October 25, 2011
By Robert W. Hunnicutt
Photographer Lindsey McCrum has out a new coffee-table book fetchingly entitled Chicks With Guns (Vendome Press, $45). The approach is aesthetic rather than political, as noted in the introduction:
"In our time, few subjects provoke the range of emotions that guns do. Thoughts as varied as policies to prevent violent crime, the romance of the Old West, and even the implications of children playing with toy guns come to mind. No matter what images are evoked, the reality is that in this country, fifteen to twenty million women own guns. The sight of women with ostensibly deadly weapons (they are actually unloaded) challenges our preconceptions about the female or maternal role."
Those who came up in the 1970s will agree that such a book would have been unthinkable 30 or 40 years ago, which is a good indication of how far the debate has shifted to our side in the interim. There are still those who demonize guns and their owners, but they are distinctly in the minority.
Despite the cheeky title, the "chicks" pictured are not the scantily-clad babes of the "sexy girls with guns" genre, but rather women of various ages from many different walks of life.
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