Guns in the family

Guns in the family As more women take up shooting, some moms find a day at the range helps bring the family together

Peggy Siler's Mother's Day celebration began last Sunday. Not with roses or a dinner out, but with a trip to the shooting range. The silver-haired 59-year-old grandmother -- who's co-owner with her husband of the Ozark Shooters Sport Complex, a gun shop and shooting range in Walnut Shade, Mo. -- is well trained in all manners of gunwomanship, and makes sure the rest of the females in the family are too.

Last weekend, Siler, her two daughters and her 14-year-old granddaughter participated in one of the most intriguing celebrations of arms and the woman: the so-called Mother's Shoot. Founded in 1990 by veteran Texan sharpshooter Sue King, the annual shootout began as a Mother's Day event in Missouri. In 1998, the National Rifle Association took over its sponsorship and management, turned it into one of its nationwide Women on Target series of women-only charity shoots, and this year, moved it forward a week before Mother's Day -- so more women could be free to attend.

Siler -- one of about 60 women who attended the event in Missouri -- is part of what seems to be an unrecorded, little reported trend: growing number of North American women are firearms enthusiasts. After all these years believing women and guns didn't go together because we're too passive and non-competitive, it turns out that womanly demureness makes for great sharpshooting.

In Canada, statistics on women and gun use are as hard to find as a .22 luger. There is no Canadian chapter of the National Rifle Association, no National Shooting Association, no hallowed constitutional right to bear arms. But if you ask around, it seems that both Canada and the States are recruiting a growing number of gunslinging girls.

Murray Gardner, a Vancouver instructor and founder of the International Practical Shooting Confederation (one of a number of Canadian shooting associations), says he's seen a noticeable rise during the past two or three years. "There's been a definite increase," he says. "One of the reasons may be that shooting is one of the few sports venues where women can compete on a level playing field with men. You don't have to be full of testosterone to shoot well."

NRA spokeswoman Stephanie Henson also confirms a rising interest among females. The NRA estimates that 2.5 million American women hunt and 3.5 million are target-shooters, and although the association has no historical gender data of its membership, the rising number of women is reflected in its programs. In 1997, it launched its first women-only instructional clinic, soon followed by women-only weekend hunts. By 2001 the number of clinics had grown to 30 clinics teaching 2,500 women. This year, the NRA has slated 120 workshops to teach more than 7,000 women how to use their trigger fingers.

But why? Aren't we mothers supposed to be teaching our daughters that a gun is a bad, bad thing? That the glamorization of violence begets more violence, and the proliferation of guns begets accidents, domestic manslaughter and myriad other beastly events? As the old saw goes, since we're the ones who give birth, we're somehow intuitively anti-killing -- and therefore anti-gun.

Pshaw, say the shooting women. "Two hundred years ago, nobody would have raised an eyebrow at a mother teaching her daughter to shoot," says Peggy Tartaro, executive editor of Women & Guns magazine. (Yes, there is such a publication.) "Back then, in America and in Canada, those kinds of [shooting] skills were right up there with making chicken soup or quilting or any other of the home arts. The women didn't go out with the men to hunt but they certainly put squirrels in the pot and so forth. And when the menfolk were away, they would be in charge of home security, however crude that might have been."

Siler offers up a holy trinity of reasons to explain her interest in guns: hunting, recreation and self-defence. Both she and her daughters carry .38 Smith & Wesson short-barrelled revolvers in holsters in their cars and are trained to use them in a crisis. This despite the fact that Walnut Shade "has no crime to speak of."

Um, why then? "Well, still, there is crime," adds Siler. "And there's a big city just 25 miles away."

Her two daughters have about four handguns apiece, and her 14-year-old granddaughter has her own shotgun. The granddaughter can't actually cart the weapons around with her, adds Siler. That would be illegal at her age, so she keeps it at the range.

So is all this mother-daughter gun-toting an audacious new strain of female bravada? Nothing, it turns out, could be further from the truth: Siler took up shooting "because I just wanted something I could do with my husband."

But, but... what about Girl Power? What about telling the guys of this world to "Go ahead, make our day"?

Siler stifles a guffaw. "I think that's an ego thing. I guess some women might like guns just because they want to have power, but I don't see it that way at all."

Well, instead of learning to do what the mister does, why not get her husband to learn some conventional female activities? "I don't know that he'd like to do the kind of things that wives do. 'Course, I don't do anything that he doesn't, to begin with."

So, it's just June Cleaverism with a twist: a sport that brings the whole family together.

