Female Firearm Consumer INCREASE

D

Double Naught Spy

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http://www.cnbc.com/id/102361120

Gunmakers' big bet on women pays off

Neat article from CNBC. Basically it says that between 2001 and 2013, there had been a 60% increase in female gun owners and an 85% increase of female hunters during that time. Not only that, but females are good spenders as well, purchasing a goodly amount of additional accessories (sights, cleaning supplies, etc.). For NSSF member stores, females now account for about 20% of sales. Not only are females good consumers, but then tend to be repeat consumers as well.
 
Makes sense.

The LadyFriend got started shooting recreationally not too long ago.

I was amazed at how quickly gear (and credit card bills) amassed.

Being a relatively novice shooter whose experience comes from the Air Force, she was basically starting from scratch.

I never realized how much ancillary equipment that I had always just sort of had until she started gearing up.

Not that I'm complaining.

I joke that my ultimate goal, is that when the commie zombies come, in the middle of a fire fight, one of us tosses the other a -1911 magazine.
 
One of the very first things my wife did when she came here from England 14 years ago, was to hit our LGS to purchase HER first personal handgun now that she was an American citizen. My sister has always had guns since she was about 13 so she doesn't count. (lol)
 
Not long ago I took a seat in a big gun shop in a big city and waited 30 minutes to meet some friends. I was astounded at the number of women I saw coming in to use the range, buy ammo, buy accessories, look at guns. Some were with husbands/boyfriends, most were alone or with another woman. I asked the clerk about this and he said a big percentage of their business was now with female buyers and the number was growing.

It is a good thing...a very good thing.
 
I realized how truly into the gun culture the LadyFriend had become when she and my two sisters would start having "girls only" range trips.
 
Sounds like a keeper to me.

I've yet to really meet a women that's as interested in firearms than I.

Maybe someday, heh.
 
My local range has "Ladies' Night" once a week. They wouldn't do it if it didn't pay.
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Mine does to, and when you drive by that night the parking lot is full. My wife usually goes shooting with me, and she is very seldom the only female there any more. It hasn't been that long ago that my wife or daughters would get comments when they went with me, but now no one give women a second thought at the range. A very good thing.
 
It can be annoying to be a female in the shooting industry. I'd say about half of the men I deal with are totally cool, they don't think twice about the fact that I'm a woman providing them technical support for shooting, gunsmithing, and reloading.

The other half tend to fall into one of two categories. They either don't believe I could possibly know what I'm talking about and argue with everything I say, or they immediately cross over into fetish territory and I can't get them to focus on anything other than how "hot" it is that a girl is talking guns. Both are totally irritating. The condescending pats on the head (Oh, do you shoot? Good for you!) and general ignorance (Oh, you shoot? I want to get my wife a gun. What's a good girl gun?) make me want to stab a mofo. When I was working the gun counter I would get these gun counter groupies bringing their friends and throwing elbows at each other and saying things like "See? I told you. Dude, she knows more than you!" like it was some kind of surprise that the hunting and gun manager at a large sporting goods store was well versed in the products she spent 60+ hours with a week.

I think it's awesome that more women are getting into shooting and hunting, but honestly I'm just looking forward to the day that it isn't a novelty.

Okay, rant over. And like I said, the majority of people I work with are awesome, they tend to make it easier to grind my teeth and get through dealing with the rest of them.
 
I think it's awesome that more women are getting into shooting and hunting, but honestly I'm just looking forward to the day that it isn't a novelty.
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It's a lot less of a novelty now than it was 15 years ago.

pax
 
Banger357 I think I've made one of those mistakes before.

I'm relatively young looking (inexperienced to boot, so I typically don't get taken seriously by some more veteran shooters sadly) and was seeking advice on training tips from a local LEO who was at the range with me and a co-worker of mine (The LEO was performing range officer duty that day). I was going over some basics with my co-worker, discussing how she needs to lock her wrists and so on while firing a handgun.

She was firing a 22 handgun of mine, and while her groups were not terrible, they were not great either. The LEO was nice enough to offer some insight for my friend, and gave her some tips that typically get overlooked by male instructors. Many of the male instructors the LEO encountered typically treated her and other female trainees poorly, apparently telling them to suck it up or deal with varying issues when it came to their shooting skills and do it the way a man does it or something along those lines.

One of which was the unintentional tightening and rolling of my friends shoulders. She commented how some women hold their stress in their shoulders (she's one of them) and my friend was doing the same. I asked her afterwards if she had any other advice that someone like me, as a male may not notice when dealing with female shooters who are new to the sport.

