Women & Guns

Women & Guns Magazine Part of Long History of Women Gun Owners

By Peggy Tartaro,
Executive Editor

Please note: Those back issues pictured in this article marked with an asterisk in the caption and a purple border can be ordered online via our order page. Click on any cover for a larger view (files are 400K-700K). You may also select from other available back issues of Women & Guns by clicking here.

Women & Guns, in its dozen years, has not so much been a witness to recent history as an observant participant, recording and reflecting this part of American life that fascinates some, repels others and, most importantly, defines American women gunowners.

In October, 1988, a young writer on assignment for Machine Gun News went to the first Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC) in Dallas, TX. She met a group of people who shared her interest in, and enthusiasm for, firearms. Encouraged, she went home to Arkansas, and percolated an idea she had. At the 1989 SHOT Show, the largest firearms industry gathering in the world, she talked again with some of the people she had met at GRPC and with leaders in the firearms industry itself. A month later, Sonny Jones introduced W&G to the world.

There must be a zillion cliches about mothers: all of them true and all of them false. But all the ideas about them boil down to one thing: they are the ones who give birth-life. In Sonny's case, she had an understandable mother's pride in having created something no one else had, in having it come to "life." In that first issue (16 pages, all black and white, with a cover that showed a challis scarf, leather driving gloves, key-and, of course, a gun) she wrote:

"Female gun owners are being cast as potential saviors of the pro-gun movement. Think carefully, ladies. Our combined influence can work to reshape American society. What do we want to accomplish and where do we want to start?"

Even as that first issue came off the press, a subject that has stayed in the pages of W&G throughout its history was being discussed: the image of women gunowners. That first issue carried a letter from a man who had seen Sonny's picture in an issue of Gun Week, which described her new venture. He complained that her finger was visibly on the trigger of the gun she was shown holding. To which Ms. Jones replied that perhaps the photograph was "expressing attitude."

The first products to be covered in W&G were the then relatively new purses designed to hold handguns in a way most movie writers never figured on. Instead of lying in a jumble of (one presumes) lipsticks, smelling salts and mad money, the new pocketbooks featured separate compartments for a handgun, some with a holster attached to the inside of the bag, other with a restraining Velcro strap, still others with a hidden compartment between the two conventional halves of the bag's body.

It's worth noting that the new designs were largely coming from small specialty holster makers, already accustomed, and indeed, welcoming the specialized needs of their customers, and in some cases, from entrepreneurially-minded women. Some of those companies exist today, some don't. Today, there isn't a major (nor many minor) producer of holsters and the like who does not make at least one product especially for the women's market.

Also in that first issue, and many more to come, was coverage of the handgun equivalent of sliced bread (as least as far as women were concerned): The Smith & Wesson LadySmith.

Even if you are not inclined to be particularly history-minded, take note of the LadySmith: it is a milestone, benchmark, signpost, or some other marker in the evolution, emancipation and revelation of women gunowners.

The revelation came to the apparently unsuspecting legions of non-gun journalists when the first LadySmith debuted in 1989. Until then, they all, to a man (and shamefully, to a woman, as well), believed that there was no such thing as a "woman gunowner." Imagine, then, their astonishment to find that one of the oldest names in American firearms had not made up a product and hoped it would find consumers, but instead, like the good business people they were (and are), developed a product to fit the needs of their existing customers.

The emancipation came almost inadvertently, because as those same journalists demanded proof of the existence of women gunowners (I remember at the time telling one that Annie Oakley had been a REAL person, not a character in a movie) quite a number of American women were happy to come out of a closet they never remembered entering and declare themselves to be in fact, women who owned guns.

And the LadySmith spurred other manufacturers to produce other firearms, mainly handguns, but eventually some long guns as well, specifically for women. Some of those were hits, others misses, but the lesson wasn't lost on anyone. In fact, I doubt that you'll find a manufacturer today who doesn't take some measure of the "women's market" when debuting a firearm. Fortunately, there are at least as many different kinds of women as there are firearms, so, not withstanding our desire for new and improved, eventually a certain level of parity was achieved.

W&G's third issue was the first to have a picture of a woman on the cover. It was Kelly Glenn, then, as now, a spokeswoman for Sturm, Ruger & Co. It is interesting to note that Kelly (who appeared on the cover again in October 1992) is still a spokesperson for Ruger. Unlike manufacturers of other women's products who jettison their spokeswomen at the .first sign of aging, the Ruger folks are smart enough to know that someone like Kelly, who works as an outdoor guide, can represent their company because of her experience not in spite of it.

