Gunning for Trouble: Some Women Pick Up a Pistol for Self-Defense

CINCINNATI — Terry Weber, a soft-spoken sharpshooter in this Midwestern city, sometimes answers the door with a gun on her hip. On the firing range, she practices her marksmanship against real-life assailants with wax bullets.

In New York City, where a female jogger was attacked and raped by a roving gang in Central Park, Thalia Adams, 32, practices regularly at a pistol range. She has twice been the victim of armed robbers since she moved to Manhattan from Palo Alto, Calif.

Marie Mann, an insurance executive in Cincinnati, has a .38-caliber Bersea. She practices with it in her back yard. But would she use it to shoot an intruder or an attacker? She’s not sure.

But when a woman takes to shooting, it’s usually for reasons of self-defense, not sport.

No one knows how many women carry handguns on the streets in the United States. By some estimates, as many as 12 million, one in eight, have handguns in their homes.

There are no reliable statistics. Neither the Justice Department nor the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms keeps records of women who are licensed to carry or own firearms or who run afoul of the law by their use.

But firing ranges around the country report a significant increase in the number of female members in the last four years. For instance, Lt. John Benner, who started the Tactical Training Center in Cincinnati, said women once made up only about 15% to 20% of his beginning classes. Now they amount to about 50%.

Sharon Sullivan, a Cincinnati attorney, can knock a clay pigeon out of the sky on the skeet range at the Moonlight Gun and Hunt Club, but she doesn’t carry her handgun on the street and wonders about the wisdom of using it in self-defense. Nevertheless, she’s convinced police are no longer sufficient protection.

Indeed, police all over the country have told citizens that they have an obligation to maintain order and enforce the laws, but they cannot defend every citizen’s life or safety every minute of every day. Citizens must take some responsibility. And the courts have upheld them.

Some women have taken the warning seriously. They are out there hefting their .44-caliber magnums from the West Side Rifle and Pistol Range in New York City to the Beverly Hills Gun Club in California. Some even graduate, for sport, to AK-47s and other automatic weapons.

Noting the trend, Smith & Wesson has brought out the Lady Smith, a version of its popular .38-caliber, scaled down to fit a woman’s hand. Another firm, Charter Arms, is offering his-and-hers .38s called the Bonnie (Parker) and the Clyde (Barrow). The Bonnie is scaled down in grip and trigger action.

There are all kinds of new products for the would-be gun-toter, including a little gun for joggers. It fires right through its wallet holster.

Polls by women’s magazines have shown that women are often the secret victims of crime and have bought guns for security. A Ladies Home Journal poll in 1987 found that 40% of 104,000 women queried kept guns at home strictly for protection, and 42% said they had been victims of crime.

Paxton Quigley in her new book “Armed & Female,” a comprehensive look at women and guns, the law and self-defense, said chances of being raped at any age in New York are one in eight; Los Angeles, one in seven; Atlanta, one in five; Detroit, one in four.

“Across our nation, one out of every four families will be victims of serious crimes like burglary, rape, robbery or murder,” said Quigley, who estimates that 12 million women have guns in their homes. “A Gallup Poll finds that six out of 10 women in this country are afraid to walk in their own neighborhoods at night.”

Quigley, a native of California, was once an anti-gun activist. Then, she said, “Two things happened in a week’s time that changed my mind. About 2 1/2 years ago a girlfriend of mine heard someone come in her bathroom window about 1 o’clock in the morning. She called 911 and waited. She didn’t know what to do. It happened very quickly and the damage was done. The police came 10 minutes later.”

The same week she read a story about a woman who thwarted an intruder with her own .38-caliber special and held the cringing would-be attacker at gunpoint until the police arrived.

“But she’d stopped a crime from happening while my girlfriend was raped. Now 2 1/2 years later she’s still not well. So I decided it was time for me to get a gun.”

Other women coming to the same conclusion have another critical decision to make. Should they leave the gun at home or defy the law by carrying it?

Gun activists are careful not to encourage women to carry guns.

If a woman--or a man--kills someone who is clearly menacing her life, chances are she will get off by pleading self-defense, a woman especially because of the “disparity of force” between her and her attacker.

But no one can avoid the charge of illegal possession of a handgun, and in most places could face a year in prison. Bernhard H. Goetz, New York’s subway shooter, is a case in point. He was acquitted of shooting his young attackers, but jailed for possession of the instrument of force.

