Women with Guns

I did a post back in May about Guns In America and it was kind of popular according to how many people checked out the post.  So I thought I might follow up on that with what I found most surprising and that is how many woman own firearms.

Apparently there is over twenty million women in the United States own a firearm.  As of 2011 Twenty-three percent of registered firearms in the country belong to women.  The surprising part is which women owns them.  The demographic is unlike anything ever seen before.  Gun owner ship of women crosses all the lines and includes ALL women!

The photographer Lindsay McCrum has recently put out a book, “Chicks with Guns”, which is certainly going to make people rethink their assumptions about woman and gun ownership!

This photograph of Alexandra Knight with her son, Truett, appears in the book “Chicks with Guns.”  “I’m so eager to teach my boys everything I know,” the Houston mom writes in the book.  “Knowing that one day they will be teaching their boys or girls the same thing with the same gun makes me smile.”

Knight said she knows her portrait with her then-9-month-old son Truett has the potential to generate strong reactions from the people who see it — but she had strong reasons for wanting it to look just so.  The gun she’s carrying used to be her grandfather’s, and her father taught her how to use it.  She’s also wearing her father’s belt buckle in the photograph.

“It was all about family and tradition,” Knight said.  “Here it was the gun that was passed on to me, and I’m holding in my right hand what I’m going to pass on to my son.  It was kind of that circle of life and tradition and everything else.”

I remember where I grew up in Northern Idaho as a boy, there was always a loaded rifle leaning inside the door jamb of every home in the area.  We routinely had to deal with wolves, coyotes, bears, and the occasional mountain lion.  We had livestock to protect.  It was a regular occurrence to sit with the family in the front of the house and learn gun safety and have shooting competitions amongst the members of the family.  My mother was always the best shot.  She had a semi-automatic .22 that she was extremely accurate with at well over a hundred yards.

There was also a shooting range set up near the natural spring where everybody would meet with their water trucks to load up water and take it back to their property.  We moved away from that area in 1979 and the area we had lived in got running water from a well in 1978, so I don’t know if people still meet by the spring and practice shooting while waiting for the trucks to fill up.  I know that area in the late seventies had some awesome shots from people you would never expect it from.  Everybody owned a weapon of some sort.

There seems to be some discrepancies in the statistics about whether crime is going up or down with the increase of conceal and carry permits being issued across the country.  I was surprised to find out that 49 of the fifty states have conceal and carry programs.  Only Illinois and the District of Columbia are the only places that do not.  The rise of women packing weapons is on the rise, but something tells me that women and shooting go hand in hand probably back to the pioneering days of the country.  I’d wager more woman have weapons than what is actually reported, just more women are coming forward to get their conceal and carry and getting counted than ever before in history.

Posted in: Girls Women Weapons Guns Conceal Carry Lindsay McCrum Chicks