April, 1989, also saw a story on the 2nd Annual Ladies Charity Classic (LCC) shotgun event in Houston, TX. The LCC was the brainchild of Sue King, who saw one women's sports event to benefit one women's charity blossom into the Women's Shooting Sports Foundation (WSSF). Actually "saw" is a rather timid verb that doesn't do justice to Mrs. King's iron determination; she basically made the whole thing work.

Oh, yes that April, W&G reviewed a book. Lots of magazines, of course, review books, but this was another milestone, again one which is not fully appreciated, except in hindsight. It was Paxton Quigley's Armed & Female, and here again, a smart, creative woman took center stage without asking first if it would be okay with the keepers of conventional wisdom. In the last ten years, Paxton (who was on our July 1995 cover) has been a sought after "quotee" in the war of words on women gunowners, and she has always emerged unscathed.

It wasn't until May of 1989 that W&G saw its first ad: a half page from Guardian Leather. Other advertisers followed, and by August, the publication had nearly tripled in size.

I won't belabor the mother analogy started earlier, but when Sonny's creation needed help, she asked for it, and got it, from the Second Amendment Foundation, which had hosted that first GRPC.

When the Foundation took over W&G in October of that year, we had already been helping out by introducing the magazine to others through ads and contacts and providing news stories, and in my case, a feature or two. Technology was changing too, sometimes for the better. We could fax stories back and forth and were playing with computers more, which slowly phased out typesetting and physically having to make "mechanicals" of each page.

The difference between the way we produced the magazine 12 years ago and the way it is done today (including this website) is the difference between wearing a corset and hoop skirt and Casual Friday.

In January of 1990 I wrote a story I had nearly forgotten about until I looked through the back issues. A man walked into the University of Montreal's Engineering School and systematically shot women-only women. He told men to leave the classrooms. He killed 15 women before taking his own life and leaving a note suggesting that he blamed women for taking his "rightful" place at the school. This happened in Canada, poster country for American anti-gunners and it happened quite a bit before anyone had even imagined that "crime" needs a modifier like "hate" appended to it to make it important.

By the end of 1990 we had our first celebrity profile, Emmy-winning actress Lee Purcell, who spoke enthusiastically about enjoying the shooting sports.

January 1991 saw another big change at W&G-like Dorothy entering Oz-we finally were in full color. The advertisers who made that possible were Glock, Lansky Sharpeners, Lorcin Engineering and Taurus International.

That change (and the confidence of other advertisers) allowed us to make one more giant step in September 1991, as W&G went on sale at the newsstand. In another confluence of the fates, that newsstand premiere issue's cover held the images of "Thelma & Louise," almost before the great national `What Do Women Want?' debate that movie spawned got started.

But if "Thelma & Louise" were a warm subject, then hotter still was the next cover: Linda Hamilton as Sara Connor in "Terminator 2." As much as women enjoyed seeing a woman on screen "take names" and save Arnold Schwarzenegger's robotic bacon, my fondest memory of that cover is being offered quite a lot of money at a gun show for the blowup of that October cover. By a man.

In our fourth anniversary issue we posed an intriguing question on the cover: "Are You Too Stupid to Read This Magazine?" The title referred to a law journal article that pro-posed the banning of handgun advertising, because, its authors (one man, one woman) suggested, the safety and security claims made by such ads were misleading ...but only, in their view, to women. Rebutting the premise in our pages were Nancy Bittle (founder of AWARE), Sherry Collins, then Smith & Wesson's PR chief, Sandra Froman (now 2nd vice president of the NRA) and Fran Haga (a sociology professor, who also teaches women to shoot).

I wish that our superior logic had put an end to the debate, but the issue was to surface again. In late 1994 Josh Sugarmann's Violence Policy Center (VPC) issued a "report" called Female Persuasion, which rehashed the whole argument. This time, it was national news, and Sugarmann got a lot of press. But so did we, and, when asked to comment, I noticed that the simple argument made especially to women reporters that the whole notion was sexist, had a good deal of resonance.

Undeterred, but slightly wiser, in 1995, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the non-profit arm of Handgun Control Inc., together with a number of medical groups, petitioned the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to ban handgun advertising altogether.
But this time, perhaps a little leery of the sexism argument, the notion that the ads were dangerous to women only was dropped in favor of a more sweeping mommyism. The 'value' of owning a handgun, they said, is far outweighed by the danger they pose to the owner and to society at large. The argument at the heart of the FTC filing had certainly been developed from the law review article and from Female Persuasion, and, indeed, most of the ads which were used as exhibits were the same ones the VPC had complained about a year earlier. The filing languishes still at the FTC, a fact we should perhaps be grateful for, given the unprecedented regulatory activism of the Clinton Administration.

