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Thread: The Spiral of Violence - Page 113







Post#2801 at 10-17-2011 11:30 PM by Eric the Green [at San Jose CA joined Jul 2001 #posts 22,504]
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Quote Originally Posted by Copperfield View Post
I don't really have the time to argue this in toto but I will say that I find it interesting that you seem to imply that people living in urban areas should have fewer rights than people living in rural areas. Does "public safety" always trump freedom or does this only apply to particular points of view with which you are in disagreement?
I don't accept your premise that having a gun has anything to do with freedom. It is generally about taking away others' freedom.
You also mentioned pig hunting by which I assume you mean feral hogs. Would it surprise you to know that in heavily forested areas hunting feral hogs with firearms is almost impossible? Generally it is still done the way it has been for thousands of years; with dogs and a knife.
I saw it done on TV, but it was not a heavy forest.
Last edited by Eric the Green; 10-17-2011 at 11:33 PM.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive,

Eric A. Meece







Post#2802 at 10-20-2011 03:15 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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Quote Originally Posted by Copperfield View Post
Generally it is still done the way it has been for thousands of years; with dogs and a knife.
rothflmao!!! As a "liberal with a room-full of guns," a life-long Rocky Mountain westerner, and hunter, you really tickle my funny bone, Copper!!

Tell us, we are waiting with bated breath ... do you hold the knife between your teeth when you hunt 600 pound feral boars??!!
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#2803 at 10-20-2011 03:22 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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Eric,

We get it. You have very, very strong feelings about guns. Despite your strong feelings, I think you would find it hard to come up with much better than anecdotal evidence for as strong a position as you hold. You should try John Lott's book, really read it through. It convinced me that while we have to agree that the issue is highly polarized, the data, as scarce as it is, tends to support both sides, and neither side.

From a practical perspective, it's a lost cause. A non-issue. No one is ever going to take the guns away from U.S. citizens. Our culture is simply too attached to them. It really doesn't matter how many kids shoot themselves with their clueless parents' pistols. It doesn't matter how many mass shootings there are.

It's a waste of your energy Eric.
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#2804 at 10-20-2011 03:42 PM by Copperfield [at joined Feb 2010 #posts 2,244]
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Quote Originally Posted by TnT View Post
rothflmao!!! As a "liberal with a room-full of guns," a life-long Rocky Mountain westerner, and hunter, you really tickle my funny bone, Copper!!

Tell us, we are waiting with bated breath ... do you hold the knife between your teeth when you hunt 600 pound feral boars??!!
Well since you asked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnPEiKu5crM

Please note that in this video I did not see the 8 year old child ever place the knife in his mouth however they do appear to be from the south. Perhaps the customs are different there?

Funny thing about pigs. They are highly intelligent and hang out in the type of brush (at least in regions that have brush) that humans usually can't get through (at least not without a lot of cursing). Once you introduce trained dogs into the equation... Well it makes firearm use quite a bit more difficult. Certainly you can hunt them with firearms but for an animal considered to be a destructive species and a pest, the most effective method for thinning the herd is to hunt with dogs.

*Edit* Just a warning. They do kill a pig in the video. If that disturbs anyone, I would suggest not watching.
Last edited by Copperfield; 10-20-2011 at 04:05 PM.







Post#2805 at 10-20-2011 04:31 PM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by TnT View Post
rothflmao!!! As a "liberal with a room-full of guns," a life-long Rocky Mountain westerner, and hunter, you really tickle my funny bone, Copper!!

Tell us, we are waiting with bated breath ... do you hold the knife between your teeth when you hunt 600 pound feral boars??!!
You ever hunted with dogs, TnT?

I never did, until we went out for wolves outside Demyansk -- even in the clear and snow, it's a damn risky proposition taking a shot at one animal when there are other animals right around it that you don't want to shoot. I imagine that in the overgrowths out in the east (and as a westerner, you might not appreciate what that looks like from the inside -- having hunted Rockies and Appalachia both, let me tell you... it makes a big difference), 'difficult' might easily become 'impossible'.

At least with a knife, you're not going to accidentally put down Rex or Fluffy.

---
-edit-
Oop. Dammit. Copp got there first. With video too, no less.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

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is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#2806 at 10-20-2011 05:07 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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Quote Originally Posted by Copperfield View Post
Well since you asked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnPEiKu5crM

Please note that in this video I did not see the 8 year old child ever place the knife in his mouth however they do appear to be from the south. Perhaps the customs are different there?

*Edit* Just a warning. They do kill a pig in the video. If that disturbs anyone, I would suggest not watching.
Ok. I've watched the video. This was not much more than a piglet. Look, my people have been farmers in the midwest for a couple generations. A full-size hog is a very scary animal. Based on what I've seen on family farms in South Dakota and Iowa, I'd say that the adult hog may be the single most dangerous animal on a farm. And they are supposedly "tame."