In northwest B.C., where I spend my summers, the sporting life's a bit tamer. Guns are, of course, registered and well monitored; bullets are scarce and rationed. But just as down there in southern Missouri, people view guns and shooting quite differently from the way Canadian city folk view them. Shooting is a weekend activity, a domestic tool, a sport. And however repulsed you are by the vision of a mighty beast slumping over in the forest, head plugged with 22-magnum shells, you can be pretty sure it was a more humane life and death than the current practices of feedlots, factory farms and slaughterhouses.

Aileen Hans looks like an unlikely sharpshooter. A 32-year-old office archivist in Skidegate, B.C., she has the aura of a woman a half-dozen years younger: lacquered silver nails, a shelf-load of high-heeled boots and the lustrous dark locks of a James Bond villainess. And she's the mother of an eight-year-old boy.

To Hans, shooting is no big deal: she's been around guns since she was a kid. Her parents didn't shoot but her big brother taught her to hunt, granting her the exclusive honour of joining him and his best friend on shooting expeditions because, says Hans, "I was the quiet one. I never jump up and down like my brothers."

In Skidegate, Hans helps organize the local firearms safety certificate course (mandatory for gun-owners). And she has a posse of shooting girlfriends, both veteran and newcomers to the sport, who shoot together.

As the 1996 National Film Board documentary Packing Heat suggests, shooting can be a bonding agent, woman to woman, mother to daughter. A feminist issue. When Toronto filmmaker Wendy Rowland set out to make the film, she expected to find a plethora of redneck ballbusters; instead, she says, she encountered articulate, congenial sorts like Sue King. King, the Mother's Shoot founder, is a mother and grandmother in a family where all the women carry a gun. For years, at the Mother's Shoot, they've been blasting away at silhouette targets of the domestic jungle: alarm clock, frying pan, vacuum cleaner. "The ladies never miss the vacuum cleaner, I can assure you," says King in a telephone interview.

Part of the appeal of shooting, concedes the 60ish King, is that it's easy to do. "I don't have to be physically fit. All you have to do is stand in one place and wriggle your trigger finger."

This anti-machismo explanation turns the gun mystique on its ear: Shooting, avers King, is fun because it's easy, and shooting works best when you're quiet.

'You know that ch-ching sound the gun makes when you're getting ready to shoot?" murmurs Aileen Hans. "I have one girlfriend who just loves it. She told me, 'Ooohhhh, that sound gets me so excited.' But you know how girls talk!"

We both dissolve into diabolical laughter, the kind of low-in-the-throat chortle that women reserve for their more decadent conversations -- about male posteriors, say, or sneaking out of the office to get the new Clinique bonus. But we are talking, with unseemly relish, about firearms.

By the end of the conversation I've become interested enough to try pulling a trigger myself. Hans, her mate Denny Chretien and one of her sharpshooting buds, Tanya Collinson, agree to take me, and we load our cache on to the truck. Collinson unfurls her target poster: a picture of a large brown bear that looks like a dead ringer for the ursine father in Can't You Sleep, Little Bear? My two young daughters' bedtime literature, sprung from its pages into the brutal real world.

As Chrétien chauffeurs us to the out-of-town rock pit that will be our shooting gallery, he reflects that the girls he knows have really been getting interested in rifles, just in the last few years. One of his female friends specifically began shooting, he thinks, because "it was the one thing she could do that her boyfriend couldn't. She took it really seriously, and when I went out shooting with her, she really wanted to beat me."

"But if you took it like a man then you are manly," coos Hans, nuzzling against him.

"Oh yeah, I was proud of her," says Chrétien. "I said, 'Tell your boyfriend' and all that."

As we ride, I take a close look at the bullets we're going to fire. Even the small fry -- the .22-calibre bullets -- look disturbingly like tiny missiles. The big ones -- .30-30 cartridges that can shoot the sun from the sky -- look formidable. I begin to feel queasy. Even if it's just a paper target we'll be firing at, the sense of an impending loss of innocence has started.

At the shooting range, surrounded by a forest and mountains, we start our session by tacking up the poster of Father Bear to the range's plywood rectangle. First up is Hans's own rifle, a Winchester Savage Model 340, which fires .22-calibre ammunition.

Still, to a shooting virgin, it looks like a piece of work. It has an attached scope -- that black truncated telescope you see on all of Bruce Willis's guns.

The others help prep me for the shoot -- safety latch on, proper crouch, steady the gun. I start to get the shakes. The truck stereo is blaring the Romantics' chirpy 1980 hit That's What I Like About You.

Safety latch off, index finger on trigger... The gun explodes, a mild kick runs through my upper body, I let out an involuntary, embarrassing yelp.

"That would be fatal -- you took out the heart," surmises Chrétien, before adding a hearty congratulations.

