced by the NRA’s ads” and were victims of the NRA’s “patriarchal double-dealing” (McCaughey 1997, 140). McCaughey’s response: “We cannot blame or credit NRA advertisements for the entire self-defense movement.”

This is a good reminder in general, even today, as many seek to equate gun culture with — or, more accurately, to reduce it to — the NRA.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to include a screencap of one of the pages of The Woman’s Gun Pamphlet which strongly resonates today as we see movements for and against women’s bodily autonomy today.

Recognizing that the four parts of the Holy Quaternity of sociology (race, class, gender, and sexuality) intersect, the existing scholarly literature doesn’t permit a fully intersectional analysis. So, having treated race and guns in Module 5, I consider gender and sexuality separately in Module 7.

There is more scholarly work on gender and guns than sexuality, especially if we include the common focus on hegemonic masculinity. But, as I have noted previously, I was pleased to include the first ever peer-reviewed sociological study of LGBT gun owners in a special issue of a journal I co-edited and I will certainly assign that article.

Required readings for Module 7 are:

• Angela Stroud, “Good Guys with Guns: Hegemonic Masculinity and Concealed Handguns,” Gender & Society (2012). Perhaps the purest example of a study that examines gun owners from the perspective of hegemonic masculinity.
• Margaret Kelley, “Feminism and Firearms: Gun Ownership, Gun Carrying, and Women’s Empowerment,” Sociological Perspectives (2021). Considers the possibility that women’s gun carrying represents a “feminist culture in action.”
• Jennifer Carlson, “Carrying Arms, Contesting Gender,” Contexts (2015). A sociologically-informed woman’s reflection on the gendered experience of carrying a gun.
• Jonathan Rauch, “Pink Pistols,” Salon (2000). Among the earliest essays advocating armed self-defense for homosexuals (his term), gives rise to Pink Pistols organization.
• Andrew Belonsky, “Pink Pistols: LGBT Gun Owners Unite in Arming Gay Community,” Rolling Stone (2016). Reporting on Pink Pistols organization, published two weeks after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando.
• Thatcher Phoenix Combs, “Queers with Guns? Against the LGBT Grain.” Sociological Perspectives (2021). The article mentioned above.

Recommended readings for Module 7 are:

• Jennifer Carlson, “Mourning Mayberry: Guns, Masculinity, and Socioeconomic Decline.” Gender & Society (2015). Article version of Citizen-Protectors book argument: downwardly mobile white men reassert their masculinity via gun carrying.
• Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (2006). “Iconic women with guns have challenged and yet reinforced the masculinist ideal of America — that guns are inextricably tied to both masculinity and American identity.”
• Scott Melzer, Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (2009). The NRA and its members fight a culture war on behalf of the ideology of frontier masculinity which is at the heart of American gun culture.
• Connie Hassett-Walker, “Women in Online Gun Subculture,” in Guns on the Internet (2019). Women’s involvement in online gun subculture “signal and reinforce the subculture’s (masculine) norms and values.”
• Martha McCaughey, “Getting Mean: On the Scene in Self-Defense Classes,” in Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense (1997). Early and rare study of armed self-defense as a feminist enterprise.
• David Yamane, Riley Satterwhite, and Paul Yamane, “A Woman’s Place in Gun Advertisements: The American Rifleman, 1920-2019,” in Understanding American Gun Culture, 2^nd Edition (2021). Systematically analyzes the portrayal of gender in gun advertisements over a 100 year time period and finds a more complicated story than expected from many theories of hegemonic masculinity in gun culture.
• Tomsich, Elizabeth A., Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, Rocco Pallin, and Garen J. Wintemute. “Firearm Ownership Among LGBT Adults in California.” Violence and Gender (2020). 6% to 11% of LGBT adults in California personally own guns and 12% to 20% of LGBT households have guns in them. From the abstract: “Most LGBT owners owned a single firearm for purposes of self-protection; almost one in three reported carrying a loaded handgun in the prior month.”

I don’t take the recommended readings to be comprehensive or complete. Suggestions are welcome.

As I was concocting my plan, I consulted — as I do with all important gun-related things — with my friend John Johnston of Ballistic Radio and Citizens Defense Research fame. I told him I wanted to build a rifle for Sandy based on a lower receiver engraved with “NASTY WOMAN” and “SHE PERSISTED.”