To allow a little boy to approach a full-grown, cornered feral boar, would be to me, unconscionable. Luckily, this was not the case. I mean the adult man was holding up the whole back half of the pig with one hand holding one leg!

No doubt dogs would be a great help in dense foliage. I guess I'd really like to see a dog pack take down a boar hog to the point where you could just walk up and stick him in the jugular. I think I'd prefer something even more old-fashioned ... a spear, maybe with a crossbar below the point to keep him from coming up the shaft at you.

I've not hunted feral pigs, but my son and I are looking into it in northeastern AZ, they are proliferating there. Guys we talk to who do hunt them, usually take a .44 mag, or .357 handgun - something that can be effective at close range in a tight spot. But I'm told that when doing that, you have to be really careful with your gun safety.
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#2807 at 10-20-2011 07:01 PM by Copperfield [at joined Feb 2010 #posts 2,244]
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Quote Originally Posted by TnT View Post
Ok. I've watched the video. This was not much more than a piglet. Look, my people have been farmers in the midwest for a couple generations. A full-size hog is a very scary animal. Based on what I've seen on family farms in South Dakota and Iowa, I'd say that the adult hog may be the single most dangerous animal on a farm. And they are supposedly "tame."
Most communities living near feral hog populations have legends of hogzilla tramping through the woods at night but animals of that size are pretty rare. When you do find a hog of that size, it has usually escaped from a local farm and is not feral. Feral pigs generally won't get as large as farm raised hogs.

They definitely are dangerous animals. Legend has it that my grandfather quite literally took a head first flight out of a hog pen while castrating piglets. One of my aunts had not properly secured the 800 pound sow. The sow broke loose and charged him after the first flick of his knife (and resulting scream from the piglet).

Quote Originally Posted by TnT View Post
No doubt dogs would be a great help in dense foliage. I guess I'd really like to see a dog pack take down a boar hog to the point where you could just walk up and stick him in the jugular. I think I'd prefer something even more old-fashioned ... a spear, maybe with a crossbar below the point to keep him from coming up the shaft at you.
Some people do hunt with spears from what I understand. Really with a pack of pitbulls doing most of the work, you could probably deliver the coup de grace with a rock if you really wanted to.

Quote Originally Posted by TnT View Post
I've not hunted feral pigs, but my son and I are looking into it in northeastern AZ, they are proliferating there. Guys we talk to who do hunt them, usually take a .44 mag, or .357 handgun - something that can be effective at close range in a tight spot. But I'm told that when doing that, you have to be really careful with your gun safety.
I'm not suggesting that they must be hunted with dogs, just that it is very effective. Many folks do hunt hogs with firearms. I have never personally been hog hunting either however I do have a close friend who has. He had to take one with his .44 mag (it charged him and ended up dying at his feet). Hogs will charge people and if the rest of the hogs in the pack are nearby they will often rally and come running to attempt a rescue. You certainly wouldn't catch me out there without something on my hip.
Last edited by Copperfield; 10-20-2011 at 07:03 PM.







Post#2808 at 10-20-2011 08:04 PM by The Rani [at joined Feb 2002 #posts 333]
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I'll be impressed when one of you guys can do this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o







Post#2809 at 10-20-2011 08:52 PM by Odin [at Moorhead, MN, USA joined Sep 2006 #posts 14,442]
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Quote Originally Posted by TnT View Post
Eric,

We get it. You have very, very strong feelings about guns. Despite your strong feelings, I think you would find it hard to come up with much better than anecdotal evidence for as strong a position as you hold. You should try John Lott's book, really read it through. It convinced me that while we have to agree that the issue is highly polarized, the data, as scarce as it is, tends to support both sides, and neither side.

From a practical perspective, it's a lost cause. A non-issue. No one is ever going to take the guns away from U.S. citizens. Our culture is simply too attached to them. It really doesn't matter how many kids shoot themselves with their clueless parents' pistols. It doesn't matter how many mass shootings there are.

It's a waste of your energy Eric.
Speaking of guns, it's waterfowl season, here. Mmmmm, duck...
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism







Post#2810 at 10-21-2011 12:41 AM by Eric the Green [at San Jose CA joined Jul 2001 #posts 22,504]
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Quote Originally Posted by TnT View Post
Eric,

We get it. You have very, very strong feelings about guns. Despite your strong feelings, I think you would find it hard to come up with much better than anecdotal evidence for as strong a position as you hold. You should try John Lott's book, really read it through. It convinced me that while we have to agree that the issue is highly polarized, the data, as scarce as it is, tends to support both sides, and neither side.

From a practical perspective, it's a lost cause. A non-issue. No one is ever going to take the guns away from U.S. citizens. Our culture is simply too attached to them. It really doesn't matter how many kids shoot themselves with their clueless parents' pistols. It doesn't matter how many mass shootings there are.

