In defense of women and guns
Among women, the fastest-growing group of concealed handgun license owners in Texas is African American
By Joshunda Sanders AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 8:43 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 20, 2011
My first encounter with a gun was when I was 6 years old. It was December 1984, and as my mother and I walked across a bridge from Harlem to the Bronx in New York City, two men came up behind us intending to take the faux mink coat she was wearing, which looked unfortunately real under the dull orange streetlights. One of them put a gun to my head and threatened to kill me if she didn't turn over the coat. I can still remember the quarters clanging on the concrete beneath our feet as they snatched the coat, let me go and took off into the night.
That sense of vulnerability and fear followed me into adulthood, when I found myself, as an African American single woman, working as a reporter in Beaumont in 2001.
In addition to the pressures of learning how to be a reporter, learning Texas and being far from home, I was warned in the newsroom about active clusters of Ku Klux Klan activity. It had only been a few years since James Byrd Jr., a black man, had been beaten by white men and dragged to his death in nearby Jasper.
It wasn't until the recent debates over concealed handgun licenses on campuses and my own curiosity about learning how to shoot that I decided it was time to apply for my own license. After a trip to Ladies' Day at Red's Indoor Range in Pflugerville, I almost reconsidered. Then a LivingSocial coupon for a Gunfighter's Clinic course showed up in my inbox, and I decided to go for it.
It surprised me to discover that I was part of a larger trend in Texas. Applications for concealed carry permits began rising in the state before the 2008 elections, an increase some attributed to concerns that anti-gun politicians would be voted in . Of the total number of licenses granted, women made up 21.9 percent in 2010, up from 17.7 percent in 2001, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. For reasons that are unclear, black women are the fastest-growing group of women being issued licenses for concealed handguns in the state.
Academics, experts and gun safety instructors have disagreed for decades about how popular guns are with women. Part of the ongoing dispute reflects what The Atlantic wisely noted in its September issue as an ongoing and unresolved battle in American culture between gun control and gun rights activists. Nationwide, the National Shooting Sports Foundation reported that in 2009, the number of women buying guns for personal defense was up 83 percent.
University of Richmond professor Laura Browder, author of "Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America" says that the visibility of female hunters such as Sarah Palin in popular culture has lifted some of the stigma of gun ownership for most women - whether they use those guns for personal defense or for hunting. "Palin has brought women's gun ownership back into the public sphere in a way that it hasn't been," Browder said.
But since the 1980s, professors across the country have argued that the media and gun industry have enlarged the scenario of unmarried women fearing for their safety in urban environments earning their licenses for protection against violent crime. Browder said in her 2006 book that women earning licenses "as a defense against anonymous violence" was in part because the gun industry uses the fear of violence to scare women into buying guns.
But my fear is grounded not just in my personal history, but in a collective one.
Adam Winkler, author of the forthcoming book, "Gunfight: The Battle Over The Right to Bear Arms in America," traced the birth of the modern gun rights movement to the Black Panthers in the September issue of The Atlantic. In it was a fact of history that I'd never heard: "Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied," Winkler wrote. "But from then on, armed supporters guarded his home."
Closer to my demographic was the historian Danielle McGuire's book, "At the Dark End of the Street," which fills out commonly told stories about Rosa Parks and other women of the civil rights movement who were subjected not just to racial intimidation but also sexual violence. Among the most jarring stories of black women attacked in the South, sometimes by police officers, was the story of Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper who in 1944, as she walked home after attending church at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Ala., was snatched from the street by seven white men armed with knives and shotguns. They raped her and left her for dead. It was Rosa Parks, the president of the local NAACP branch office, who was sent to investigate Taylor's case.
Sure, both the robbery from my childhood and the rape of Taylor were decades ago. But as a homeowner who lives in the South and aspires to travel unfettered to places where I might be viewed more as a target than a benevolent visitor, earning a concealed handgun license seemed the best way to quell my personal fear.
And in order to get that license, I needed to spend at least 10 hours with Mathew Williams, an instructor with Austin-based Gunfighter's Clinic, and pass a state background check.