John suggested it would be imprudent to build this into a functioning rifle for anything other than fun. In the improbable but not impossible event that Sandy had to use the rifle for self-defense, she would not want a rifle with these phrases entered into evidence.

So, I ended up having Infectious Design (again) engrave and Cerakote (in pink champagne, Sandy’s favorite drink) the lower receiver and gave it to Sandy as a 7th anniversary gift (on 02/20/21) to use as a paper weight.

I was really pleased with how it came out and Sandy was very touched by the gesture.

With John’s guidance, I ended up constructing a rifle for Sandy consisting of Bravo Company USA BCM® MK2 Standard 14.5″ Mid Length (ENHANCED Light Weight-*FLUTED*) Upper Receiver Group w/ MCMR-13 Handguard (with some other fancy do-dad options) and a Primary Weapons Systems MK1 MOD2 Complete Rifle Lower. I snapped the two halves together, topped it off with an optical sight, back up iron sights, and a weapon mounted light, and the rifle was good to go.

Of course, to make it a proper Feminist Assault Rifle, I took the lower to Infectious Design to have it engraved and fill painted in Sandy’s preferred pink champagne color.

The Feminist Assault Rifle came out great and I was happy to be able to use have my Sociology of Guns seminar students shoot it during our class field trip.

TLDR: I just posted a publicly-accessible pre-print of a book chapter, “A Woman’s Place in Gun Advertisements: The American Rifleman, 1920-2019,” co-authored with recent Wake Forest University graduate (and current George Washington University Law School 1L) Riley Satterwhite and my son Paul Yamane (Wake Forest ’16). The chapter is scheduled to appear in the forthcoming Second Edition of the book, Understanding American Gun Culture.

For longer than I care to remember, I have been working on an analysis of the portrayal of women in gun advertising. I have posted some elementary thoughts about this along the way, including on Crimson’s Trace’s interesting banner at the 2016 NRA annual meeting and a pair of ads they ran in The American Rifleman in 2009, as well as a TV ad for the M&P Shield placed on Sportsman’s Channel by Smith & Wesson.

Although gun culture is typically characterized as embodying hegemonic masculinity, looking at advertisements over a 100 year time period complicates the gender story. To wit: As soon as I embarked on my study of the rise of self-defense (Gun Culture 2.0) using ads in The American Rifleman (and later Guns), I noticed some surprising appearances of women in those magazines. One example I first posted about in 2015 (did I mention I have been at this for a while?) was an ad for Peters Cartridges featuring a Lady Champion shooter which ran in January 1937.

Of course, just scanning magazines for images of women can lead to false conclusions driven by confirmation and other biases (see Daniel Kahneman). To overcome this takes serious time and effort. Our systematic study of gender advertisements in The American Rifleman over a 100-year time period took hundreds of hours to complete.

In the end, we found a more complex portrayal of women in gun advertising than we expected based on the scholarly literatures on gun culture and on gender in advertising.

Reflecting gun culture itself, gun advertising as a whole is largely the domain of men, though the gap in gender representation is shrinking, especially from the 1980s forward (see Figure 1 reproduced above). Moreover, when women do appear in gun advertising, at least in The American Rifleman, some of the worst stereotypical gender displays we find in the world of print advertising more broadly are more muted or absent altogether.

For the empirical basis of this conclusion, please download and read the pre-print on SocArXiv.

Seen today on the Independent Firearm Owners Association homepage. . .

Seen today on the Independent Firearm Owners Association Facebook page. . .

If they really wanted to feature female gun owners, I know a number of women shooters who could have been pictured doing more than just modeling guns and in doing so better match the stated purpose of this firearm owners association.

I was going to write a summary of the article, but then it occurred to me that the author himself might do a better job of sharing his ideas on the topic. I am pleased that Noah S. Schwartz (see about the author at the end) agreed, and his thoughts are below.

(If you cannot access the original article behind the paywall, send me an email and I can send you a copy for educational purposes.)

By Noah S. Schwartz

My car kicked up a small storm of dust as I turned on to the long dirt driveway of my local gun range. I glanced over at my companion in the passenger’s seat and could see that she was visibly nervous. I smiled reassuringly, thinking back to my first time shooting a gun, only a few years before, and how anxious I had been. As a woman, about to enter the hypermasculine world of the gun culture, I could only imagine it must be much more difficult for her.