It's a waste of your energy Eric.
I've never believed that truth and a vision of a better world is beyond possibility, even if it might be unlikely. Especially when there has always been a lot of support for gun control, and the trend has been positive over the longer run. Look what is happening in North Africa? The people can awaken. Of course I came of age in an extraordinary awakening, in which our American culture changed, so I know it can happen. There's no reason a culture has to stay the same, or remain locked in old barbaric attitudes. Changes happen.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive,

Eric A. Meece







Post#2811 at 10-21-2011 07:38 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
I'll be impressed when one of you guys can do this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o
Wow! Yeah, now that's a real hunter.
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#2812 at 12-09-2011 02:20 PM by RyanJH [at joined Jan 2011 #posts 291]
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Buddhist Packing Bond Pistol Shows American Warm Embrace of Guns

Good article - more balanced than most.


Buddhist Packing Bond Pistol Shows American Warm Embrace of Guns, By Ken Wells.

Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Robin Natanel picks up a compact black pistol, barrel pointed down range. Gripping the gun with both hands, left foot forward, she raises the semi-automatic and methodically squeezes off five shots. The first one creases the left edge of a red bull’s-eye on a target 25 feet away. The four others paint a three-inch pattern around the first. If the target were a person’s head or heart, he’d probably be

Natanel is a Buddhist, a self-avowed “spiritual person,” a 53-year-old divorcee who lives alone in a liberal-leaning suburb near Boston. She is 5-foot-1 (155 centimeters) and has blonde hair, dark eyes, a ready smile and a soothing voice, with a hint of Boston brogue. She’s a Tai Chi instructor who in classes invokes the benefits of meditation. And at least twice a month, she takes her German-made Walther PK380 to a shooting range and blazes away.

Two years ago, an ex-boyfriend broke into her house when she wasn’t home. The police advised a restraining order. Instead, she bought pepper spray and programmed the local police number on her cell phone’s speed dial. “I was constantly terrified for my safety,” she says

Ultimately, she got the Walther, joining a confederacy of people who might once have been counted on in the main to be anti-handgun -- women, liberals, gays, college kids. They are part of a national story: Domestic handgun production and imports more than doubled over four years to about 4.6 million in 2009, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun-industry trade group.

‘Societal Change’

The surge has been propelled by shifting politics and demographics that have made it easier and more acceptable than at any time in 75 years for Americans to buy and carry pistols. Post-9/11 fears also seem to be a factor, as has been the relentless pro-gun politicking of the National Rifle Association and marketing, particularly to women, by handgun manufacturers. Events like yesterday’s fatal shootings on the Virginia Tech University campus reinforce a feeling that the world is an unsafe place, even as violent U.S. crime rates fall.

Natanel found it was no trouble to purchase the Walther, a brand favored by movie superspy James Bond, or to locate experts to train her. Her circumstances won her a conceal-carry permit in a state with tough gun-control laws. Her friends have been broadminded about her conversion.

“I’d never considered a gun,” Natanel says. “I thought they were scary. I wanted nothing to do with them. I didn’t think anyone should have them.”

Twenty years ago, 76 percent of women felt that way about handguns, and 68 percent of all people in the country were wary enough of firearms of any kind to tell Gallup pollsters that they backed laws more strictly limiting their sale. Then what Gallup calls “a clear societal change” began.

Democrats, Women

In October, a Gallup poll found record-low support for a handgun ban -- at 26 percent among all, and 31 percent among women. The poll, which has tracked gun attitudes since 1959, documented a record-low 43 percent who favor making it more difficult to acquire guns and record-high numbers of women and Democrats saying there is a firearm at home. Forty-seven percent said someone in the household owns at least one gun, the highest reading in 18 years.

The growing acceptance of guns echoes a transformation in the politics of weapons. In 1987, Florida joined a handful of states that by law or tradition allowed people to carry hidden guns; now Illinois is the sole conceal-carry holdout, and the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 16 sent to the Senate a bill advocated by the NRA that would require those that issue concealed gun permits to recognize licenses from other states.

Virginia Tech

Congress let the ban on assault weapons expire in 2004. The last federal gun-control initiative to pass -- a 2008 measure that beefed up screening to prevent the mentally ill from buying firearms -- was an incremental change in the wake of a 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, perpetrated by a psychotic student. Yesterday, the school said one of its police officers was shot and killed on campus and that another person was found dead from a gunshot wound.

In decades past, mass shootings, such as the Jan. 8 rampage that killed six and wounded Democratic U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, provided a potent rallying cry for the anti-gun movement. These days, pro-gun forces are as likely to parade them out as evidence that citizens need to arm themselves against attacks that the authorities are often helpless to prevent. Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, which claims 45,000 adherents on Facebook, sprang up in response to the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings.

Gaining Momentum

“Post-9/11, the thinking of more and more people is that, when push comes to shove, I need to be more responsible for my safety,” says Peggy Tartaro, executive editor of Women & Guns, a magazine published by the Second Amendment Foundation, a Bellevue, Washington-based group named for the constitutional amendment regarding the right to keep and bear arms.

