"Women, we are told, should not own guns. Women, we are told, are more likley to be injured by their own guns than to be able to fend off an attack successfully themselves. This "fact," along with other such widely disseminated and destructive myths as the belief that single women over thirty-five are more likely to be struck by lightning than to marry, is rooted in a fundamental assumption of female weakness and vulnerability. Why should a woman not be every bit as capable as a man of using a firearm?". "Women's growing tendency to arm themselves in recent years has been political fodder for both the right and the left. Female gun owners are frequently painted as "trying to be like men" (the conservative perspective) or "capitulating to patriarchal ideas about power" (the liberal critique). Eschewing the polar extremes in the heated debate over gun ownership and gun control, and linking firearms and feminism in novel fashion, Mary Zeiss Stange and Carol K. Oyster here cut through much of the rhetoric to paint a precise and unflinching account of America's gun women."--BOOK JACKET.