Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. -- MaxedOutMama

I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. -- Kim du Toit

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them.-- Moshe Ben-David

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. -- Sultan Knish

All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war. -- Billy Beck

Sunday, December 17, 2006

The Changing Face of the Shooting Sports.

Women are an increasing percentage of gun owners, recreational shooters, and self-defense advocates. This is a good thing, because otherwise the gun-owning demographic would be edging toward ever more elderly white males. The research has shown that, while the total number of guns in circulation has been going up, the total number of gun owners has been declining. That's changing. Gun ownership, recreational shooting and hunting are no longer male-exclusive activities. Books like Abigale Kohn's Shooters, Paxton Quigley's Armed & Female, Women Learning to Shoot, by instructors Diane Nicholl and Vicki Farnam, and Debbie Ferns' Babes with Bullets, are part of this growing trend.

A while back I did a couple of pieces on Emily Yoffe, a contributor to Slate and to NPR who had learned to shoot as part of her "human guinea pig" project. Her Slate piece was entitled How I Learned to Love Firearms. I transcribed her NPR interview a couple of days later. I found the original Yoffe piece via Zendo Deb of TFS Magnum. She and several others of the distaff-gunblogger persuasion tend to find op-eds and news stories that illustrate the growing female membership in the ranks of today's shooters - something I could not be happier about, though Tam has commented:
Why is it that when some bright spark in the marketing department at Apple, Cannondale, or Pontiac notices that slightly more than 50% of the planet's population is setters rather than pointers, it gets two column inches on page 24 of the WSJ, but when their counterpart at Remington or Smith & Wesson does likewise, it calls for a panting TeeWee news spot from ABC? Build a Saturn that has room to stow a purse in the front passenger compartment, and nobody notices. Make a SIG small enough to fit in that purse, and shoulders get dislocated in newsrooms across America as folks reach for dusty tomes by Freud.
I don't mind. It's all good publicity.

So are things like this, and today's link from Instapundit: Husker's Top TCU, Air Force. How about that? Some universities still have pistol and rifle teams, and there are very definitely women shooters there!

May this trend increase! Which would you rather be the public face of shooting? This:

or this:

I know my answer.

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