At the same time, the conceal-carry movement has gained momentum, in part because the dire predictions of anti-gun groups in the early years of the fight -- that carriers of hidden guns would deploy them to settle disputes over road rage and the like -- haven’t materialized.

“We don’t look around and see blood spreading across the country,” says Deborah Homsher, an Ithaca, New York, writer whose 2001 book, “Women & Guns,” explored gun politics in the 1990s. “I think that fact deflates the anti-argument.”

Women in Combat

The advent of the 24/7 news cycle and its steady thrum on violent crimes may also be helping to drive people to handguns. Deciding to acquire one is part of “a broader feeling of helplessness that doesn’t come out of any kind of thoughtful calculation of risk,” says Homsher. “People buy guns to get rid of their phantoms.”

Women, too, may be liberalizing gun attitudes, because of the unprecedented numbers of them who have trained on firearms in the military and law enforcement in the past 30 years. Some 250,000 women have served in combat zones -- and often in combat roles -- in Iraq and Afghanistan, returning with a familiarity of firearms their mothers never had.

The latest data from the National Firearms Survey, a telephone poll conducted by an arm of the Harvard School of Public Health, shows 40 percent of America’s 283 million privately owned firearms are handguns, up from the 34 percent the survey found in 1994. And while middle-aged white men own the most handguns of any demographic segment, according to federal data, other groups are arming up.

Matthew Shepard

Besides Students for Concealed Carry, there are the Pink Pistols, Mothers Arms, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, the Second Amendment Sisters, the Women’s Firearm Network and the International Defensive Pistol Association, among others. Their influence may be outsized in gaining converts as they set up Facebook pages, churn out blogs and post recruiting videos on YouTube.

The public face of the 11-year-old Pink Pistols, which claims 1,500 members across 29 chapters, is Nicki Stallard, a 52-year-old, San Jose, California, medical technician who has a Colt .45 and a conceal-carry permit. She recruits under the group’s motto, “Armed gays don’t get bashed.”

Stallard, who had a sex-change operation in 2007, is in a documentary being made by HEYbabe Productions, a group of independent film makers, that amounts to a call to arms for gays. The title, “Arming Laramie,” derives from Laramie, Wyoming, the site of the 1988 murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21- year-old gay college student, that led to the passage of a 2009 federal hate crimes law named after him.

‘It’s Emotional’

As Gwen Patton, a former spokeswoman for the Pink Pistols, says in the trailer: “We teach queers to shoot -- then we teach everybody that we’ve done it.”

Proselytizing for handguns in the gay community can be difficult, Stallard says, given that “many people in gun culture are anti-gay, so as a reflex, the gays are anti-gun. It isn’t logical, it’s emotional.”

Stallard, who grew up in what she calls “anti-gun New York City,” acquired her handgun before the sex change, and says the surgery increased her concern about being a victim. She likens the Pink Pistols to Deacons for Peace and Justice, an armed movement in the 1960s that protected civil rights demonstrators from the Ku Klux Klan.

“I accept that the gay-rights movement began in nonviolence, and I believe in nonaggression,” she says. “But if in adopting a posture of nonviolence you make yourself a target for a sociopath, that’s not right. Violence is ugly, but if my life is on the line I will protect myself.”

Ownership Discrepancies

While the skeptics don’t dispute that the raw number of guns, including pistols, has grown, they point to the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, which indicates more guns are being concentrated in fewer hands. That poll last year found a third of households claimed to have at least one gun, far fewer than those answering the same question in Gallup’s October poll. Tartaro says these discrepancies lie in the fact that people “simply don’t always tell polsters the truth about gun ownership.”

Those Americans who have acquired handguns for protection are living with “serious delusions,” says Caroline Brewer, a spokeswoman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. She contends that few are trained rigorously enough to deploy their weapons in the shock and heat of an attack, that they’ll shoot innocent bystanders, that more times than not their firearms will be turned against them.

Allowing Hidden Guns

"To suggest all these guns make the world safer is pure fantasy,” she says. “And the idea that Americans are comfortable with millions of guns being carried by millions of people -- I just don’t buy it. Most Americans aren’t aware how easily people can get guns, and all the places that they can take guns.”

Such fears underpin the concerns of states that allow people to carry hidden handguns but make permits difficult to obtain by leaving it up to the discretion of local police. Densely packed New York City, with a population of more than 8 million, issued just over 2,100 permits last year, according to the New York Daily News. Meanwhile, Florida, with about 19 million citizens, issued 123,759 in the fiscal year ended June 30 and has more than 1 million active permits, state data show.

"When you look at how rigorously our police and military are trained in firearms to keep their skills up to snuff, I just think it’s a huge leap to suggest people will be able to safely use guns with so little training,” says Laura Browder, a University of Richmond professor of American studies and author of a 2006 book, “Her Best Shot,” exploring the history of American women and firearms.