My colleague, I’ll call her Tara, had acquired her Canadian gun license so that she could qualify for a promotion in her summer job as a tree planter in western Canada – grizzly country. She wanted some experience pulling triggers before facing the prospect of defending herself and her team from a 500 pound bear, so she had reached out to the only person with shooting experience she knew in Ottawa. I was happy to oblige.

We walked up to the counter of the pro-shop to pay our admission. “Is this your first time shooting?”, the attendant asked Tara. “Ladies shoot for free their first two times”. The gun range had realized what firearms manufacturers and advocacy groups had started to grasp in the late 1980s: that if the shooting sports and gun industry were to survive, they needed to attract more women.

One such organization was the National Rifle Association of America (NRA), who have invested significantly in several programs to bring women into the gun culture. They recognize that women are an important demographic that the organization has missed out on in the past. As a result, they have increasingly sought to find female spokespeople. This includes conservative commentators like Dana Loesch or professional shooters like Kim Rhode and Julie Golob. They have created new course curricula, like the NRA Refuse to be a Victim Program, which I took as part of my ethnographic fieldwork on the organization in Virginia. Finally, they have created a ton of new digital content geared at attracting women to the gun culture.

This is the topic of my recently published article, “Called to arms: the NRA, the gun culture & women”, which was published in the journal of Critical Policy Studies. The article examines three online television series that the NRA has produced under the label of NRA Women: Armed & Fabulous, Love at First Shot, and New Energy. These shows attempt to help women overcome the internalized social barriers to their entry in the gun culture by presenting them with female role models, helpful advice, and stories of women that have found success and empowerment in the gun world.

The NRA faces an uphill battle in this regard. Though the feminist movement has made great progress, masculinist ideology still exerts a profound influence on North American society, creating a strong social taboo against female gun ownership. The majority of gun owners in Canada and the United States are men, and women tend to be much more supportive of gun control.

Further, guns are often framed by politicians and social movements as a threat to women. For example, one of the most powerful gun control lobbies in America deploys this frame in their name: “Mom’s Demand Action”. North of the border, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has attempted to position his recent “assault-weapons” ban as a way of protecting women and girls, even though most victims of gun violence in Canada are young men.

The NRA programming is part of their attempt to counter this frame. Their messaging emphasizes the empowering aspects of gun ownership for women, not just in terms of protection from crime, but also the empowerment that comes from participating in the shooting sports or hunting. Further, their programs make excellent use of narrative. Scholars are of policy are increasingly realize the important role that storytelling plays for political groups in winning friends and influencing people. The NRA Women programming provides an excellent case study of this principle in action.

Back at the gun range, Tara was taking her first shots with a .22LR lever-action rifle. Despite being new to shooting, she resoundingly trounced me and had a fun time doing it. Looking up and down the range though, I noticed that she was one of the only women there. Though the firearms industry and advocates have made significant efforts in both Canada and the US to bring women into the gun culture, it is evident that social barriers to women’s participation remain strong.

About the Author

NOAH S. SCHWARTZ is a PhD candidate in Political Science with specializations in Public Policy and International Relations. His research looks at the politics of memory and the use of narrative in the American gun debate. His doctoral research project, supervised by Mira Sucharov, employs ethnographic methods to study community building and the mobilization of narratives about America’s past by the gun-rights movement. Noah received his BA at Carleton in Global Politics, before moving overseas to complete his MSc in Defence, Development and Diplomacy at Durham University. After working with the Privy Council Office and Global Affairs Canada, he returned to study at Carleton in the fall of 2016 to begin his PhD.

When I think of this problem, one of the reasons that comes immediately to mind is the cost of higher level gun training. I can relate to this as I have gone thousands of dollars in debt traveling to observe gun training events over the past 5 years. And I only infrequently actually participate in those events and therefore rarely have tuition costs (and in Craig Douglas’s case, he waived my tuition).

Although they recognize the cost barrier to training, Rehn and Daub downplay its significance. As they note, many gun people have no trouble finding money when it comes to buying another gun or more gun-related accessories. They quote a maxim of John Holschen of Insights Training:

Amateurs think equipment,

Students think techniques,

Experts think tactics.