Part of Williams' class is a 200-slide presentation explaining Texas gun-ownership laws. There were four other women in the class. Among them was a thin blond woman named Chris, who asked me not to use her last name. She said she came to the class with her husband, Bruce, and their adult daughter mainly out of curiosity, after Bruce's pastor took the Boston native out hunting and got him thinking about applying for his concealed handgun license.
Chris and her daughter decided to join Bruce for the class.
"I'm not a very big woman myself," Chris said. "And so, if something happens to Bruce, I want to be able to protect my home. And because I'm not very big, a man could do whatever he wanted with me. A gun seems like it would level the playing field."
Williams, who seemed to regard less lethal methods of self-defense with a lot of skepticism, said that he had a 30 percent increase in the number of women showing up in his classes, which meet the state's public safety requirements for concealed handgun licensing. Generally, the courses cost upward of $100, and the application for the concealed handgun course is about $140, not including fingerprinting fees and the cost of passport photos. Williams' class, which is combined with a legal response program that includes information about what to do if you have to shoot someone, costs about $400, though it was $198 with the coupon.
Williams, a gunsmith, insomniac and father of two teaches the 10-hour training course four times a week, he said.
"Chivalry is dead," he said. "Male criminals think nothing nowadays of shooting a woman." At home, his two daughters are well-versed in marksmanship - the 7-year-old has a rifle and a handgun and his 5-year-old will soon have her own rifle, he said. It was the first time I had heard anyone mention children owning guns, but he says in the class that the best way to prevent children's injury with firearms is to educate them about how to use them. (And to keep them in locked cases.)
There are other things to consider. The personal injury rates for firearms in homicide and suicide in this country are higher than they are in any other industrialized nation. And violent crimes in America dropped significantly in 2010, to what appears to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years.
While Chris and I, her daughter and Bruce braved the 106-degree heat with our other classmates in Hays County, a man starting to shoot his required 50 rounds cut his hand on one of the gun slides, and blood started dripping down his hand.
My heart racing, and sweat trickling into my eyes, I stood in a line behind a blue barrel and tried to focus when it came time for me to take the test. If I end up earning my license, I can only hope the shots fired there will be the last ones I ever shoot under that kind of pressure - or worse.
jsanders@statesman.com; 445-3630
My first encounter with a gun was when I was 6 years old. It was December 1984, and as my mother and I walked across a bridge from Harlem to the Bronx in New York City, two men came up behind us intending to take the faux mink coat she was wearing, which looked unfortunately real under the dull orange streetlights. One of them put a gun to my head and threatened to kill me if she didn't turn over the coat. I can still remember the quarters clanging on the concrete beneath our feet as they snatched the coat, let me go and took off into the night.
That sense of vulnerability and fear followed me into adulthood, when I found myself, as an African American single woman, working as a reporter in Beaumont in 2001.
In addition to the pressures of learning how to be a reporter, learning Texas and being far from home, I was warned in the newsroom about active clusters of Ku Klux Klan activity. It had only been a few years since James Byrd Jr., a black man, had been beaten by white men and dragged to his death in nearby Jasper.
It wasn't until the recent debates over concealed handgun licenses on campuses and my own curiosity about learning how to shoot that I decided it was time to apply for my own license. After a trip to Ladies' Day at Red's Indoor Range in Pflugerville, I almost reconsidered. Then a LivingSocial coupon for a Gunfighter's Clinic course showed up in my inbox, and I decided to go for it.
It surprised me to discover that I was part of a larger trend in Texas. Applications for concealed carry permits began rising in the state before the 2008 elections, an increase some attributed to concerns that anti-gun politicians would be voted in . Of the total number of licenses granted, women made up 21.9 percent in 2010, up from 17.7 percent in 2001, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. For reasons that are unclear, black women are the fastest-growing group of women being issued licenses for concealed handguns in the state.
Academics, experts and gun safety instructors have disagreed for decades about how popular guns are with women. Part of the ongoing dispute reflects what The Atlantic wisely noted in its September issue as an ongoing and unresolved battle in American culture between gun control and gun rights activists. Nationwide, the National Shooting Sports Foundation reported that in 2009, the number of women buying guns for personal defense was up 83 percent.
