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.