And then anti-gunners continue the only line of attack they can think of when it comes to women-that the manufacturers and pro-gunners are "scaring" women into gun ownership.

Sometimes this particular line makes me laugh as I think of a figure dressed up like Snidely Whiplash, dragging some unsuspecting lass off and tying her to the metaphorical train tracks until she gives up and buys a gun.

Why is it that gun ownership is the one area in which women are never quite given full faith and credit? We are allowed to make other important life choices without interference, even without comment, but the decision on personal protection is not ours to make?

We seemed to have spent a good deal of the rest of 1992 wrestling with the notion of women gunowners' identity, both seen from within and without, and, after a certain amount of heated debate, the issue settled a bit. I remember at the time being dismayed every time someone complained, but hindsight again leads me to think it was a pretty natural and benign group struggle, about which most of us have become less exercised as we become more comfortable with what we are and how others see us. In May that year, another woman stepped into the limelight. Marion Hammer was elected the first woman officer of the National Rifle Association, at about the 125 year mark of the organization's existence. Hammer, profiled in our November 1992 issue, eventually became president of NRA, and is now one of its senior directors.

At the beginning of 1993, Sonny Jones left W&G, to pursue her interest in training women, as director of NRA's Refuse to be a Victim program, a non-gun personal defense strategy course that had been the brainchild of Tanya Metaksa, then an NRA director, but soon to be the group's chief lobbyist. (Metaksa was profiled in the June 1994 issue.)

In June 1993, Lyn Bates wrote a feature for us titled, "Keeping the Piece," a comprehensive look at the then-new subject of small lock boxes. It was extremely well received by readers, and even won an award later that year. In September, Gila Hayes debuted her "Personal Trainer" column, which continues in our pages occasionally today.

The year 1994 brought back the image question as Ms magazine ran a cover story on guns. Its unsigned editorial said, "When we took up the fight for women's rights the right to keep and bear arms was not what we had in mind." Beware the editorial, royal, or even, the professional feminist use of "we"!

On the other hand, Naomi Wolf, in her book Fire With Fire, coined the term "power feminist," and seemed to understand, if not out-right approve, of women who viewed the choice argument more totally than their sisters as Ms.
My own editorial imperialism caused two popular covers in 1993. Casting about for an anniversary cover, I remembered reading a story that said whenever the women's magazines wanted to goose sales, they put a big picture of a chocolate cake on the cover.
So, we did, too-surrounded by the six handguns Gila reviewed in that issue. It was one of our best selling newsstand issues of all time.

In June, I discussed an idea with Roger Lanny, who, with the help of willing volunteer Martha Chiarcharo, executed it far beyond my hopes. There stands Martha as a demented June Cleaver, in pearls and an apron, illustrating Roger's feature, "It's a Dirty Job: Gun Cleaning." Okay, a couple of humorless souls complained about that cover, but apparently no one had any objection to the cake.

The following year we took our first look at Cowboy Action Shooting, and in August, profiled young Kim Rhode, poised to represent the US at the Atlanta Olympics in the sport of Double Trap. "Poised" was a good term. Kim took home gold, and this young woman continues to be a marvelous role model for everyone, but especially the young, in the shooting sports. Rhode took bronze home from the Sydney Olympics in 2000, the same year American Nancy Johnson won Gold in Women's Air Rifle. Neither Rhode or Johnson got much national publicity for their efforts, nor do they get the lucrative endorsement deals and million-dollar professional contracts that most Olympians routinely receive these days.

Over the years, a host of other champions have graced our pages, and expanded our ideas of dedication, determination and femininity including Annie Oakley, and Margaret Murdock.

I think you could make a credible argument that Annie Oakley, an orphan from rural Ohio, was the world's first athletic superstar, the Michael Jordan of her day. Oakley's prowess drew crowds of 50,000 on Bill Cody's Wild West tour of Europe during the late 19th Century, and she was admired by men, women, kings and queens. She, at least, got endorsement deals, and nearly a 100 years after her death, a slightly more colorful version of her life is still playing on Broadway.

Margaret Murdock is another pioneer whose story is sadly underreported and unknown to all those little girls watching the overpriced sneaker commercials today that exhort them to "just do it."