University of Richmond professor Laura Browder, author of "Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America" says that the visibility of female hunters such as Sarah Palin in popular culture has lifted some of the stigma of gun ownership for most women - whether they use those guns for personal defense or for hunting. "Palin has brought women's gun ownership back into the public sphere in a way that it hasn't been," Browder said.
But since the 1980s, professors across the country have argued that the media and gun industry have enlarged the scenario of unmarried women fearing for their safety in urban environments earning their licenses for protection against violent crime. Browder said in her 2006 book that women earning licenses "as a defense against anonymous violence" was in part because the gun industry uses the fear of violence to scare women into buying guns.
But my fear is grounded not just in my personal history, but in a collective one.
Adam Winkler, author of the forthcoming book, "Gunfight: The Battle Over The Right to Bear Arms in America," traced the birth of the modern gun rights movement to the Black Panthers in the September issue of The Atlantic. In it was a fact of history that I'd never heard: "Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied," Winkler wrote. "But from then on, armed supporters guarded his home."
Closer to my demographic was the historian Danielle McGuire's book, "At the Dark End of the Street," which fills out commonly told stories about Rosa Parks and other women of the civil rights movement who were subjected not just to racial intimidation but also sexual violence. Among the most jarring stories of black women attacked in the South, sometimes by police officers, was the story of Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper who in 1944, as she walked home after attending church at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Ala., was snatched from the street by seven white men armed with knives and shotguns. They raped her and left her for dead. It was Rosa Parks, the president of the local NAACP branch office, who was sent to investigate Taylor's case.
Sure, both the robbery from my childhood and the rape of Taylor were decades ago. But as a homeowner who lives in the South and aspires to travel unfettered to places where I might be viewed more as a target than a benevolent visitor, earning a concealed handgun license seemed the best way to quell my personal fear.
And in order to get that license, I needed to spend at least 10 hours with Mathew Williams, an instructor with Austin-based Gunfighter's Clinic, and pass a state background check.
Part of Williams' class is a 200-slide presentation explaining Texas gun-ownership laws. There were four other women in the class. Among them was a thin blond woman named Chris, who asked me not to use her last name. She said she came to the class with her husband, Bruce, and their adult daughter mainly out of curiosity, after Bruce's pastor took the Boston native out hunting and got him thinking about applying for his concealed handgun license.
Chris and her daughter decided to join Bruce for the class.
"I'm not a very big woman myself," Chris said. "And so, if something happens to Bruce, I want to be able to protect my home. And because I'm not very big, a man could do whatever he wanted with me. A gun seems like it would level the playing field."
Williams, who seemed to regard less lethal methods of self-defense with a lot of skepticism, said that he had a 30 percent increase in the number of women showing up in his classes, which meet the state's public safety requirements for concealed handgun licensing. Generally, the courses cost upward of $100, and the application for the concealed handgun course is about $140, not including fingerprinting fees and the cost of passport photos. Williams' class, which is combined with a legal response program that includes information about what to do if you have to shoot someone, costs about $400, though it was $198 with the coupon.
Williams, a gunsmith, insomniac and father of two teaches the 10-hour training course four times a week, he said.
"Chivalry is dead," he said. "Male criminals think nothing nowadays of shooting a woman." At home, his two daughters are well-versed in marksmanship - the 7-year-old has a rifle and a handgun and his 5-year-old will soon have her own rifle, he said. It was the first time I had heard anyone mention children owning guns, but he says in the class that the best way to prevent children's injury with firearms is to educate them about how to use them. (And to keep them in locked cases.)
There are other things to consider. The personal injury rates for firearms in homicide and suicide in this country are higher than they are in any other industrialized nation. And violent crimes in America dropped significantly in 2010, to what appears to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years.
While Chris and I, her daughter and Bruce braved the 106-degree heat with our other classmates in Hays County, a man starting to shoot his required 50 rounds cut his hand on one of the gun slides, and blood started dripping down his hand.
My heart racing, and sweat trickling into my eyes, I stood in a line behind a blue barrel and tried to focus when it came time for me to take the test. If I end up earning my license, I can only hope the shots fired there will be the last ones I ever shoot under that kind of pressure - or worse.
jsanders@statesman.com; 445-3630
No comments:
Post a Comment