I understand men and women handle stress differently and each new shooter should be handled on an per person basis, but looking back on this, I can't help but wonder if I accidentally alienated her by asking such a thing.
 
Doesn't sound like anything alienating about that to me. A pet peeve of mine is that some men (usually it is the good'ole boy type) really tend to think everything is different for female shooters. While there are a few different considerations, for the most part 2 woman shooters will be as different as 2 male shooters. When a woman walks into a gun store and says she is looking for a new gun, typically the person working will immediately start pulling down .380s and j-frames, ie "girl guns", or even more obnoxiously, only pink or other colored guns. I don't think there is anything wrong with colored guns per se (let's be real, it probably hurts a lot more to be shot by a pink gun than a black one...), but it is screwed up to assume that is the top criteria because the shooter is a woman.

I just deleted a huge effing rant... I'm long winded. Basically it is annoying to assume ANYTHING about a shooter because she's a member of the ovary club. Our hands are typically smaller but very few guns are large enough for that to be a consideration. From my experience women aren't any more likely to be recoil shy than men- in fact I've seen a lot more men insisting that anything less than a .45 is useless who then flinch so bad they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn from 5 yards if they threw the stupid thing. In order to help any new shooter of either gender it is about taking everything they tell you into account. There is nothing wrong with being aware of issues which may be more gender-specific, it is only irritating if the person makes assumptions based on the shooter's genital situation rather than individual preferences and other considerations.
 
It's a pet peeve of mine when other shooters, men in particular, essentially treat women in a condescending manner when they ask questions about firearms and training
Especially when they offer advice. I've seen and met some incredibly talented marksman who happen to be female, I assure you, they can easily and quite handily shoot rings around me. In fact they typically do.

An aspiration of mine is to someday be proficient enough to where I can provide accurate and valuable training to those that seek it, regardless of their given sex.


We have few allies enough in this fight for our rights, alienating a huge part of the population by being picks just because they don't pack a set of twigs and berries between their legs is just ridiculous IMO.

Sadly, the macho bravado gets the better of some people. Which it always makes me smile when I see a women swiftly shut such people up when they're plugging tight ragged holes into a target while the guy struggles just to keep his rounds in the black.
 
Kimio, you know what's up. You're one of the good ones :) I wouldn't get all *rawr*hiss* so often if all of my customers were secure enough to see me a shooter like themselves rather than a "little lady".
 
Guns are more popular among men than women?

As a Kentuckian, this is news to me. Everyone owns guns here and if there's a gender disparity I was never acutely aware of it.

On the subject of discrimination towards female gun owners, I hate to say it, but I think this is partially a generational thing. Many people in my parents and grandparents generations are still strong believers in gender roles. But in my generation people who believe in traditional gender roles are very much the minority. So I think most people in my generation probably wouldn't treat female shooters any differently than male shooters. That isn't meant to be judgemental towards people who believe in traditional gender roles, but I do think the two beliefs are correlated.

Then again, most people in my generation are virulently anti-gun, so they tend to discriminate against all gun owners, regardless of their gender. Hopefully, this new wave of female shooters will help to cancel out this worrying trend in my age group.

Having said all that, I think there is one key difference between men and women when it comes to guns: women have more reason to carry one . It's a sad fact that women are more likely to be victimized by violent crime, simply because their gender makes them a target to sexual criminals.

So it makes me happy to see a rise in female gun ownership because hopefully this will precipitate a decline in the victimization of women.
 
Ninja, I second everything you just said, except the part where just as many women shoot as men. Unfortunately here in Washington, the general disdain for firearms is even more prominent within the female populartion.

It definitely tends to be a generational thing from what I see too. And women are more likely to be the victims of violent crime, and also likely to be physically smaller and weaker than their attackers so in my opinion, we should take any advantage we are given. Of course most criminals aren't going to attack someone physically superior to them, so from that perspective guys should carry too. An armed society is a polite society and all that, right?

Not too long ago I got into an argument with a sandwich-board-wearing-idiot in front of a grocery store, advocating for initiative 594 (the scourge of our existence). He asked if I loved my family, I affirmed, so he told me that I should vote yes to save them from all the scary gun people or something along those lines. I asked if he had a daughter, he affirmed, so I told him he should vote no if he has any kind of aversion to the idea of her getting raped some day. Things went swiftly down hill from there and he is no longer welcome at that store and I may be on the hit list for a few hippies but they're clearly pacifists so I'm not terribly concerned.
 
I think it's great. Back during the Clinton Era the gun-grabbers never tired of going on about how females were on "their" side. The Soccer Mom Vote. Guess that's changing now. Okay with me. Glad to see it.
 
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