Pulling the Trigger

Browder lives in Virginia, where it’s possible to get a conceal-carry permit with no more than 10 hours of training in a hunter safety course. Alaska and Vermont allow residents to carry concealed handguns with no permit at all.

Lyn Bates, an instructor with Arming Women Against Rape and Endangerment, or AWARE, who taught Robin Natanel to shoot, shares Browder’s concern even as she defends handgun ownership. A Boston-area grassroots group, AWARE’s philosophy is built around the tenet that the gun should be the last resort and that owners need to be rigorously prepared, physically and psychologically, to pull the trigger.

One AWARE exercise presents students with a list of 45 questions that get to the nub of the legal and moral argument over shooting an assailant. A few of them: When is shooting justified? How can you tell? Can you shoot if your assailant has a knife? A club? If your assailant is unarmed? Can you shoot to stop a rape? Can you ever shoot someone in the back?

Synagogue Shooters

Bates, 64, says she believes guns can be potent equalizers that well-trained civilians can handle. “A gun is like a fire extinguisher,” she says. “It isn’t there because you want to have a fire or expect to have a fire. It’s there because you may find yourself in that situation where it can save your life and give the professionals time to get there.”

This is why more Jews should join the conceal-carry bandwagon, says Dovid Bendory, an Orthodox rabbi in Livingston, New Jersey, who heads the 4,500-member Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Post-9/11, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ranks the domestic terror threat against synagogues equal to that of railroads and utilities.

“I ask Jews all the time, ‘Are you prepared for an active shooter in a synagogue?’” Bendory says. “‘What would you do?’ The common answer is ‘I’d dial 911.’ So I ask, ‘And what would you do until the police got there? Hide?’ They don’t have a good answer for that. I believe we are woefully unprepared for such an attack.”

Ground Zero

Raised on the Jersey Shore in a house of liberal Democrats where guns were anathema, Bendory, 43, says his conversion was slow. He saw his first armed Jew in 1987 when he went to Israel and encountered a soldier on his way home, a rifle slung over his shoulder. It got him thinking about his reflexively anti-gun stand in America.

While Israel does have gun control laws, it is a gun-savvy society whose egalitarian obligations to military service translate to large numbers of armed civilians trained in gun use. Civilians with guns have stopped terrorist attacks there. In March 2008, for example, a school principal drew his concealed pistol and killed a Palestinian man who had attempted to stab him and another Israeli at a bus stop, according to Arutz Sheva, operator of the website IsraelNationalNews.com.

Bendory says the 9/11 attacks were a sign for him. “I worked across the street from Ground Zero,” he says, “and I thought, ‘The same terrorism Israel has fought for years has come to America.’ I wondered what we needed to do to defend ourselves here.” His conclusion was to arm himself.

Women Living Alone

Natanel is emblematic of a demographic bulge that may help explain why women are drawn to handguns: More and more of them are living alone. The number of one-person households in America increased to 27 percent of the population in 2010 from 13 percent in 1960, according to U.S. Census data. Including single mothers, about half of all women now live without spouses, up from about 35 percent in 1950, based on census estimates.

The NRA and gunmakers in the 1980s began marketing to women with self-defense classes and handguns tailored to their size and needs, often amid intense criticism in anti-gun quarters that what they were peddling was fear.

The NRA’s “Choose to Refuse to be a Victim” campaign, started in 1993, rolled out magazine ads with a toll-free number that encouraged women to call for a self-defense brochure and sign up for $20 self-defense seminars taught by women.

‘Marketing Fear’

U.S. Representative Nita Lowry, a New York Democrat, demanded that the association halt the program, accusing it of “a thinly veiled attempt by the NRA to add new members and promote gun ownership by preying on women’s legitimate fear of violence.” The NRA, noting that the promotion didn’t push firearms or require callers to join the NRA, refused. These days, it dedicates several pages of its website to women’s offerings, including an updated version of “Refuse to be a Victim” and female hunting and shooting clinics.

Meanwhile, Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. began advertising its LadySmith revolvers, including a lightweight, snub-nose .38 caliber model with optional pink rubber handles that the company said it had developed with suggestions from more than 6,000 women. An ad described the guns as “elegant without losing any of their practicality.”

‘Not V8 Moment’

“I think the gun industry has been very successful at marketing fear of crime to women,” Browder says. “If you look at gun ads directed at women, it’s the lone woman walking through a deserted parking lot. The police can’t protect you. You need to protect yourself with a weapon.”

That the country may be statistically safer, with incidents of sexual assault against women declining 70 percent between 1993 and 2008, doesn’t necessarily matter.

“A lot of women don’t feel safer,” says Paxton Quigley, a New York-based writer, certified NRA instructor and gun-rights advocate who bought her first handgun after a friend was raped.

