The Rise of the Female Firearm Enthusiast

July 25, 2018

Firearms ownership among females is on the rise. More women are enrolling in firearms safety courses, marksmanship courses, dynamic training classes and more women are hunting. The anti-constitution crowd downplays this trend and even makes claims that it is propaganda being circulated by the NRA or other gun related groups with a vested interest in boosting sales and/or tapping in to previously untapped markets. While I disagree with that assessment, gun sales and anecdotal evidence of increased participation in classes is interesting, but not exactly compelling. I have been scouring the internet looking for studies that analyze gun ownership among women, statistics on guns actually purchased by women, etc, but there is very little of it out there that I could find before publishing this.

The Crime Prevention Research Center has conducted a study on the trends of concealed handgun permits and this is a better measure of the increase in interest in guns among women. Even so, as of 2016, only fourteen states actually break down this data by gender. In 2016, women accounted for 36% of the permit holders in those states. Between 2012 and 2016, only eight states provided data by gender and in that time, they saw a 326% faster increase in permits among women as opposed to men. This is part of an overall increase in the number of CHL permits nationwide. That begs the question, why is there such an increase, especially among women?

According to a Pew research study, 67% of gun owners cite protection as the reason for owning a gun. When you break that down along gender lines, 71% of women cite that as the reason. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center states that one of every five women will be raped at some point in their lives. That's 20% of the entire female population. That is a stunning statistic. The report from the CDC commissioned by Barack Obama stated:

"Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies"

In other words, either pulling the weapon in a self-defense scenario or actually firing it to stop an attack saves lives. The fact that the left doesn't like to admit this or acknowledge something this blatantly obvious is mind blowing.

Something else that is obvious is that owning a gun is not a magic bullet - pardon the pun. Owning a gun will not automatically make you safer, but that does not mean that the anti-gun lobby's opposite position that owning a gun automatically makes you less safe is therefore true. Gun owners have a responsibility to handle and store their firearms safely; but they also have responsibility get training in the defensive use of them, whether they choose to carry them or only have them in the home. Either way, if you do not get that training, there is the very real possibility that in a life-threatening situation, an attacker could take it away and use it against you. We talk about empowering women to be able to protect themselves and their loved ones, but it's not just the tool that provides that empowerment, but the training that goes with it to be able to use said tool effectively. Our focus in this space is on women, but this true for anyone.

The Carry Girl

Alis Volat Propriis

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