Robin Natanel picks up a compact black pistol, barrel pointed down range. Gripping the gun with both hands, left foot forward, she raises the semi-automatic and methodically squeezes off five shots. The first one creases the left edge of a red bull’s-eye on a target 25 feet away. The four others paint a three-inch pattern around the first. If the target were a person’s head or heart, he’d probably be dead.
Natanel is a Buddhist, a self-avowed “spiritual person,” a 53-year-old divorcee who lives alone in a liberal-leaning suburb near Boston. She is 5-foot-1 (155 centimeters) and has blonde hair, dark eyes, a ready smile and a soothing voice, with a hint of Boston brogue. She’s a Tai Chi instructor who in classes invokes the benefits of meditation. And at least twice a month, she takes her German-made Walther PK380 to a shooting range and blazes away.
Two years ago, an ex-boyfriend broke into her house when she wasn’t home. The police advised a restraining order. Instead, she bought pepper spray and programmed the local police number on her cell phone’s speed dial. “I was constantly terrified for my safety,” she says.
Ultimately, she got the Walther, joining a confederacy of people who might once have been counted on in the main to be anti-handgun -- women, liberals, gays, college kids. They are part of a national story: Domestic handgun production and imports more than doubled over four years to about 4.6 million in 2009, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun-industry trade group.
‘Societal Change’
The surge has been propelled by shifting politics and demographics that have made it easier and more acceptable than at any time in 75 years for Americans to buy and carry pistols. Post-9/11 fears also seem to be a factor, as has been the relentless pro-gun politicking of the National Rifle Association and marketing, particularly to women, by handgun manufacturers. Events like yesterday’s fatal shootings on the Virginia Tech University campus reinforce a feeling that the world is an unsafe place, even as violent U.S. crime rates fall.
Natanel found it was no trouble to purchase the Walther, a brand favored by movie superspy James Bond, or to locate experts to train her. Her circumstances won her a conceal-carry permit in a state with tough gun-control laws. Her friends have been broadminded about her conversion.
“I’d never considered a gun,” Natanel says. “I thought they were scary. I wanted nothing to do with them. I didn’t think anyone should have them.”
Twenty years ago, 76 percent of women felt that way about handguns, and 68 percent of all people in the country were wary enough of firearms of any kind to tell Gallup pollsters that they backed laws more strictly limiting their sale. Then what Gallup calls “a clear societal change” began.
Democrats, Women
In October, a Gallup poll found record-low support for a handgun ban -- at 26 percent among all, and 31 percent among women. The poll, which has tracked gun attitudes since 1959, documented a record-low 43 percent who favor making it more difficult to acquire guns and record-high numbers of women and Democrats saying there is a firearm at home. Forty-seven percent said someone in the household owns at least one gun, the highest reading in 18 years.
The growing acceptance of guns echoes a transformation in the politics of weapons. In 1987, Florida joined a handful of states that by law or tradition allowed people to carry hidden guns; now Illinois is the sole conceal-carry holdout, and the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 16 sent to the Senate a bill advocated by the NRA that would require those that issue concealed gun permits to recognize licenses from other states.
Re: Support for Gun Control in US at its Lowest Level in More than 50 Years
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Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit
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