Girls With Guns

“Girls With Guns”
Lori Mitchell


The squad is on the line ready to start its round.
On post four, the shooter goes over a subconscious checklist: Hull bag on hip, shell box holder on waist, shell box open and ready, toe pad on shoe, ear plugs in ears, shooting glasses just the right tint for the light conditions and gun at the ready. And her hair is out of her eyes thanks to the ponytail poking out from under her cap.
Girls and guns. When most people think of those two words together they think cheap porn, Quinton Taratino’s B-grade blood-fest “Grindhouse” or Annie Oakley, the woman trick shooter in Buffalo Bill’s traveling show in the 19th century.
On this 35th anniversary of Title IX, the law giving college women’s sports increased credibility, there is a small invasion going on. Women are starting to flock to the male dominated shotgun sports of trap, skeet and sporting clays.
Shotgun sports evolved out of the desire of bird hunters to keep their shooting skills sharp during the off-season. Instead of live birds, shooters try to hit spinning, circular color clays launched in all directions by hand or by machine. The clays are meant to mimic birds in flight. Today’s shotgun sports appeals to more than just hunters. It is a sport unto itself.
As with women in most male dominated sports, the female athlete faces many challenges. In addition to learning and mastering the mechanics of the sport, a woman must deal with additional hurdles. A woman taking up a shotgun sport will face scrutiny from the men in the sport and surprisingly from other women.
Women will wonder about her motives. The women will look at a new woman and ask is she here to learn this sport? Is she serious about competing? Does she consider this a man store? Is she just looking for a husband? A female will also face scrutiny from non-shooting women. Women who have no experience with guns will assume that the female shooter either “wants to be a man” or is “too small to handle a gun and will get knocked around by it”.
Denise, a 47-year-old trap shooter and duck hunter who has been shooting since 1972, notes she gets more reaction from women who are not in the sport.
“Because I am smaller in stature, I often hear ‘how can you hold a gun?’ It is women who have little or no experience that will assume the gun is more powerful than me.”
She goes on to say the way today’s shotguns are constructed and the ability to shoot high scores with shells that have less recoil pave the way for an enjoyable experience without the fear of pain for both men and women.
The whispers from both sexes that a woman is taking up shotgun sports as a way to hook up with a man certainly has some basis in fact. After all, die-hard golfers claim the same thing! There are certainly several examples of successful couplings from women who join the sport and, by luck and love, find someone to share their sporting and life’s interests with. As I overheard one trap shooter say to the man I was shooting with on a “date,” “She is pretty, has a great personality…and shoots straight!” But it is agreed that any woman who enters the sport strictly to find a date or a mate will ultimately be disappointed.
Jennifer Carter was one such success story. Growing up, she accompanied her Dad to the trap range and found it the height of boring.
After breaking up with her boyfriend at the age of 26, she was looking for something to occupy her time, and went back to the range.
“Some men would actually walk out onto the line and tell me what I was doing wrong-while I was shooting!” Jennifer learned to just smile and nod and ignore everything they said, and continue to take her coaches advice.
She persevered in the sport and in 2000, met her future husband while trapshooting. Their first date was a shooting tournament and their wedding featured a clay target groom’s cake.
“Dave’s friends (her husband) are often telling him how lucky he is to have a wife who likes to shoot,” she said.
A woman will get many reactions from men ranging from politeness and respect as a shooter first and a woman second to abject, raw chauvinism.
Longtime shooter and consummate gentleman Pat Ireland is direct when asked his opinion on women in this man’s sport. “Away from a trap club I will treat women as Ladies. At the club, they are shooters.”
Respect is shown to women by men such as Pat Ireland, who will celebrate with them when they win and not show any mercy in a shoot off against them and beat them on the line without hesitation. These are the men who will proudly wear a button that reads, “Beat by a Girl.”
On the other side of the clay, we have the men who will refuse to shoot with women because they gossip, or are too slow, or “just plain don’t know how to shoot”. These are the men who won’t hesitate to run out on the line and interrupt a practice or even an event round to espouse their expertise by letting the little woman know everything she is doing wrong, no matter what her score is. There are the men who think a woman should be barefoot and pregnant and have no business holding a shotgun unless it’s in a trashy movie.
Jennifer Carter tells of one such experience. The winner of several tournaments, Jennifer, a Safety Director for a construction company, keeps several of her trophies on the walls and shelves in her office. She says she often faces disbelief and shock by her male clients when she informs them that no, they are not her husband’s awards, that they are indeed hers.
The first image people may get of a woman trap shooter is a hillbilly woman who dwarfs her man on the line in size and girth. If anything, it is just the opposite. As long-time trap shooter Linda Hoffman jokingly advised, “It’s not how you shoot, its how you look when you shoot.” Recently, there have been businesses spring up which cater to a woman’s shooting needs including tailored vests and products like the “Shoot Like A Girl” t-shirts.
Most men fall somewhere in the middle. They are perfectly content to shoot with women, but still regard them as women.
At a small private club one afternoon a little over a year ago, I walked up and asked about learning the sport. While I was getting my lesson a man observing could be overheard saying, “She has a cute face and great stance.”
Though this is high praise indeed from a trap shooter, his friends’ teasing reaction of “How come you never tell me I have a cute face?” illustrates that women are perceived differently in this sport.
Dave Snelling is familiar with the battle of the sexes when it comes to shooting; his wife Lisa is a Class A trap shooter in the Central Valley and has a closet full of belt-buckles and plaques to prove it. Dave is a bit behind Lisa in the sport and shoots at a lower level.
He has seen both types of pride and prejudice in this position. At one tournament, where his wife was doing particularly well; one of the shooters teasingly chastised him. “Your wife is kicking your ass, son! You better start shooting better!”
He also noted that even among the old-timers, there were compliments for his wife’s ability. During one shoot where his wife shot her way to a win her class, an old-timer, complete with grizzled, gray beard and a drawl perfected after years of chewing tobacco, leaned up next to him and intoned, “Your woman sure shoots good.” While not quite politically correct, it was taken as a compliment.
Is there any benefit to being a female in a male dominated sport? Ask the long-time women shooters and you will get a resounding yes. To be able to excel not only against a man in a male-dominated sport and to feel the personal pride of winning after the hard work and effort to learn the game, practice both the mechanics and the mental aspect, and win is as addictive as chocolate. And that is something that nobody, neither male nor female, can take away.
After all, it takes a lot of courage to “shoot like a girl!”