Femme fatales, bad girls, pistol packin’ mamas. We all know who they are, what they are, their voluptuous figures and hard faces thrust in our eyes in television, movies, even video games. Their names are etched in our brains.
Sarah Connor. Lara Croft. Jill Valentine. The list goes on and on, and stretches as far back as the earliest days of cinema, and even further still considering the volume of dime novel westerns published in the late 19th and early 20th Century. Their legacy lives with us—in politics, in academia—and film of course. So to say that America is obsessed with the gun toting female is pointing a fine point on it.
But for some, the obsession with “gun girls” is something more. It is a serious study, a way of life, no less so than auteur films or the works of Rimbaud and Baudelaire. It just so happens that their object of interest is more Russ Meyer than Bertrand Russell.
Meet “Jim”. In many respects, the Scottsdale, Arizona resident, web site entrepreneur and sometime blogger is no different than any other hobbyist. He’s happily married to a wife of several years, has two step-children, and from all outward appearances, is just like any other red-blooded American.
He just happens to run a not-so little known site on the side called girlswithguns.org. But he was interested in characters such as Ellen Ripley long before that.
“It’s a genre which had been of interest to me for some time.” He says in an email interview. “I’d written several pieces related to the topic for my fanzine Trash City, as well as other publications. It seemed natural, to gather all these [articles] in one place, and extend the coverage.”
Thus, the idea for girlswithguns.org was born. But the actual circumstances surrounding its birth are more…circumstantial.
“My wife actually bought me the domain name as a Christmas present!” Jim says.
According to him, it had just been a vague notion knocking around his head until then, a cloud in a headspace dominated by molls and Black Widows, valentine assassins and vengeful kidnap victims.
When the site launched in earnest in 2003, the site logged over 53,000 visitors in its first year alone, impressive compared to the mountain of similar sites with the same theme. Much of the popularity had to do with the visuals, to be sure. Voluptuous, unattainable women are always popular—for women as well as men. Yet the success was also owed to his own brand of insightful, even handed critiques of relevant films and television programs, reviews more akin to Ebert and Roeper than Screw Magazine.
Even so, he has found himself receiving unwelcome attention sometimes. Not just from the usual brand of perverts looking for a cheap fix, but sometimes critics as well. To his credit, not a single one of his detractors are women, although he admits he ‘hasn’t received much either way’.
For a man who shot a rifle only once, it’s a thin line he walks. But he’s not the only one.
Like Jim, Alex Smits is just another regular guy who happens to have a thing for girls with guns. Not surprisingly, the software engineer and computer animator maintains his own website, alex-in-wonderland.com, only a portion of which is actually dedicated to gun molls and femme fatales. But even he admits the stigma of being a perceived as little more than a pervert, albeit a very knowledgeable one is real and palpable.
“Art is subjective, and therefore subject to individual interpretation, based on the viewers’ personality and experiences and beliefs.” He writes in an email to Racketmag. “As such, it will always be misunderstood and I’ve certainly experienced a lot of frustration and derision in that regard.”
It is a sensitive issue for an entire subculture, bound up in politics, gender, sexuality, and human being’s innate attraction to violence. For a man who witnessed the struggles second wave feminists endured to attempt to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed at the same type idealizing females such as the cast of Charlie’s Angels, and later Sigourney Weaver herself, it is a complex situation, as embedded in his subconscious as the gun culture is in American society.
At the same time that people such as Jim and Smits defend themselves from both the Christian right and the feminist left—with their arguments of eternal damnation, Freudian interpretation and copious references to Lacan’s concept of the signifier and signified—guns themselves are getting a feminist makeover, or rather, the growing numbers women toting them are.
According to Greg Lee Carter’s Guns in American Society, nearly one third of American women own guns in their households, and an estimated 1.3 to 3 million own rifles for hunting purposes. Of the majority sampled, 60% of them own some kind of firearm for ‘self-protection’ purposes versus sport, mostly rifles. Only a small minority have Glocks or Colt by the nightstand. The percentage comes out to roughly 6.6 percent.
Not surprisingly, most of those are married, living on the outskirts of large metropolitan cities, where violent crime, especially drug and gang-related offenses are a primary concern.
Incidentally, the National Rifle Association, and assorted groups, have rode the wave of women’s fear of violent crime, earning new members through a series of incredibly in-your-face ads that are frank about concerns of sexual assault, battery , and home invasion.
One ad in particular, courtesy of famed advertising director and blogger Oleg Volk, features the arm of a dead woman clutching a firearm. ‘You never see this in the hands of a rape victim’ it screams in the foreground, followed by the words ‘don’t be a victim: go armed!’ in bright green letters.
