Jan/Feb. 99

A Long Look at Our History So Far
By Peggy Tartaro

From The Editor:

Sometime last August I started putting together a preliminary schedule for 1999. "Preliminary" is as good a word as any for the process. Actually I listed the dates of issues and using a cross between the Pythagorean Theorem and the Vulcan Mind Meld, plugged in what information I had on printing, mailing and newsstand deadlines, tentative travel schedules, holidays and observances (I try never to work on Charlotte Bronte’s birthday) and the schedules of other Second Amendment publications I am involved with to come up with some sort of "plan."

Then I added all these dates to a computer program and officiously sent around this masterwork to various concerned parties. Who wisely remained unconcerned until I actually began hyperventilating at, or near, them.

So it was that months ago this concept began to work its way across my brain: W&G will be 10 years old. Now, "will be," that most hopeful of tenses, is here and the actual anniversary is upon us.

To try to put some order, and perhaps some perspective, to the task, I looked through every issue of W&G since its debut in February, 1989. Eventually I put behind me the hideous specter of the perm I had in 1991 and concentrated more fully on the issues before me.

In October, 1988, a young writer on assignment for Machine Gun News went to the third 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, keys—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 gun owners. 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 of these feature 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 reticule’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. In 1999, 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 gun owners.

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 gun owner." 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 gun owners (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.

I would be extremely remiss if I didn’t mention one other serendipitous factor in the LadySmith’s re-introduction in 1989. S&W was fortunate to have the services of a PR person who could go toe-to-Joan & David-clad-toe with the most hoplophobic writer: Sherry Collins. Ms. Collins’ face appears in about every other W&G for its first year and a half; she was about the most visible spokesWOMAN the industry had ever had and she knew her stuff. I doubt if there was any general circulation article about women gun owners written in 1989 that didn’t have a quote from Sherry in it.

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 spokesperson 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, testament to both her own skills and the Ruger folks’ good sense.

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 gun owners, 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 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.

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 an adjective appended to it to make it important.

By the end of 1990 we had our first celebrity profile, 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. In retrospect, and after seeing a hunk of it again on television, I think its biggest impact was to bring back stories about women to the big screen and to get people, particularly women, thinking about how they wanted to be thought about.

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 Schwartzenegger’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 proposed 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, 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 twice more. In late 1994 Josh Sugarmann’s Violence Policy Center (VCP) 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 VCP 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.

In a similar spirit, this issue contains Sue Caplan’s review, appreciation and thoughtful look at Professor Nicholas Johnson’s 1997 Rutgers Law Review article, "Principles and Passions."

I urge you to read the entire piece and if possible to seek out Prof. Johnson’s original, no matter how you stand on the abortion issue. It contains insights that no one who cares about her gun rights can afford to overlook. I daresay you and I (whichever "you" is reading this now) don’t see eye to eye on abortion, or probably any other issue. I don’t care. And, neither should you. This magazine is about women gun owners, all of whom feel differently about different things on any different day. That we sometimes talk about other political issues may given you as much heartburn as it does me, but it is not possible or practical to discuss politics or social issues without doing it. Keep in mind that women were the first and best practitioners of the art of the possible and the practical. (And keep those letters coming!)

A word on Sue Caplan is due here, as well. When I first became aware of "guns" as a subject of politics and society and not just sport, Sue Caplan was already there, already smarter than most everyone else and already a leader.

We seemed to have spent a good deal of the rest of 1992 wrestling with the notion of women gun owners’ 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 125th 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 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 outright 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. Over the years, a host of other champions have graced our pages, and expanded our ideas of dedication, determination and femininity: Annie Oakley, Margaret Murdock, Launi Meili, and with this issue’s cover story, Nancy Tompkins-Gallagher.

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.

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 10 years, but although devoted to trivia, gave up. There have been a lot, and most all have been genuine gun owners. 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 comfortable 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 gun owners. Perhaps that’s why Sonny named the magazine "Women & Guns" and not "Guns and Women."

Two years ago 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. Last month we brought you our second bridal cover—Heidi Smith’s "I do’s" at Thunder Ranch.

At the end of 1997 we made another decision about W&G, changing our format to bi-monthly and focusing most issues to a particular topic, such as concealed carry. It gives us a little more room to explore topics of interest to our readers, in a little more depth, and I am gratified that feedback has been uniformly positive.

Some of our writers have posed the question, or speculated on the answer to what the next ten years will bring to these pages. I wish I had a good answer myself. Part of the fun (and after 10 years at W&G and 20 in the business, there’s still some fun in it), is waiting to see what unfolds—and looking back on what it means.

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 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 10 years ago, and believe more strongly now, for women gun owners 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 gun owners resides. Sometimes I refer them to other studies, which 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 ten years have taught me anything at all, it is that I will always meet women gun owners, 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!