Tartaro adds a caveat: “This doesn’t mean that all these women are going to go out tomorrow and buy a gun for defense. Buying a gun is not a V8 Moment. It’s an incremental process. It requires instruction and training.”

The number of armed women in the U.S. is a matter of debate, as is the issue of whether that number is growing. The General Social Survey has found it holding steady at around 11 percent since the survey began in 1980. That would translate to about 17.5 million.

‘Guns for Meditation’

Other evidence suggests female gun ownership is increasing, though not necessarily of handguns. The National Shooting Sports Foundation cites data from the National Sporting Goods Association that female participation in target shooting rose 46 percent from 2001 to 2010 while in hunting it increased 37 percent. In the NSSF’s annual survey of firearms retailers, 61 percent said they saw an increase in female customers in their stores in 2010 over 2009.

None of this is news to Cathryne Czubek, a New York film maker who spent six years researching and making a documentary, “A Girl and Her Gun.”

“What surprised me is how a lot of women use guns for meditation,” Czubek says. “They parallel it with their yoga practice. It’s a certain mindset that you get into when you’re in a range. You are so focused -- you slow down your breathing and metabolism.”

Music Teacher

In Shawnee, Oklahoma, about 40 miles from Oklahoma City, Tammy Pinkston, 47, has her own story to tell about women and handguns. Born in Toledo, Ohio, she moved as an 11-year-old to Oklahoma with her divorced mother, who bought 30 acres (12 hectares) on a mountaintop near the hamlet of Heavener. There weren’t any people living nearby, and Pinkston and her mom kept firearms in the farmhouse, as did the distant neighbors. “It’s the kind of place where if you’re a bad guy and break into a house you’re probably going to get shot,” she says.

After college, Pinkston eventually settled into a career in Shawnee as a music teacher, mostly for area churches. About five years ago, she began to apply her teaching skills to guns and gun safety, getting an NRA instructor certification in 2008 and team-teaching with an experienced male friend. A typical class would be 36 people, a handful of them women. Pinkston noticed their reluctance to ask questions because “they didn’t want to appear stupid” in front of men.

‘Scary Places’

Out of this observation came her company, Oklahoma Personal Defense Academy for Women. She fills up her all-women classes on a regular basis. That Shawnee isn’t exactly a hotbed of crime isn’t the point for her students, Pinkston says. Perception is key, she says, and hardly a week goes by without newspapers or TV reporting some awful crime against a victim caught unaware.

She tells of a case at a mall “surrounded by million- dollar houses” in which a woman was stalked by a man before he tried to kidnap her by dragging her into her car. She escaped by wrenching free and “face-planting on the mall parking lot,” Pinkston says. “Like I tell my students, I don’t go to scary places, but sometimes the places I go turn scary.”

Most of Pinkston’s students aren’t crime victims; they’re women living alone, widows or divorcees in their 50s and 60s. “All of a sudden they are by themselves,” she says. “They feel unsafe. The majority have come to me because they realize they need to defend themselves and they need a tool to do so. In a hand-to-hand fight, they’re not going to overpower a man.”

Bra Holster

The Justice Department’s 2009 Female Victims of Violence report showed that 552,000 females 12 and older in 2008 experienced “nonfatal violent victimizations” including rape, sexual assault, robbery or physical assault by an intimate partner. Ninety-nine percent of the assailants were men.

The not-so-subtle subtext in women arming themselves is the real battle of the sexes. Men on average are bigger, and have superior upper body strength and muscle mass. In hand-to-hand combat with men, women almost always lose.

“Not all men are predators,” says Pinkston, “but all women are prey. We’re the little white bunny in the field. Good men don’t hunt women, but bad men do. If such a man kicked down your door and there was no cop on the couch to protect you, what would you do? For women, there are worse things than death.”

‘You’re Done’

Over lunch at a Friendly’s restaurant in Springfield, Massachusetts, Robin Natanel marvels at her changed attitudes. A half-hour earlier, she was browsing the Smith & Wesson retail store and, she says, “drooling over guns -- it’s like shoe- shopping to me now.”

She was considering a smaller pistol because she’d become enamored of a new conceal-carry holster called the Flashbang that attaches to the underwire of a bra. The wearer simply pulls up her blouse or T-shirt and with a single swipe downward can free the gun and fire, hence the archly descriptive name. The Walther, she says, “is just too big to fit the Flashbang.”[/SIZE][/COLOR]
[COLOR=black][SIZE=3]The topic turns serious. Natanel recalls the Oct. 12 shooting rampage at a Southern California hair salon in which eight people died. “If people couldn’t get guns at all, yes, maybe that would have prevented the shooting. But that’s not the world we live in,” Natanel says. “And what if I had been there with my gun? What if I could have intervened? Slowed him down. Would people judge me then?”

She adds: “I wake up every day saying, ‘Please, I never want to shoot.’ But make no mistake about it -- you try to hurt me and you’re done.”

