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the trigger, feeling the explosive surge, and watching a portion of a distant target erupt for no visible cause. It is an appeal that crosses lines of class, race, and gender.Joyce Mays-Rabbit,a money manager in Los Angeles, told me that when she goes hiking and fishing in deep wilderness, she carries a .44, the handgun equivalent of a cannon. “When you start shooting a .44,” she said, “it’s a real power trip. The flames shoot out of it. It’s like playing cowboys and Indians as a kid. It’s not that you want to kill anything. It would be very similar to having a really hot car.”
    I took the first step toward learning to shoot in October 1992 when I took a beginner’s course in self-defense shooting from a woman named Paxton Quigley, a near-celebrity among gun owners. Although I took the course when I was already well into my journey through the gun culture, I present it here as a kind of introduction, for it taught me worlds about why the shooting passion burns so bright. It demonstrated how guns can seem such a compelling solution to the helplessness so many Americans now feel in the face of what they perceive to be a wild surge in violent crime.
    In the hands of so astute a marketer as Paxton Quigley, the concept of armed self-defense becomes nearly irresistible. She brings to the fray a carefully crafted image, that of a former antigun activist who saw the light after the rape of a close friend.In fact, she was a marginal activist at best—“a glorified gofer,” as one contemporary put it. And the rape was nowhere near as influential as Quigley’s realization that a book on armed self-defense by a former antigun activist might be a hot seller. E. P. Dutton published the book, Armed & Female , in 1989, and soon afterward Quigley began teaching women to shoot. Shooting became a vehicle for feminine empowerment. “By getting over their fear of guns and knowing they can take care of themselves,” Quigley told me, “they become more confident human beings.”
    Although the message may at first seem novel, at its root it is nothing more than a repackaged and redirected version of the message broadcast repeatedly to Americans since the late nineteenth century by presidents, newspaper reporters, Hollywood producers, TV writers, novelists, poets, and painters: just as guns won the West, they will win you peace of mind on the wild and woolly urban frontier.One of Quigley’s students, Noelle Stettner, a Libertarian disc jockey from Gainesville, Georgia, synthesized this idea aptly when she told me she saw armed self-defense as “the last frontier of feminism.”

    “Okay,” Paxton Quigley bellowed, “on the count of three, everyone say, ‘ Get the fuck out of here !’ ”
    Nineteen Georgia women stood in a circle inside the meeting room of the Cherokee Gun Club in Gainesville, Georgia. Inside the circle stood Quigley. As always, she had begun the course with a couple of hours of instruction on basic self-defense techniques and on helping the women to stop thinking like victims.
    “I don’t want you smiling,” Quigley said. For a small woman she had a surprisingly powerful voice. She was petite, blond, and by anyone’s standard, drop-dead gorgeous. She wore a snug black blouse, a purplish tweed blazer with a peach kerchief in the pocket, and skintight jeans, with a gold chain looped a few times around her tiny waist. She moved within the circle in long concussive strides, the hard heels of her python-skin boots slamming the linoleum. “I want you to be angry, because women are basically fearful,” she told the group. “I want you to come from a strong position.”
    The women screamed again, with considerably more conviction. The room erupted in laughter, war whoops, and scattered shouts of “Aw right !”
    Although the message was serious, Quigley had designed the exercise to keep the mood light, part of her strategy for helping women shed their fear of guns and get them in the mood to shoot.