Women & Guns

From The Editor...

By Peggy Tartaro,
Executive Editor

Last September I had my throat cut while I co-piloted a plane with Gun Talk's Tom Gresham.

In October I was a button-up and overheated private eye in Las Vegas.

Most of you are probably too young to remember those lingerie ads that began "Last night I dreamed" with an underwear-appropriate fantasy tagline.

The ads disappeared somewhere in the late '70s, I think, because by then women didn't need as many Madison Avenue cues.

What else did I do last year?

Well, twice I went to Orlando and spent more time with gun people than with teenagers dressed as septuagenarian rodents (Mickey M. turned 75 in 2003).

I chatted on the phone with reporters from England and around the US.

In the second darkest bar I've ever been in, I had a drink with Judge Roy Bean and his lady, Justice Lily Kate.

If you would have asked me 15 years ago, in Women & Guns first year, if this was the sort of thing I would be up to a decade and a half later, I would have been shaking my head.

Certainly when the magazine began in 1989 it engendered a lot of interest, and in that first year we fielded a lot of phone calls from reporters and television producers. (Talk radio had not yet hit its stride so there were many fewer of those calls, which are a routine occurrence now).

And, since then I have traveled a good deal, to a majority of the states, where I've always met folks who start out labeled as "gunowners" and often end up as friends.

I played private eye last fall to demonstrate to a roomful of mystery writers that while shoulder holsters were indeed a bit of a challenge in 90 degree weather, they weren't prohibitive-especially if you or your character where in mortal danger.

There's more on our Firearms & Fiction Seminars (see page 28), an idea that grew out of the simple notion that if you explain things to people, they not only get the subject matter but maybe get the idea that "gun nuts" are not so nutty after all.

In 1989, terrorism was something that existed in books or in far away countries with complicated and troubled histories.
Like everything else, that which "Can't Happen Here," eventually did, and by 2001, Americans knew first hand what terrorism meant.

At last year's Gun Rights Policy Conference (see page 44 for more on GRPC), Capt. Robert Davie, a commercial airline pilot involved in the fight to train and arm pilots, asked me if I'd mind participating in a demonstration. He also asked if I could get another volunteer to the dais for his presentation. I asked Tom Gresham to help since, while I didn't know what the demonstration would involve, I knew Tom was a licensed pilot as well as writer and talk show host.

Tom and I got to be pilot and co-pilot of an imaginary commercial airliner and Capt. Davie chillingly showed the audience what would happen if we were unarmed.

I had that drink with the Judge, Kate and Aimless Annie at GRPC. "Aimless," when she isn't in full Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) mode, is our own Susan Laws.

When W&G started, there was no SASS, although the Judge and his friends were playing cowboy out in California. Now the game is the fastest growing, and among the most family friendly, in the shooting sports.

Kate is such an effective envoy for SASS, that the next day I handed her some cash, and signed myself up as "Calamity Jane Eyre."

The other SAS-shy an "S" but no less effective-Second Amendment Sisters, also didn't exist in 1989. While women have always been a part of the shooting sports and the gun rights struggle as well, the idea of a magazine for women gunowners was radical enough, without anyone forming a whole group!

I gave Mari my check in Houston, too, and hope to be with them at this year's Mother Day SAFER event in Washington. (The only title I hold with this SAS, however, is "She Whose Copy Deadlines Must Be Obeyed.")

One thing that hasn't changed so much as evolved in 15 years: the so-called assault weapons issue.
Back in 1989 it was just getting started publicly, although it had been cooking in the minds of anti-gunners for some time.

The issue, which began in California and marched around the country, is responsible for many of today's most effective gun rights activists, particularly at grassroots.

In 1989, the national pro-gun groups were used to fighting on the federal level, and when the "assault weapons" issue hit, it was in state capitals and big cities around the country.

It was grassroots folks who knew their state legislators, their county commissioners, their attorneys general and secretaries of state. And it was grassroots that put out many of the fires.

When the issue became national again, during the long years of the Clinton Administration, activists from around the country worked the issue-hard.

While they were unsuccessful in defeating the ban outright, they did manage to scare the then-current Congress into crafting language which sunsetted the provision-in 2004. And, they were very successful in showing their displeasure to their elected officials, turning out a slew of incumbents in 1994, and more thereafter..

"The past is prologue," wrote Will Shakespeare 400 or so years ago.

There's a very good reason we still quote him today.