--Editors: Anne Reifenberg, Robert L. Simison

To contact the reporter on this story: Ken Wells in New York at Kwells8@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Gary Putka at gputka@bloomberg.net
Ryan Heilman '68
-Math is the beginning of wisdom.







Post#2813 at 12-10-2011 09:30 AM by The Grey Badger [at Albuquerque, NM joined Sep 2001 #posts 8,876]
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A most thought-provoking article. I think they have cause & effect reversed, though. They cite growing legalization of guns as the reasons more people carry them. I'd say it's the other way around. More people are getting scared and carrying them - especially with police cutbacks and hard times - and so there's this push for legalization.

I also note the scene one responder saw in Israel - where people were gun-savvy - holds true in Switzerland, was once true of frontier America, and was true of rural America for a long enough time it may never have gone away.

And from a comment on the Saxon conquest of England - the Britons had been Romanized for centuries, and the Roman Empire tended to disarm its citizens in order to keep the peace internally, since the legions were there to keep it externally. Exit the legions, and they were like a feral cat that's been fed for so long it's questionable whether it can still fend for itself. Lucky for the Britons, a lot of them were still wild Celts; and they still had a few retired people around with Legion training (Ambrosius Aurelius was quite likely one such.)

Pat, who has never owned a gun, grew up and lived in cities lifelong, and understands the problem in the city, but also sees the other side.
How to spot a shill, by John Michael Greer: "What you watch for is (a) a brand new commenter who (b) has nothing to say about the topic under discussion but (c) trots out a smoothly written opinion piece that (d) hits all the standard talking points currently being used by a specific political or corporate interest, while (e) avoiding any other points anyone else has made on that subject."

"If the shoe fits..." The Grey Badger.







Post#2814 at 12-10-2011 11:38 AM by Odin [at Moorhead, MN, USA joined Sep 2006 #posts 14,442]
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IMO, even if one doesn't have and use a gun, one should still learn how to use one just in case.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism







Post#2815 at 12-10-2011 06:20 PM by RyanJH [at joined Jan 2011 #posts 291]
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Quote Originally Posted by Odin View Post
IMO, even if one doesn't have and use a gun, one should still learn how to use one just in case.
You can't surge training. Fire extinguishers, changing the tire on your car and basic first aid should also be candidates one should should spend some time on.
Ryan Heilman '68
-Math is the beginning of wisdom.







Post#2816 at 01-04-2012 03:33 PM by Hutch74 [at Wisconsin joined Mar 2010 #posts 1,008]
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Was wondering where the thread was on gun ownership. Personally I believe in the second amendment. You have the right to defend yours and the lives of your family.

Shared this on facebook:

http://news.yahoo.com/okla-woman-sho...091106413.html

Okla. Woman Shoots, Kills Intruder: 911 Operators Say It's Okay to Shoot

A young Oklahoma mother shot and killed an intruder to protect her 3-month-old baby on New Year's Eve, less than a week after the baby's father died of cancer.
Sarah McKinley says that a week earlier a man named Justin Martin dropped by on the day of her husband's funeral, claiming that he was a neighbor who wanted to say hello. The 18-year-old Oklahoma City area woman did not let him into her home that day.
On New Year's Eve Martin returned with another man, Dustin Stewart, and this time was armed with a 12-inch hunting knife. The two soon began trying to break into McKinley's home.
As one of the men was going from door to door outside her home trying to gain entry, McKinley called 911 and grabbed her 12-gauge shotgun.
McKinley told ABC News Oklahoma City affiliate KOCO that she quickly got her 12 gauge, went into her bedroom and got a pistol, put the bottle in the baby's mouth and called 911.
"I've got two guns in my hand -- is it okay to shoot him if he comes in this door?" the young mother asked the 911 dispatcher. "I'm here by myself with my infant baby, can I please get a dispatcher out here immediately?"
The 911 dispatcher confirmed with McKinley that the doors to her home were locked as she asked again if it was okay to shoot the intruder if he were to come through her door.
"I can't tell you that you can do that but you do what you have to do to protect your baby," the dispatcher told her. McKinley was on the phone with 911 for a total of 21 minutes.
When Martin kicked in the door and came after her with the knife, the teen mom shot and killed the 24-year-old. Police are calling the shooting justified.
"You're allowed to shoot an unauthorized person that is in your home. The law provides you the remedy, and sanctions the use of deadly force," Det. Dan Huff of the Blanchard police said.
Stewart soon turned himself in to police.
McKinley said that she was at home alone with her newborn that night because her husband just died of cancer on Christmas Day.
"I wouldn't have done it, but it was my son," McKinley told ABC News Oklahoma City affiliate KOCO. "It's not an easy decision to make, but it was either going to be him or my son. And it wasn't going to be my son. There's nothing more dangerous than a woman with a child."







Post#2817 at 01-04-2012 04:11 PM by antichrist [at I'm in the Big City now, boy! joined Sep 2003 #posts 1,655]
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That's awesome! Go mom!


