"Women in U.S. are Growing Face of Gun Ownership"

It's already been declared, said, that men, boys are the ones who are the main gun users that results in crimes. Now I read that women in the U.S. are growing face of gun ownership and also they're taking up the same approach over in India where the female was gang raped over and over by several men and later died. Here in the U.S. where we have a major problem with guns and crimes, what actually are we trying here to initiate? A civil war between men and women? Men are already giving up natural intimacy with women for the unnatural, and women are giving up natural intimacy with men for the unnatural?... They're already turning away from each other so now, to seal the deal with the devil, society is going to top it off by hyping up women to bear arms to shoot off the men. Wow!

Terri Herbert shoots during a Girl and a Gun Women's Shooting League class at Atwell's Firing Range in Painesville, Ohio, on Jan. 25. Michael F. McElroy/The New York Times

Women in U.S. are growing face of gun ownership

By Erica Goode
New York Times

PAINESVILLE, OHIO - Mary Ann Froebe stood, feet apart and knees slightly bent, and aimed the .22 caliber Ruger semi-automatic.

"You've got some adrenaline running through you right now", said Esther Beris, coordinator of the northeastern Ohio chapter of A Girl and a Gun Women's Shooting League. "It's OK, just relax."

Froebe, 42, a small-business owner who described herself as a "virgin gun shooter", concentrated and pulled the trigger.

"It was awesome", she said, her face flushed, after emptying the 10-round magazine. "The sense of control, of being in charge of me."

In the national debate about firearms regulation, the voices of gun owners have largely been those of men. But at firing ranges across the country, a growing number of women are learning how to use firearms or honing their existing skills.

Women's participation in shooting sports has surged in the past decade, increasing 52.5 percent for target shooting from 2001 to 2011 - to just more than 7 million women from 3.3 million women - and by 41.8 percent for hunting, according to the National Sporting Goods Association.

Gun sales to women have risen in concert. In a 2012 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, 73 percent of gun dealers said the number of their female customers had gone up in 2011, as did a majority of retailers surveyed in the two previous years.

And manufacturers have increasingly geared advertising toward women, marketing special firearms models with smaller frames, custom colors - pink is a favorite - and accessories like the "salmon kiss" leather "concealed carry" handbag offered by Cobra Firearms.

Women's shooting clubs have also proliferated - not just in small towns like here in Painesville, but in Houston, Atlanta and even New York City, where a women's gun club meets at a firing range in Chelsea.

Though they may share a fierce belief in the Second Amendment with their male counterparts, female gun owners often learn to shoot for different reasons, their interest in and proficiency with firearms not just a hobby or a means for self-defense, but a statement of independence.