WOMEN AND GUNS
September 96 Column: Women Shooters

Not long ago, I needed new glasses and went first to the eye doctor's.
The older you get (and, to be fair, the more technology changes) the
more tests you are treated to at any doctor's office.  The last time
I visited the opthamologist, several years back, I don't remember
being tested for eye dominance, but this time I was.

	I already knew that the results would show me to be cross eye 
dominant (right handed, but with a dominant left eye), but I let the 
doctor do his job.  He confided  to me that studies show that cross
eyed dominant people were "highly intelligent," to which I replied,
"That must be why more women than men are cross eye dominant."
	He laughed  and then gave me a puzzled smile.  "That's true,
but how did you know?"  I explained tat it was something useful to
know about yourself if you were a shooter.  He seemed a bit taken
aback by this, and the subject closed there.

	Not long afterward I was visiting an old friend who was in
town briefly with her young son.  During her stay at her mother's,
her 14-month-old had knocked her glasses off, breaking the frames.
Since he had just gotten new glasses, she merely had the old
prescription "read" and replaced.  We discussed the high cost of
eyewear and the limited number of styles. (She bought "indestructable"
frames, although I'm sure Jaw will figure out a way around them.) I
mentioned all the tests they do now, the doctor's assertion that
someday I would need bifocals, and eye dominance.  I showed her how
to test herself for this phenomenon and mentioned that the doctor
seemed surprised I knew anything about it.

	"Well," said Lucia, "you don't look like a shooter. This 
evolved into a friendly argument about what shooters "look like," with
my mentioning several of our mutual acquaintances who shoot (and all
look different from one another as you might expect).

	On my drive home from the suburbs, I decided I was mildly 
disturbed that a friend of over 20 years (for whom I had once allowed 
myself to be clad in peach lace and tafetta) would say I didn't look
like a shooter.  It  never occured to me that "not looking like a
shooter" was in any way a compliment.

	I should have, perhaps, probed further, so that I had a
clearer picture of what a woman with my same educational and social
background, and a mere 11 days older than me, thought a shooter looked
like.

	Perhaps I should start stopping people in movie lines,
bookstores, airports, coffee shops, etc., whom I considered outwardly
similar and ask them what shooters looked like?  I didn't, however,
perhaps because I find this kind of man-on-the-street psychology
unsettling when I encounter it elsewhere.

	In the end, all I was left with was a reinforcement of the
tenant that shooters have an image problem.  And that it is one that
grows graver.  A doctor should not be startled that a patient
participates in activity like shooting and friends, who know you to
be sober and industrious (but who may have occasionally seen you
otherwise) should not have a pejorative judgement in mind--as if you
alone were the exception to an unwritten an unspoken rule that
shooters somehow "don't look like us."

	I had intended, originally, to comment here about a different 
kind of image--the fictional one discussed by Susan Wittig Albert, 
beginning on Page 18.  The idea that authors present an image of woman 
who shoots or own guns to other people who probably aren't gunowners,
and what that all may mean.

	I think this kind of "imaging" is important to us for a number
of reasons.  How we appear in popular culture goes a long way toward
how we appear in the "real world" to others.  Our impressions of
others, different than ourselves, have always been drawn in that way.

	When I discussed the feature initially with Susan I told her
that W&G readers always seemed interested in the way "they" were
presented in books, television and the movies.  That, having made a
tough, thoughtful decision that, in many cases, changed their life,
they were fascinated with fictional images of women doing the same,
and that they often called such examples to our attention (commonly,
with a disappointement that it wasn't done right).

	I guess it is up to us individually to wage a campaign of
image repair--to occasionally remind friends that it is I, your boon
companion, that owns an "assault rifle," or me, your office mate, with
a "Saturday Night Special" near to hand.

	With the image of a gunowner thus exploded it should be easy 
enough to explain what terms like"assault weapon" and "Saturday Night 
Special" really means.
	Image matters.  That's why a picture of a group of people--say
a mouther, father, their grown (eyeglass wearing) daughter, a friend
and his two young teenage daughters in the sunny summer countryside
might also contain the seven handguns and three rifles they were
enjoying that afternoon and not seem at all out of place.

Peggy Tartaro,
Executive Editor