Sullivan, who practices law in Cincinnati, said, “Here’s the problem. Once you’re close enough to use self-defense, you’re better off submitting. . . . In a threatening situation with a gun, what happens? The attacker gets the gun first. Or you never get a good drop on him because there are so many variables it’s incredible. Or, if it is a perfect deal and everything works right, you don’t have the justification to use the gun.

“The only way I would go jogging in Burnett Park here would be with a gun. And if I carried it in a holster, the police would stop me. Or some guy will knock me in the head to get the gun.”

Terry Weber, who trains people in the use of handguns, agrees. “It’s a Catch-22. Do I do my time in prison or take a chance with my life?”

Sullivan appealed a case of a young man who was attacked on his way home through the park early one morning after his wife had given birth. He killed his assailant and spent a year in prison for illegal possession of a handgun.

Women Must Make Decision

Linda Farmer, who with her husband, J. D., operates the Hard Times Armory in Atlanta, Ga., said, “If women are going to be equal to men in this world, then we are going to have to take on the responsibility for our own self-defense whether we like it or not, whether it’s something that’s feminine or unfeminine, whether you decide to carry a gun or not.”

Janet Davis of Kennesaw, Ga., carries a gun in a special pocket in her purse. There are a number of reasons. Her sister was raped. She had a job in which she carried a lot of money. The community in which she lives encouraged every citizen to own a gun, in fact passed an ordinance requiring it. The local police gave the National Rifle Assn.’s four-hour course in the use of guns to anyone who asked.

Davis, who calls herself a “very religious woman,” went through all of the arguments for and against the use of lethal force. Her decision: to carry a gun, but to exercise caution in its use. “If you take it out, you’d better use it, and if you use it, you’d better empty it.”

Originally from Nebraska, she and her husband live in the Atlanta suburb that passed its gun ordinance in reaction to Oak Grove, Ill., which passed an ordinance prohibiting the ownership of any guns. She admits her relatives in Nebraska might not understand her fondness for guns, “but they still live in Nebraska, and they don’t need to like them.”

Chief Dwain L. Wilson of the Kennesaw Police Department said his officers trained about 500 women in the use of guns, and the community’s small crime rate fell after the ordinance and has remained at a low level despite the rapid growth of the town.

But even women who have taken up shooting concede many women are against it. “They hate any kind of aggression or any kind of control or power,” said Sharon Sullivan. “They sort of turn up their little noses.”

Train in Real-Life Situations

Terry Weber and Paxton Quigley think the training has to go beyond target practice. Weber takes courses at the Tactical Training Center that she and her husband, Joe, own with Lt. Benner of the Fairfax, Ohio, Police Department.

“They are real-life situations with wax bullets.”

People pop out and the student has to make shoot-or-don’t-shoot decisions in a split second.

“They used me in a hostage situation. Somebody had me around the neck with a gun to my head. What are you going to do? Joe came on the scene.”

What did he do?

“He shot both of us. You can’t believe the ability you lose when all these things start happening to you. You can be a tremendous shot on paper, but when those hands start shaking and the knees start knocking and the Adrenalin starts pumping, I’ve had people standing as close as three feet and miss me.”

Benner trains women to open their eyes to what is going on around them in a series of concentric circles, 15-feet, 30-feet and farther away.

Women Make Better Students

Both Wilson and Benner say women make better students than men. Longtime gun advocate and shooter Linda Farmer agrees.

The woman has been taught that firing a gun is going to hurt and she fears the recoil, Farmer said, but what she really fears is the noise.

“So give her a pair of earmuffs,” she said. “She’s a better shot than the man from the beginning. They don’t have this macho thing men have. They can ask questions and nobody faults them for it.”

Not Practical About Own Safety

The women who like guns for sport recognize the difficulty of carrying that over to self-defense.

“My perception is that women are not very practical when it comes to their own safety,” Sullivan said. “They’ll have a fetish about locking the doors, but then they’ll do all kinds of stupid things like going out in the middle of the night to get a pack of gum.

“I think women will often say they are fearful for their lives, but they are also fearful of guns. And many will not overcome that fear to better protect themselves. First of all, the gun is mechanical and it’s black and dirty. It’s not something that is appealing to the feminine personality. I think if they had more pink guns. . . . “

Terry Weber said, “That’s why women want a smaller-caliber gun. They only want to shoot him a little bit. So they want a little gun that’s pretty and that will only hurt a little. It doesn’t have stopping power. Yet that’s what defensive shooting is all about.”

Suddenly her voice gets hard and she said, “Stopping that person. Psychologically you have to prepare yourself to hurt somebody.”