Women Learning to Protect Selves, Firearms Instructor Says

The passage of the Brady bill and President Clinton’s vow to strengthen gun control laws further have fueled the debate on gun ownership. A recent development is the growing number of women who are arming themselves. From early 1991 to late 1992, sales of Smith & Wesson’s Ladysmith guns--including 9-millimeter semiautomatics and .357 Magnums, lighter and with smaller grips for women--doubled. Shooting ranges and gun shops report an increase in female clients. Shirley Braverman is a firearms instructor who teaches in Chatsworth. Two-thirds of her clients are women. She discussed the trend with Times correspondent Rebecca Bryant.

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Question: Gun shop managers in the San Fernando Valley report that more women are buying guns than ever, with a marked increase in sales after the 1992 civil disturbances. Why do you think so many women, many of whom have never owned a gun, have turned to firearms?

Answer: The women learned they had to be responsible for their own health. They’re going to be responsible for their own safety. They’ve had two police chiefs tell them, and they know, that the police can’t always be there. They’re going to have to protect themselves.

A gun is like a parachute. When you need it, nothing else is going to work. It’s the equalizer.

Q. When did you purchase your first gun and what prompted your decision?

A. I was receiving death threats from a gang because I was a witness. I got Sassy then. I lived with her. Sassy is a 640 Ladysmith revolver. I carried her with me everywhere. I was never without her. She was within three feet of my reach, day and night.

Q. When was that?

A. This was three years ago.

Q. Was that your first gun?

A. Well, I’m from Missouri. I’d shot rifles and shotguns all my life. In Missouri, when you’re hunting, this would be considered a toy. So I had other guns. This one was the first one for self-defense.

Q. You mentioned you carried it with you everywhere, in the city of Los Angeles. That’s illegal.

A. Yes, 90% of my female students do that.

Q. Why is it worth breaking the law?

A. To save your life. The only reason you’re going to carry a gun is because you’re afraid you might have to use it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but maybe someday. And I have women calling me all the time where they used a gun, didn’t shoot anybody, but used a gun to make people go away and leave them alone, that they were afraid of. They would have been horrified if they had no recourse.

Q. What kind of training do you have?

A. I’m NRA-certified, an instructor in pistol, rifle and shotgun and I’ve taught all of them.

Q. What kind of training do you believe gun owners should have?

A. If they want the gun for self-defense, they certainly need strategies and tactics on how not to get in situations where you have to use a gun, because certainly nobody ever wants to use the gun.

They need to be able to use the gun almost without thinking, which means they need to put in at least 3,000 rounds. It needs to be an automatic response.

I’d go into justifiable homicide. I’d go into cleaning, taking it apart, putting it together, shooting. Keep it away from people who don’t know how to use it. That is your responsibility 24 hours a day, seven days a week for as long as you live or own the gun.

Q. Do you believe the training should be mandatory? Should there be some sort of certification process required for gun ownership?

A. The whole thing has to do with responsible people. Responsible people are going to learn whether they have a training course or not. You can’t gauge responsibility by people who take a class. It’s the same thing with cars. You can give somebody a license who’s the most irresponsible driver in the world.

Q. So, would you say yes or no on the mandatory training?

A. It’s a start. Sure, why not? Everybody should know how to use it, have some instruction.

Q. When your guns are at home, where do you keep them?

A. I have quite a few so I have a type of safe that I keep the ones that we use on the shoot. But my self-defense gun, since I live with no one, is loaded by my bed at night, and I carry it into the kitchen at a special place that I have hooked under a shelf. If somebody comes to visit me, if my grandchildren come to visit me, then I inactivate the guns, put them where they can’t reach them at all.

Q. And they’re loaded?

A. A self-defense gun is always loaded. Most confrontations are four to seven seconds. That’s how long you have to react, so I have to be able to grab it within three seconds, point it in one second and shoot.

Q. And when you’re traveling, you take them with you as well?

A. Yes. The castle doctrine says that any place you sleep, that is your private space. You have a right to defend it, whether it’s a campground, a cruise ship, or a motel. You transport it legally when you’re transporting it, but once you’re in there, no one has the right to break in in the middle of the night to your private place. They do it to me, they might get shot.

Q. Gwen Fitzgerald, spokeswoman for the Washington-based Handgun Control Inc., cited a 1991 FBI crime study that reported 25% of police officers killed by a gun are shot with their own weapons. If officers who are well-trained to deal with those sorts of situations become victims, how can gun owners feel confident their guns won’t be turned against them?

A. In the first place, officers live quite a different life than a person like me. Twenty-four hours a day they are exposed to dangerous situations and violent situations. The study of that is that most of the time these officers misjudged a situation. They went into a situation that they did not realize was dangerous.

Sometimes an officer just does not want to believe that he’s in such a dangerous situation that he has to draw his gun. They don’t think the boys, the young people, are that dangerous and they are. Now officers are getting much smarter. Much more backup.

Q. If a gun owner is walking around with a weapon in her purse, and that’s the same group of people she might walk by, is she . . .

A. I wouldn’t walk by them. I’m staying away from them. I’m using a defensive tactic where I’m staying 21 feet away from anybody that I think could be a threat. And I’m watching them very closely. If they continue to come toward me I draw my gun and say go away. If they don’t go away, if they continue toward me, I would shoot them, yes. And they have to come through five .38s to get to me. I don’t look for trouble. I’m trying to stay away from it.

Q. Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to introduce a new package of gun restrictions when Congress returns in January. The package would require handgun buyers to submit to a fingerprint check and undergo a seven-day “cooling-off period” before purchase. Would you agree with these measures?

A. It’s stupid. It’s a waste of money. Do you know any criminal who goes to a gun store and gets himself fingerprinted, who writes out three pages of his life history and waits a week? Do you think anybody, any criminal, is going to do that?

The law-abiding citizen is not the problem here. Why are we penalizing and setting up this great paperwork mill and spending millions to regulate the people who aren’t the problem? The problem is the gangs, and the drugs. Do something about them .

Q. Do you believe semiautomatic or automatic weapons should be banned?

A. No. There are 200 million guns in the United States. I know people who’ve got guns that their grandfathers gave them. Semiautos. You can’t do it. How? What happens to the Second Amendment?

It seems to me that when I saw President Clinton up there, I didn’t hear him when he took his oath say that he was going to uphold the handgun control. President Clinton said he was going to uphold the Constitution, and my Second Amendment right is that I have the right to keep and bear arms.

Q. Do women’s reasons for owning guns vary greatly from men’s reasons?

A. Yes. I think women are much more realistic. A gun to a man is like a macho toy and a power thing. They fantasize entirely differently. They’re going to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.

When a woman decides to buy a gun, man, she is serious. She wants to learn to use it. She’s not doing this lightly.

I would like to see many more women own guns. If rapists thought that a woman had a gun, there would be much less rape in the city of L.A.

Q. What would a society be like if all the responsible citizens had guns and all the criminals had guns?

A. An armed society becomes a very polite society. Very polite.

Yes, I wish every woman in the United States, every law-abiding citizen had a gun. Every house should have a gun in it, with responsible people who know how to use it. Only we can protect ourselves.