Don't mess with a momma bear.







Post#2818 at 01-07-2012 02:23 PM by JDG 66 [at joined Aug 2010 #posts 2,106]
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Quote Originally Posted by Hutch74 View Post
Was wondering where the thread was on gun ownership. Personally I believe in the second amendment. You have the right to defend yours and the lives of your family.

Shared this on facebook:

http://news.yahoo.com/okla-woman-sho...091106413.html

Okla. Woman Shoots, Kills Intruder: 911 Operators Say It's Okay to Shoot
-Honest citizens use firearms to defeat thugs hundreds of thousands of times every year, although usually not with results that dramtic.

Just don't tell Kaiser or Eric.







Post#2819 at 01-23-2012 02:33 AM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by antichrist View Post
That's awesome! Go mom!


Don't mess with a momma bear.
Messrs. D. O. Berman and R. Ottweiler are good deterrents, too.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#2820 at 01-23-2012 03:13 AM by Chas'88 [at In between Pennsylvania & Pennsyltucky joined Nov 2008 #posts 9,432]
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Quote Originally Posted by RyanJH View Post
You can't surge training. Fire extinguishers, changing the tire on your car and basic first aid should also be candidates one should should spend some time on.
All are things Boy Scouts learn (well not the tire changing, but most definitely all the others).

~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."







Post#2821 at 12-12-2012 01:14 PM by Weave [at joined Feb 2010 #posts 909]
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12-12-2012, 01:14 PM #2821
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union goon thuggery

The unions in Michigan are threatening violence, nothing new of course, and "mainstream" media yawns. Imagine the outcry if a Republican legislator said "blood will be shed".

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepa...-rage-n1464612

Union goons attack a conservative for having the temerity to disagree with them. One of them threatens his life

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepa...a-gun-n1464738

How often did something like this happen when "angry" Tea partiers protested?

And of course now Jimmy Hoffa Jr is now threatening Civil War...

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybens...l-war-n1464799


If Tea Partiers or other conservatives used this type of rhetoric they would be pilloried by the media....

Last year longshoreman used thuggish tactics here in Washington in Longview. Since union membership is at record modern day lows and many members disagree with the leadership or do not with to be in the union but are forced too, I doubt the unions would have much of a chance in a Civil War...







Post#2822 at 12-12-2012 09:50 PM by Odin [at Moorhead, MN, USA joined Sep 2006 #posts 14,442]
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Quote Originally Posted by Weave View Post
The unions in Michigan are threatening violence, nothing new of course, and "mainstream" media yawns. Imagine the outcry if a Republican legislator said "blood will be shed".

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepa...-rage-n1464612

Union goons attack a conservative for having the temerity to disagree with them. One of them threatens his life

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepa...a-gun-n1464738

How often did something like this happen when "angry" Tea partiers protested?

And of course now Jimmy Hoffa Jr is now threatening Civil War...

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybens...l-war-n1464799


If Tea Partiers or other conservatives used this type of rhetoric they would be pilloried by the media....

Last year longshoreman used thuggish tactics here in Washington in Longview. Since union membership is at record modern day lows and many members disagree with the leadership or do not with to be in the union but are forced too, I doubt the unions would have much of a chance in a Civil War...
Our side did not start the class war, your corporate masters did. We are just defending ourselves. As far as I'm concerned the working class is perfectly justified in hanging Governor Snyder from a lamppost.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism







Post#2823 at 12-13-2012 11:46 AM by Weave [at joined Feb 2010 #posts 909]
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Quote Originally Posted by Odin View Post
Our side did not start the class war, your corporate masters did. We are just defending ourselves. As far as I'm concerned the working class is perfectly justified in hanging Governor Snyder from a lamppost.

Yeah your "side" was as "justified" as Germany was on Sept 1 1939 defending itself from the evil Poles.

I doubt your "side" want to pick a fight with the Right. Given the sympathy we garner with the majority of the police and military and the fact that we are well armed ourselves you lefties might find out that your "side"are the ones at the end of a rope.







Post#2824 at 12-13-2012 12:48 PM by Odin [at Moorhead, MN, USA joined Sep 2006 #posts 14,442]
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Quote Originally Posted by Weave View Post
Yeah your "side" was as "justified" as Germany was on Sept 1 1939 defending itself from the evil Poles.

I doubt your "side" want to pick a fight with the Right. Given the sympathy we garner with the majority of the police and military and the fact that we are well armed ourselves you lefties might find out that your "side"are the ones at the end of a rope.
You keep telling yourself that, meanwhile, in the real world...
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism







Post#2825 at 12-13-2012 01:10 PM by Weave [at joined Feb 2010 #posts 909]
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Quote Originally Posted by Odin View Post
You keep telling yourself that, meanwhile, in the real world...
Feel free to continue to discredit your "side" with union thuggery and calls for civil war etc.....
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