WASHINGTON -- We've all seen the stories: Young women, terrified by crime, snapping up handguns in record numbers and heading out to the shooting range to pop a few slugs into paper cutouts of would-be attackers.
"Fear Impels More Women to Buy Guns," declared a Washington Post headline in January. "Women are buying guns like they've never bought them before," Morley Safer told "60 Minutes" viewers last fall.
"These days, you never know," warned the Dallas Morning News, "which woman is packing a pistol."
But like other media creatures before her, the pistol-packing woman may be greatly exaggerated.
According to a new study by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, female gun ownership has remained virtually unchanged in America since 1980.
"There's absolutely no indication that women are more likely to own guns or handguns in the last 14 years," said Tom Smith, director of NORC's General Social Survey and author of a study analyzing media reports about the alleged gun craze among women.
Where did the idea come from? It was "fabricated by the gun groups," Mr. Smith said. Why? Because the male market became saturated, gun sales dropped and gun manufacturers wanted to mine American women as a potential new market, according to a study released yesterday by the anti-gun Violence Policy Center in Washington.
The gun groups, including the National Rifle Association and other industry representatives, deny fabricating anything.
"Why do we claim more women are owning guns? Because we make a line of guns, the Ladysmith line, and we have sold quite a number over the years. And I don't think men are buying those guns," said Ken Jorgensen, director of communications at Smith & Wesson, which pioneered handguns for women in the late 1980s.
It was Smith & Wesson's research for the Ladysmith that first jTC aroused Mr. Smith's suspicions. In 1988, the Massachusetts gun manufacturer paid for a Gallup Poll showing that the number of American women who own guns increased 53 percent from 1983 to 1986.
Mr. Smith was skeptical. "Such a huge increase in a behavior is just totally outside the norm one would expect," he said. "So I immediately ran our numbers."
Mr. Smith's numbers come from the General Social Survey, an extensive, in-person survey of American attitudes on a wide variety of subjects. Among the questions: Is there a gun in the house? Is it a long gun or a handgun? And who owns it?
Ten different surveys between 1980 and 1994 found that, on average, only 11.6 percent of women owned firearms of any kind and just 7.4 percent owned handguns.