I can remember a time when Soldier Of Fortune might have run a piece on a latte-drinking liberal woman, scared by some close calls with crime opted to buy a gun:

More than once [while living in Los Angeles] I called 911. What’s bizarre is that during those nights I never remembered the gun. I didn’t even know where R. stored it. It never occurred to me that a gun might quiet my blaring inner alarms.

Until last year, that is, when I moved to Montana to live with my new boyfriend, now fiancé. Montana is one of only 12 states that allow residents to carry a loaded gun in public—“open carry”—either on foot or in a vehicle, without a permit. (To carry a concealed weapon, you do need a permit, obtainable after completing a training or safety course.)

Firearms, in other words, are a seamless part of the culture here. I don’t see people examining fruit in the produce aisle at Albertsons with a gun in plain sight, but I have glimpsed quite a few guns idly resting, like a map or some other quotidian object, on the dashboard of a car. People also talk about guns casually and often, the way people in New York talk about long workdays and people in L.A. talk about yoga classes. My boyfriend’s father’s girlfriend, a sixtysomething former stewardess who lives in Jackson Hole, tells me she keeps a pistol in her car because she often drives long stretches, crisscrossing her way between Wyoming and Arizona. Another woman I befriended, a quirky, devoutly Christian two-time divorcée in her fifties, takes her teenage son to the shooting range on weekends instead of to the movies. Leaving a sporting-goods store one evening, I pass a young couple with a yellow Labrador. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” squeals the woman, who has frosted pink lipstick and a blond ponytail snaking down her back. “This is for my birthday, right?” She’s carrying a large box containing a shotgun. As Lindsay McCrum, a photographer who published the bluntly titled book Chicks With Guns, has said: “When you get outside of the blue-state cities, everybody has a gun.”

But that’s not Soldier Of Fortune  It’s Elle. And I can not remember a time when Elle would have done anything but sniff with horror at the thought.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, January 26th, 2012 at 6:26 am and is filed under Victim Disarmament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.