Weapon No. 2 is a vintage wild-west gun: a Winchester 1894, more than a century old. After we fire off a few rounds, it exudes the heady aroma of sulfuric gunpowder. Each shot reverberates through the trees and sky and mountains as though we're watching a wild-west movie at the Silver Screen Metropolis. The queasiness subsides; shooting turns out to be (will we burn in hell for thinking this?) kind of fun.

Social critics and other armchair observers have made much of the gun's mimicry of the mechanics of male genitalia. Yet how to explain how female shooters, too, experience pleasure in the sense of release when the trigger is pulled? It might have more to do with a broader intuitive satisfaction of expulsion in general -- from popping bubble-wrap to squeezing a blackhead to venting your peeves in an argument. After all these treatises of gender-related gun theory, perhaps a catharsis is just a catharsis.

Weapon No. 3 is the slickest, nastiest of them all: a Winchester Model 70 Featherweight. It is, says Chrétien, the rifle of choice for military snipers. Lightweight and boasting an extremely flat trajectory, it shoots 308 bullets that travel very, very far before lobbing. Since the gun itself so light, the shooter's body absorbs most of the kickback.

We take turns bracing ourselves against a small hill of rubble, sniper-style, and each fire off a round. Hans and Collinson are firing like a couple of pro markswomen, their bullet casements tumbling to the ground and their 308 shells peppering the bear poster.

Maybe it's just the wussy-girl in me, but I can't stand the thought of snuffing out Father Bear yet again. This time, I deliberately aim to miss. But the Featherweight is so light it's almost impossible to keep steady: the crosshairs jiggle up, down and sideways as I break into a small sweat trying to keep my sights off Bear.

Blam. The kickback almost knocks me off my feet, and for a nanosecond, I wonder if I myself have been hit by some concealed assassin on the other side of the forest. Moments later, still alive, I feel thrilled once again.

We trudge up to Bear to survey the results. Hans is delighted to see she's hit his tiny bob of a tail, just as she'd planned. I'm happy to see that, for all my shaking, the last shot landed exactly as pinpointed: dead-centre on the white space between his paws -- a shot that should safely scare him away from the likes of us.

The excitement of shooting does seem to be vaguely connected to the prospect of death. But bloodlust isn't part of the appeal, at least not for everyone: my greatest thrill derived from my last perfect, deliberate bear-sparing miss -- unsullied by the guilty pleasure of hitting the animal image. (For whatever it's worth, I avoid eating mammals anyway.)

As the afternoon wanes, we pick up our spent casings and trudge back to the truck, which is now wailing Iggy Pop's Lust for Life.

Slightly ashamed of enjoying my "research" so much, I later confer with filmmaker Wendy Rowland, who included footage of a Mother's Shoot in Packing Heat. Rowland, it turns out, also found shooting to be an unexpected thrill. But, like me, she probably won't bother trying it again soon, and, also like me, would probably discourage her own kids from eventually taking it up. It's dangerous, you know...

And now that the shootout has been nudged up a week earlier, how are they going to celebrate Mother's Day this year?

"We'll go to church together," replies Siler, "and then we'll be down here at the range, shooting shotguns."

What's bizarre is how this writer, while writing an overall positive piece about shooting, shows overwhelming ignorance of the gun laws of her own country - Canada. Guns are not "monitored" and bullets are not "rationed" in Canada. And Canada has its own national association equivalent of the NRA despite the writer's ignorance.

Range time and the cost of bullets would put my family in the poor house. I'm lucky to get to shoot at all. 9-12 dollars a box of ammo (50 rounds) and 6-10 dollars for 1/2 hour of range time. 50 rounds in 30 minutes is no problem to do. Adds up fast.

Weapon No. 3 is the slickest, nastiest of them all: a Winchester Model 70 Featherweight.

My father's .243 Featherweight is slick, sweet, but certainly not nasty.

Unless you're a woodchuck.

"Range time and the cost of bullets would put my family in the poor house. I'm lucky to get to shoot at all."

May I suggest archery as a family sport?

Although equipment isn't cheap, there's no expensive reloading expenses, easier clean-up, etc.

Yes and what a dumb ass thing to try to use as self defense. Are you sure your not a liberal. I have heard such suggestions from them.

Uh...maybe because the entire idea is a total crock?

I had an instructor not too long ago who had a real fast way of dealing with this little bit of derogatory two-bit pseudopsychology, with a curt "yes, I'm into guns because my penis is too small."

Her name was Cathy.

Take up shooting with a 22 you get lots of good time for a little money. My wife and daughter are very good shots with all their firearms. They both have shot many game animals and you would not want them shooting at you. The best way of winning women over to the shooting sports is to take them shooting.

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