Another black and white ad simply has the picture of a woman grasping pistol and the words ‘been raped, never again’.
The interest in women’s issues is not a new development. The NRA, for example, has long used traditional progressive issues to its advantage, starting with the targeting of black males in the mid-to late 20th Century to the pro-pot crowd today (one ironic ad protests the DEA no-knock raids on 2nd Amendment grounds). But while advertisements targeting males typically stress the fear of murder or assault, the conscious use of rape as a meme, implied or not, speaks to a visceral need to protect oneself from harm. And like spreads targeting men, the message is universally the same: buy a gun, and blow your enemy to kingdom come.
In a sense, it’s the Jackie Brown phenomena come full circle—the objectified, submissive woman becoming assuming power, control, and domination over her opponent. Add to that the popularity of politicians such as Sarah Palin, and the rise of the powerful woman with the wadcutter strapped to her hip or thigh is almost transcendent.
Despite such celebratory images, there is a real downside to the gun girl ideal. According to Professor James Gabarino of Loyola University, the estimates of female aggression, including female-female aggression involving firearms is on the rise, and it’s not entirely due to the usual suspects of broken homes and the abuse cycle either.
“There is an increase in physical aggression among girls because the two forces that control aggression—thoughts about aggression and experiences in settings in which aggression is normal—are changing in the direction of more models and approval for girls to be physically aggressive.” He says.
The presence of guns at home, work, or on a person’s person is one of the reasons why young teens in the inner cities—mostly African-American men—are more three times as likely to die of homicide as white males (skeptical? Check this graph). While correlation isn’t causation (see our article on serial killers), the same situation would apply to females, both black and white. Add a history of mental illness, suggestibility and a pervasive, violent culture (gangsta rap for black males, movies such as Domino for females) and you got a potent brew of bad waiting to happen.
If a disturbed young girl from a broken home, let’s say, sees Charlie’s Angels and decides to shoot the Queen Bee at recess, it’s an issue, and with more incidents of gunplay involving females increase, the likelihood of a Columbine-style event involving a female perpetrator increases as well.
Guess what? It already has, and not as part of a movie director’s script.
Brenda Spencer, the suspect in a spree shooting at the Cleveland Middle School in San Diego, California, was convicted of gunning down her school principal and a custodian in 1979. Spencer, now 47, famously quipped “I don’t like Mondays”. She was known to be a fetishist of guns—her parents even gave her a .22 semi automatic for Christmas, a mere month before the shootings.
She would later be mythologized by The Boomtown Rats.
Nine years later, Laurie Dann, a 30 year-old babysitter with a history of mental illness, calmly walked into a elementary school in Winnetka, Illinois, shot and killed a boy, and wounded five other individuals before turning gun on herself. At the time of her death, she had a .22 semi-automatic Beretta pistol, as well as a .357 revolver and a .32 pistol.
Incidentally, Dann’s story would become a movie of the week, starring Valerie Bertinelli.
Most recently, there was the case of Latina Williams, a nursing student out of Baton Rouge. In nearly each instance, all of the guns were obtained legally by either the perpetrators themselves (Dann) or from a family member (Spencer).
Although shootings involving females as perpetrators are rare, the multitude of crimes is enough for Dr. Gabarino to be concerned, enough so, that he even wrote a book about female aggression. Entitled See Jane Hit, it is one of the few books to look at the incidence of female aggression—and it’s escalation into physical violence—in a comprehensive way. For more information on guns and violence, go here and here.
For their part, Jim and Smits deplore actual gun violence.
“It’s ultimately fantasy.” Smits says. “They [guns] scare the shit out of me and require more care, respect, and responsibility than I can handle. I’ve only been to a shooting range once, and fired a variety of rifles and handguns. I didn’t like it at all.”
But as far as he sees it, guns are the great equalizer. The ideal of the ‘weapons of oppression’ (his words, not ours), being turned against the oppressor is powerful. So powerful, in fact, that it has been used by people as diverse as Eugene Delacroix, the Black Panthers, the former PLO, and every insurgent group from Iraq to Nepal.
When’s it’s a female commando with her hands on the trigger, the effect is even more acute, shall we say. Think Leila Khaled. Again, Smits:
“To me, the image of a woman with a gun symbolizes the struggle of an underdog fighting against her oppressors. These are very strong and fierce, and powerful women, and while the weapon imagery represents a physical tool of violence, their feminine charms are just as deadly.”
At the end of the day though, for both Smits and Jim, what it all comes down to is, they love women crack shots, whether their targets are live or otherwise.
Attractiveness, of course, is a plus.
–Jack Winn