So, some of getting beyond the one percent has to do with resource allocation.

Most of us allocate a certain amount of our resources — time, treasure, talent — to helping others. How great would it be to support a worthy charity AND have the chance to rise above amateur status at the same time? It is possible.

A nationwide training raffle is being held again this year In conjunction with and in support of “The Mingle”, an event hosted by The Complete Combatant (Brian and Shelley Luehder Hill) that brings together women in the firearms/self-defense industry for networking and education.

A number of the best defensive trainers in the country have donated to the raffle. You can read the complete rules on the raffle site, but basically you donate money and get entered into the raffle for a slot in a training course, a gift certificate, or some other prize.

50% of the proceeds from the raffle go to help with The Mingle’s operating expenses for the following year and 50% goes to support Racheal’s Rest., a 501c3 nonprofit that helps women and children who have experienced sexual abuse or acts of violence regain their balance in lives. (The spelling of Racheal is correct, read the moving story of its origin.)

I don’t want to offend any of the great trainers who donated, some of whose classes I could not attend just because of timing or distance, but I have my eye on a few raffle items in particular:

• Caleb Causey of Lone Star Medics has donated 1 LIFETIME invite to attend as many LSM classes as the winner can attend (as long as you meet any prerequisites) free of charge ($50 raffle ticket). My medical knowledge and ability is bad.
  
• William Aprill of Aprill Risk Consulting has donated a seat in his “Unthinkable” course ($25 raffle ticket). Readers of this blog may recall that I have been low-key stalking Aprill for a while now and want to attend this class more than any class currently available. No kidding.
• The red-dot Jedi, Scott Jedlinski of Modern Samurai Project ($25 raffle ticket). I have only shot a red-dot pistol on one occasion and it was intriguing. Would like to learn more.
• Jacks and Saps with Larry Lindenman of Point Driven Training at Annette Evans’s Race Street Range ($25 raffle ticket). I am really increasingly interested in less-than-lethal options for self-defense. Class is ideal, timing is tough, though!

So, that’s where my $100-$125 in donations is going. Where are you throwing your support?

The complete list of donors is: Lee Weems of First Person Safety, Dodd & Associates Training, Tom and Lynn Givens of Rangemaster, Karl Rehn of KR Training, Chuck Haggard of Agile Training and Consulting, Lone Star Medics with Caleb Causey, Scott Jedlinksi of Modern Samurai Project, The Complete Combatant and Fusion Fitness and MMA (Brian Hill), John Correia of Active Self Protection, Larry Lindenmen of Point Driven Training, William Aprill of Aprill Risk Consulting, Beth Alcazar of Pacifiers & Peacemakers, Massad Ayoob of Massad Ayoob Group, Citizens Safety Academy with Aqil Qadir and Tiffany Johnson, Paul Sharp of Sharp Defense, Spencer Keepers of Keepers Concealment, TDR Training with Tim Reedy, Hirt’s Defensive Solutions with Carl Hirt, Civilian Defender with Sherman House, Archetype of the Gun with Erik Tweedt, and Bill Rogers of Rogers Shooting School.

I discussed this in my series of posts from the 2016 United States Concealed Carry Association (USCCA) Concealed Carry Expo and in the book chapter I wrote about that event, “‘The First Rule of Gunfighting is Have a Gun’: Technologies of Concealed Carry in Gun Culture 2.0.”

One familiar face from the 2016 USCCA Concealed Carry Expo was Anna Taylor of Dene Adams. Taylor was just getting started when I first met her, and not quite 3 years later her company that makes corset style holsters for women (among other products) made its debut in the SHOT Show NEXT Pavilion. Off the main show floor, this corridor allows 100 or so first time exhibitors to get their foot in the door. Cost: $4,395.

Another familiar face was Kirsten Zeh-Franke of Packin’ Neat. She had a full booth on the lower level of the SHOT Show to display her concealed carry purse inserts. She guessed it was her fourth year exhibiting at the SHOT Show.

Of course, concealed carry for women is often synonymous with off-body carry in purses, and one of the household names in this space is Gun Tote’n Mamas.

Leggings/Tights/Athletic pants are all the rage for women, so Girls with Guns clothing understandably marketed a concealed carry variant.

