Her Aim Is to Arm Women

There are monsters out there.

That’s why Paxton Quigley bought a gun.

That’s why Quigley wrote a book titled “Armed and Female. Twelve Million American Women Own Guns. Should You?”

Quigley, a firearms expert, self-defense instructor, mother of two, part-time bodyguard, writer and lecturer brought her crusade to the Desert Inn in Lancaster this week.

Arm yourselves against the night, Quigley told a spellbound audience at a seminar sponsored by The Gunshop Inc. in Lancaster. She brings a message well-grounded in statistics, news stories, garish true-crime programs and hysterical voices on the 911 line: For women in the United States in 1990, the night lasts 24 hours a day. The troops are in the Persian Gulf, but the war--with daily body counts and 2-year-old-victims--is right here.

“Women have finally realized that the police can’t protect them, their husbands can’t protect them, their boyfriends can’t protect them,” Quigley said. “There is more and more crime. There is a change in attitude.”

Quigley has built a one-woman industry on this theme. Her presentation is slick. The cover of her book shows her in a fashionable V-neck blue dress, red ear protectors and gold bracelets as she holds a revolver at the ready.

Like her press clippings, the 38-year-old with big, startled eyes and a master’s degree in anthropology describes herself as “petite and attractive.” She says you would not expect her to own a 9mm Lady Smith semiautomatic pistol or to speak the arcane language of recoil and isosceles firing stances.

That’s the point. At the heart of her pitch lies a personal conversion.

“I hated guns,” Quigley told the Antelope Valley crowd, which hails from an area where people grow up around guns, own lots of them and often announce their allegiance to them on bumper stickers. “I feared guns. I was actually anti-gun.”

Quigley’s views grew out of a liberal political upbringing and solidified after the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy in 1968, while she worked in Kennedy’s presidential campaign, she said.

But her gun control activism faltered, she said, after her house was burglarized, her car was stolen as she watched and two friends were raped. She learned to shoot. She embarked on a research project that took her around the country to hear the stories of victims, cops, self-defense experts, inmates at San Quentin staring from the other side of the glass.

Now Quigley teaches self-defense, charging $125 for two-hour lessons at gun ranges in Van Nuys and Orange County. She recommends the .38-caliber special revolver with a three-inch barrel for beginners because of its “excellent intimidation value” and moderate weight.

“I teach them to shoot from the prone position, I teach them to shoot weak-handed,” she said, absently tearing at the edge of a newspaper as she talked. She jumped up to demonstrate how she instructs her students to “walk and shoot, they love the assertiveness of that.”

Quigley, a National Rifle Assn. member and promoter, told the crowd that carrying a gun without a permit is illegal and carries awesome responsibilities. But she said 250,000 “law-abiding” Californians break the law daily, and there are modified purses and “fanny packs” to help them do it. Fear transcends ideology when it comes to the broadening spectrum of gun owners, she said.

“I could never understand why it ended up being a conservative issue,” she said. “Liberals are always pushing for the First Amendment. I don’t see why they fall down when it comes to the Second Amendment,” which defines the right to bear arms.

The women in the audience, some with husbands in tow, listened intently to the pros and cons of Mace, stun guns, knives and Ku-batons, plastic sticks attached to key rings that enable the holder to slash and stab with the keys.

The woman laughed, some of them a bit nervously, at scenes in a video of women using combat techniques to rip and stomp mock assailants in protective padding. They joined in enthusiastically when Quigley asked them to practice a resounding, angry “No!” of the type to be shouted at would-be “perpetrators.”

“As middle-class people we are bought up to be nice,” she said, stressing that attitude is the foundation of self-defense. “Women are brought up to be especially nice. . . . It’s hard for them to practice for something that could be horrible.”

The audience was silent during an audiotape of a frantic phone call to police from a Kansas City woman as a man broke into her house, an example of how the students should not be--defenseless, no gun, no “safe room” with reinforced door, no recourse. A teen-age blonde, who had been sitting next to her sister, got up and left.

The discussion veered from political denunciations--tough restrictions on concealed-weapon permits leave gun owners “defenseless,” a man exclaimed--to legal questions about when it is permissible to shoot an intruder. The law looks favorably on a woman who uses deadly force, Quigley said, but you are not supposed to shoot them in the back.

A thin, dark-haired woman in a business suit announced calmly that two years ago she had been abducted from a coin-operated laundry and raped. She referred to the color-coded hierarchy of mental states that Quigley had outlined: white for a comfortable, unalert state, with awareness increasing through yellow and orange. Finally comes the red zone in which you make decisions, run, attack.

“I was in the white zone,” the woman said. “I wasn’t ready. I was in my own world.”

She thanked Quigley and the others and left.

At a table staffed by employees of the gun shop, a line of women formed to sign up for shooting lessons: New arrivals in the red zone.