Do women hesitate when using a firearm for self defense?

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I will add this:

I know a woman who is now a school counselor. Prior to being a school counselor she was an LAPD police officer. She had to fire her weapon 3 times in the line of duty, and each ended with fatal wounds to the suspect.

The first time, her and her partner were going around the rear of a house in preparation of a search warrant being conducted. The homeowner was actually hiding behind a shed and got the jump on her partner. After the suspect hit her partner with a shovel and knocked him to the ground, he was prepared to hit him again when she fired 4 times, each hitting the suspect in the torso. She didn't hesitate, she didn't think twice about what she was doing, she just acted. She said that she doesn't really know what she was thinking when it happened, she just knew that she was not going to let her partner get hurt.

The second time she was responding to a domestic abuse call. After she knocked on the door of the residence she heard the scream of a child and made entry into the home. When she reached a back room she saw a woman who appeared to be unconscious on a bed, a young girl whose face was bleeding, and a large man standing next to the girl. When she ordered the man onto the ground he grabbed the girl and was about to slam her into the bed frame and the officer fired twice, hitting the man in the upper torso; again, fatally wounding him. She recalled this situation and remembers most everything about it. She said that as soon as she saw the girl things seemed to change. When the girl's life was put in danger, she acted.

The final time that she fired her weapon was after a pursuit. She was patting down a woman when the suspect went "ballistic" as she called it. The woman elbowed the officer and pulled out a syringe and as she made an aggressive move towards my friend, both she and her partner fired, killing the woman. In this situation my friend said that she just reacted, there is really no other way to put it.


Obviously, my friend has since retired. After the last incident that I mentioned she decided that she wanted to go into a more safe occupation since she had a family and a young daughter. She still owns firearms, and I will bet anyone that if put in another situation like any of the above mentioned ones, she would not hesitate to pull the trigger.
 
From what I've seen, women are usually better shots than men. That has no bearing on the psychology of hesitation, but it's an interesting fact. I think shooting comes more naturally to women.
 
Given that rifles and pistols and revolvers have been reduced in weight so much that it should not matter,. relative to competitive shooting, men and women ought to be pitted against each other with no quarter given either way.

Not so in combat, but we are not talking about combat.

I shoot CAS and think it is unfair for women to have their own categories and also be able to compete without restriction in any of the non-women-only categories.

But we seem not to be concerned with "fair" anymore - only about "equal outcomes."
 
From what I've seen, women aren't necessarily better natural shots.

The advantage I have seen many women bring to their first lesson, though, is that they don't typically fall victim to machismo. IE, they actually listen to instructors, and don't feel they have something to prove - instead, they have something to learn.

As far as preferring blades goes...

I know Glenn said research doesn't support a "preference," but I'd be willing to bet that statistics will show that women are more likely to use a knife than a gun. This doesn't have to do with preferences, it has to do with availability. I doubt half the women in the US have regular access to a readied handgun. I suspect 95% of the women in the US have regular access to kitchen and butcher knives. For attacks that occur in the home, then, I'd expect to see a lot more women using knives than guns.

But that doesn't mean they prefer them.

From what I've read, and from what I've heard (I have acquaintances who have used knives in self-defense and in combat, including at least one who killed a man using his knife), the knife is much more personal, and has greater impact on its user than does a gun, especially if the shooting occurs well beyond arm's length.

The knife user has to be right up on his opponent; the knife user feels the blade enter the opponent; the knife user may then have to cut the knife back out, and feel the sensation of cutting the person the entire time.

I've only killed a hog, using a knife; that seemed much more personal to me, too, than using a gun.

The other drawbacks to using a knife are that (again) one has to be very, very close to use it; and people often manage to cut themselves, when using a knife against another in a fight.
 
The advantage I have seen many women bring to their first lesson, though, is that they don't typically fall victim to machismo. IE, they actually listen to instructors, and don't feel they have something to prove - instead, they have something to learn.
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I disagree with this one, too.

What I have seen is that most men and most women make excellent students. I don't see a whole lot of these testosterone-blinded men people go on about! Most of the guys I've worked with over the years have worked hard to learn what the instructors had to offer.

A few men are poor students, and a few women women are poor students. The percentage of poor students seems to be about the same between the sexes. It's not common, but it does happen.

Here's the kicker: culturally, women are trained to hide it better when they shut you out. So an instructor who isn't looking for it often misses the attitude shift that says she isn't listening. She starts out pleasant even if someone twisted her arm to get her into class, and she keeps right on being pleasant even if she decides you're full of crap. That doesn't mean she's listening, and it sure doesn't make her a good student; it just makes the instructor less likely to notice the problem.

pax
 
I would think it would be the opposite. As a man I would do everything I could to avoid using a gun on an unarmed person if it was only myself that I was protecting but in most cases women aren't as physically strong or quick as males so in many cases they could be physically overwhelmed if only using a blade. Out of the women I've taught how to shoot & basic aspects of self defense with a firearm fortunately none have had to pull the trigger however there was one that had her car blocked in, she immediately drew her handgun, pointed it at the guy, told him to get away from her car. She later told me that she was prepared to pull the trigger if he hadn't backed away & had instead hit her window again as if he were trying to break through.

There are exceptions though of course. My grandfather's wife used to keep a butcher knife next to her bed when my grandfather was out of town, even though there were guns in the house & she knew how to use them.
 
My friend believes that women should be more preferential to blades because they would hesitate if they were to use a projectile weapon and cites psychology as her reasoning
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Your friend never saw my grandmother with her 30-30 or my wife with my 38 super. My next door neighbor was a petite 5' nothing pregnant lady with a infant child and as anti-gun as she could be but when confronted by a drunk in her dining room one evening she pretty much rearranged the guys face when she jabbed him with the shotgun she didn't want her husband to have. If she would have known how to load it his face would have been gone. 30 years later she is quite the trap shooter, not a champion shot but better than me by far at wing shooting. Anybody want to try and break into her house now?
 
er what? Using a knife is better psychologically is the argument?

My wife's/and daughter's mentality is "don't mess with Mom. She'll shoot you."
:D
 
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