Tactica Defense Fashion put a concealed carry sweater front and center in its booth as an example of how it attempts to bridge women’s twin desires to carry a firearms and look good while doing it. They also sell holsters in partnership with Aliengear Holsters.

Last, it would not be women’s concealed carry without the Can Can Concealment garter holster prominently displayed. They’re still at it after all these years.

The faces in the crowd in the picture above and every other picture I have from the show reflect the statistical reality that the average gun owner in America is a middle-aged white male. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se, but one of the promises of Gun Culture 2.0 is that it will better reflect the diversity of the American population. The massive photo on the back of the Glock booth at the SHOT Show is definitely aspirational.

This was my first SHOT Show, so I don’t have any historical perspective, but I saw more women in professional shooter jerseys or covering the event as media than I did “booth bunnies” (though there were still some of those). I would count that as progress based on what I have heard about previous SHOT Shows.

I also attended a seminar on how companies can leverage their brand ambassadors that featured two female professional shooters, Diana Muller and Gabby Franco.

Although I did not see Colion Noir, the NRA’s designated black commentator, he was apparently at the SHOT Show. I did, however, attend a seminar called “Evolve or Die: Engaging Urban Communities in the 2A Fight” featuring Maj Toure, founder of Black Guns Matter.

I counted about 90 attending Toure’s seminar, overwhelmingly white people. Toure alternated between a reading the text of a PowerPoint presentation on the concept of evolution applied to gun culture, and a freestyle interaction with the audience. He was much more in his element doing the latter, but the net result of his alternating back and forth was some lack of clarity on the promised topic of evolution and engaging urban communities.

In my view, his talk boiled down to a couple of key challenges to gun culture: “What are you doing to engage people outside your bubble?” And support companies that support outreach into urban communities, even if you just want to make more money because you need new customers.

Kudos to the NSSF for giving Toure a platform to begin a dialogue about diversifying gun culture. It’s unfortunate, then, that the same NSSF was selling a SHOT Show branded t-shirt in its show store that threw shade on the professional athletes kneeling during the national anthem to bring attention to the issue of police brutality and racism.

Among the issues that Maj Toure said gun culture was slow to evolve on: inner city police violence.

Why the NSSF felt it necessary to wade into that culture war, I have no idea. I thought that was what the NRA was for? Why not just stick to the more inclusive message found on another t-shirt: I just want to drink coffee and shoot guns.

At 22%, I believe the 2015 National Firearms Survey underestimates the actual rate of personal firearms ownership in the United States. Even still, there are still some interesting results from the survey related to Gun Culture 2.0.

Specifically, I examine here the results focusing on the demographics of those gun owners who only own handguns. As handguns are the primary self-defense firearm owned by Americans, those who own only handguns probably have both feet in Gun Culture 2.0.

In the National Firearms Survey, 63% of respondents said one reason they own firearms is for protection against people. (Another 20% gave protection against animals as a reason.) However, when the authors look at the type of firearms owned, those who own handguns stand out from those who own only long guns:

• Handgun only (own >1): 83% give protection from people as a reason for ownership
• Handgun only (own 1): 78%
• Handgun and long gun: 72%
• Long gun only (own 1): 36%
• Long gun only (own >1): 27%

Gun owners overall tend to be from a particular demographic profile: more male, older, whiter, rural, and southern.

Handgun only gun owners, by contrast, tend to come from different demographic groups, as I have highlighted in the table from the report below.

Women are nearly twice as likely as men to own only handguns (42% to 22%), Blacks are more than twice as likely and Hispanics nearly twice as likely as whites to own only handguns (57% to 38% to 20%), and those who live in urban areas are more than twice as likely as rural folks to own only handguns (40% to 15%).

Other interesting findings are political liberals are nearly twice as likely as political conservatives to own only handguns (36% to 20%), and (not shown) those who did not grow up with a gun in the home are more than twice as likely as those who did to own only handguns (44% to 20%).

When I spoke with Karl Rehn on the Handgun World Podcast, I said that Gun Culture 2.0 has the potential to be more inclusive than Gun Culture 1.0 because, unlike hunting and traditional target/recreational shooting, self-defense is everyone’s concern.

Although the study is not without its flaws, the 2015 National Firearms Survey points to some of this diversification of gun ownership in Gun Culture 2.0.