NEWINGTON — Gun laws in Connecticut have gone through drastic changes in recent years, with another series of new regulations up for debate at the state capitol. Amid those debates a new trend is emerging in which a growing number of women are becoming gun owners.
The Connecticut’s Citizen’s Defense League told FOX61 they have a total of 27,000 members who own firearms, roughly 5,400 of those members are women, and that the majority of their women members joined in just the last four years.
“There’s definitely an ever growing rate of women shooters, we see it, its apparent here in the store,” Peter McClusky, sales manager of Hoffman’s Gun Center in Newington, said. He went on to say, “In the industry the rate of women that are getting involved competition shooting that kind of stuff definitely going up there in numbers.”
When it comes to gun ownership, the numbers show the gender gap is shrunk by roughly 20 percent between 1990 and 2014, according to the independent research organization, NORC at the University of Chicago.
“It’s breaking maybe a scene stereotype that this is a man’s industry which couldn’t be more far from the truth,” McClusky said.
Brooke Cheney, firearms instructor and owner of A Great Start, a shooting school, said she too has seen a rise in women clientele.
“I opened in 2014 and I had some people interested but as I’ve grown as a business I’ve also increased the number of women in my classes. Seventy percent of my clientele are women,” Cheney said.
She also said for her clients there’s no one reason for the upward trend.
“Some women are coming because there is a gun in their home, because their husband, their boyfriend happen to have firearms and they just want to learn a little bit more about it, some women are coming to me strictly to overcome their fear,” Cheney said.
One newer gun owner, Deborah Mansell, of Storrs, said her shooting skills are coming as a surprise to even her. She first became interested in better understanding the mechanics of a gun as a means to better protect herself.
“Two years ago I would have never said that I would have done anything with guns,” Mansell explained. She added the new-found desire to learn how to properly use a firearm was triggered by a startling nightmare.
“I woke up from a dream one night that someone grabbed me from my house and I was sweating and I was scared to death,” Mansell said.
The kind of fear is also linked to gun ownership across both genders, according to the Pew Research Center. The research pointed out that hunting was named the top reason for gun ownership in the U.S. back in 1999, but that reason shifted to “self protection” by 2013.
McClusky and the professional trainers at Hoffman’s urge all first time and long time gun owners to understand that safety must always come first and be a priority, emphasizing that professional training is far more important that any amount of money spent on guns or their accessories.