Up to and including the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, the shooting sports were not segregated by gender. Murdock competed alongside her American teammate Lanny Basham in the pistol event. They tied for the Gold medal, a shootoff ensued and Basham won the Gold by a fraction, although he said they should share the first place ranking. At that time the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc were powerhouses in international shooting sports and those countries insisted that the rules be changed for the next Olympics, so that a woman would never beat a man. The rule changes were enacted, and the head-on competition between men and women in the shooting sports, which still exists today at the club level, is no more. The upside of the change has been more Olympic events for women to compete in, but the downside is that because it involved the shooting sports, Murdock's legendary performance is all but forgotten.

For our tenth anniversary in 1999 our cover showed two women with the tag line "Why Aren't These Women Famous?" The women in question were Nancy Tompkins-Gallagher and her daughter Michelle. The previous summer Tompkins-Gallagher had shattered another gender barrier in sports that went almost totally unnoticed in the mainstream press. Again competing side by side with men, Tompkins-Gallagher became the first woman to win the National High Power Rifle Championship at Camp Perry, Ohio. Her 17-year-old daughter was that year's National Long Range Rifle Champion. Think about the closest analogous scenario, say, Nancy Lopez wins golf's Masters Tournament. Think that would get press?

Through the years we have also come to know other women involved in the business and politics of guns; for example, Jolene Unsoeld, Donna Bianchi, Becky Bowen, Christine Thomas and the late Maxine Moss.

In the last 12 years we've also covered the major firearms training schools where women are likely to find themselves learning and enhancing skills side by side with men. It takes time, money and dedication to take yourself off to Lethal Force Institute in New Hampshire, Gunsite in Arizona or Thunder Ranch in Texas, to name a few. But our writers have done just that over the years, at the same time meeting and profiling liked-minded women.

I thought about counting all the pictures, every single image, of a woman with a gun, that's run in these pages over the last dozen years, but although devoted to trivia, I gave up. There have been a lot, and most all have been genuine gunowners. We've used maybe half a dozen professional models in that time, a ratio I'd stack up to any other "women's" magazine in the world.

One of those models turned out to be a woman who grew up with guns, and was extremely comfort-able handling the one we used. That shouldn't have surprised me, because over the years I've met hundreds of women who wouldn't be thought of-at first glance-as women gunowners. Perhaps that's why Sonny named the magazine "Women & Guns" and not "Guns and Women."

In 1997 we had our first Wedding Cover, fittingly enough in June. At the Beretta reception and fashion show the previous January, the folks giving us a glimpse at their line of clothing ended in a fitting runway tradition, and with an honor guard of crossed shotguns, a "bride" seemed right at home. In December 1998 we had our second bridal cover-Heidi Smith's "I do's" at Thunder Ranch. Some people might think of this as "playing" with the covers and perceptions, and I suppose, in a way, it is. But it also reinforces the serious and true notion that women gunowners are not mythic creatures, or movie icons, but real women with real lives who have made a commitment to their own personal protection and the safety and security of themselves and their loved ones.

We've always shared true stories with our readers that may bear some passing resemblance to what the TV and movie folks call "Women in Jeopardy" scenarios. But unlike the big or little screen versions, ours are true and all the more powerful and instructing for it. They don't have neat little endings after two hours and they don't star rail-thin actresses. Even after all this time, I still feel-really feel-their stories and am awed by their courage not just in surviving mortal jeopardy but in being willing to share it with others.

It's clear that women have become a major force in firearms-from teachers and industry executives to activists and leaders. I doubt whether concealed carry laws in a number of states in the last 10 years would have come about without the hard work of women. When talking to more thoughtful journalists, I sometimes quote Virginia Woolf s book title, "A Room of One's Own," to try to give a sense of what we are about at W&G. There is room, we thought 12 years ago, and believe more strongly now, for women gunowners to have that place and to make it comfortably to their own liking.

The one thing I've been asked most often in the past decade is: "How many?" Sometimes I struggle with the answer, trying to explain that there is no one place where the correct number of women gunowners resides. Sometimes I refer them to other studies, that give the number at anywhere between 11 and 17 million. Sometimes I just say, "a lot."

When you work with anything, but in my case the subject of women and guns, daily, you occasionally get annoyed that other people don't see it the way you do.

I don't worry about who we are-what color, how old, how rich, how political; we are, or should be-way past that. Do we try to make the picture clearer for others? Of course. But if all these years have taught me anything at all, it is that I will always meet women gunowners, even in unlikely places.

I'll always have something to talk about with them, and not just firearms. And, I'll always feel pretty comfortable and happy doing so.

You can't ask for much more than that!