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# Carrying Care
- URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-women-think-about-guns-lethal-force/
- Published: 2026-09-09T13:25:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-09T13:25:12.000Z
- Description: How women think differently about guns, responsibility and lethal force
- Author: Margaret Kelley
- Tags: #women-and-guns, Gun Violence, When Women Wield Guns

We tend to talk about guns and violence as if they naturally belong together. In policy debates, media coverage and public imagination, firearms are most often framed through harm: [who is injured, who is killed](https://www.cdc.gov/firearm-violence/data-research/facts-stats/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [how to prevent the next tragedy](https://www.preventioninstitute.org/focus-areas/preventing-violence-and-reducing-injury/preventing-violence-advocacy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That focus is understandable. But it leaves out something important: how most gun owners actually live with guns, which is often shaped by where they live.

[In my research](https://www.routledge.com/A-Gun-of-Her-Own-The-Everyday-Lives-of-Women-Who-Shoot/Kelley/p/book/9781041015284?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with 55 Midwestern women gun owners, including women of color (18%) and LGBTQ respondents (9%), most living in suburban areas near high-crime cities, I found that many approach firearms through the lens of care. That is, women prioritize care of others, and that can include gun ownership as part of how they look after others.

That may sound counterintuitive. We are not used to putting guns and care in the same sentence. Women talked about responsibility, not wanting to use a gun and what it would mean if they had to. Some men likely also express this sentiment, but as I note below, the research on men and guns has focused more broadly on readiness and action.

The way women think and talk about guns matters. Despite a [gender gap in ownership](https://news.gallup.com/poll/406238/stark-gender-gap-gun-ownership-views-gun-laws.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), women are also one of the [fastest-growing groups](https://americanrounds.com/the-rising-tide-womens-growing-presence-in-firearm-ownership/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of gun owners, with recent data showing they account for a [substantial share](https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/nearly-30-million-acquire-guns-amid-pandemic-including-11-million-first-time-owners/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of new purchasers. This shift has drawn attention but not always understanding. Much of the public conversation still relies on older assumptions about gun culture, assumptions rooted in masculinity, identity and political affiliation. These frameworks do not fully capture how women are coming to firearms or what those firearms come to mean in their lives.

To make sense of this, I developed the concept of a care mindset.

### A care mindset

The care mindset*,* drawing on an [ethic of care](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674970960?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), is an ethical orientation in which gun ownership is understood as an expression of love, vigilance and responsibility toward those one is committed to protecting, and the larger community.

This orientation is not exclusive to women. Men also express concern for others, but[ ](https://uncpress.org/9781469627892/good-guys-with-guns/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)research often shows it is [shaped by norms of masculinity](https://uncpress.org/9781469627892/good-guys-with-guns/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that emphasize readiness, control and aggression. By contrast, the women I interviewed approached guns less as a way to assert control and more as a responsibility to be managed, with an emphasis on restraint, limits and the consequences of being wrong.

Care shaped how they thought about risk and safety. Gloria lived in my neighborhood and, with her husband, owned 15 guns. She explained: “I think about protecting myself and my kids all the time. Randomly I’ll be on the treadmill and think, ‘OK, what if someone comes into the gym right now and starts shooting a gun? What will I do?’”

Another, Eva, who carried her gun most of the time, also described the duty to protect: “You need to know how to defend yourself. And especially with women who have kids around their home, you need to be able to protect your kids.”

The language is relational: my kids, my family, the people around me. Protection is not abstract. It is tied to specific others. I interviewed only women, so I cannot know how often men understand gun ownership in similar terms. They may well do so, though existing research shows that men also navigate masculine expectations around readiness, control and protection.

The care mindset is structured through a set of duties that define what women believe responsible gun ownership requires of them. The duties that comprise the care mindset do not push women toward violence. If anything, they pull them away from it.

Women also emphasize diligence, which in their minds typically requires training, practice and restraint. Owning a gun requires judgment about when to use it and when not to use it. Carol, for example, doubted her readiness to take a life, expressing the duty to know one’s limits: “I have thought about if someone came toward me, whether I could shoot them or not. I do think I could if I truly felt in danger and I felt like I had no other option, but all of our training has suggested that you have to have the mindset to shoot … and that’s not a mindset I have.”

Shaye was careful to avoid risky situations and said: “I don’t ever want to get into a situation where I have to use violence on another person. It’s in our hearts that we don’t want to hurt people.”

The care mindset recognizes limitations and the weight of these decisions. It encourages less lethal outcomes. Lorena, with 30 years of law-enforcement experience, put it, “I really like the work ethics of women, and they tend to use less lethal force.”

### The weight of moral injury

At the center of gun ownership is a question most people avoid: What would it take for you to kill someone? The women did not see themselves as violent people. Yet they thought about home invasions, about protecting their children, about encounters that might leave no other option.

They returned to what it would mean to take a life and whether they could live with it afterward, a concern closely tied to [moral injury](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11919856/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the [psychological and ethical harm](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Achilles-in-Vietnam/Jonathan-Shay/9780684813219?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that can follow taking a life. As Esha put it, simply understanding what a gun is capable of made the possibility of harm feel real and deeply troubling. This concern often translated into a commitment to de-escalation and doing no harm.

While public debates often assume that owning a gun means being willing to use it, many of the women I spoke with approached gun ownership through hesitation, not eagerness.

Research supports this pattern: Women, on average, [are less involved in](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2009.00149.x?casa%5Ftoken=lDlFsbc7Sl0AAAAA%3A3mwsTBkJ%5FFSie-lRv4dyyCFTU8DYDNB4cbk0uB-lWvqxzk1dCv0a6bsMPP5kbtn2SPhm3WFQrG-dkOzsnw&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [less supportive of ](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346488585%5FGender%5FDifferences%5Fin%5FAggression?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)violence across a [wide range of scenarios](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2083439?seq=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including retaliation and even [some forms of self-defense](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-law-in-context/article/women-and-selfdefence-an-empirical-and-doctrinal-analysis/D2E0C6333823BF77FA100D9C74B96B5E?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#ref22).

Women spoke of the moral weight of violence in ways that were deeply reflective, even anticipatory. Rosemary told me: “Unless you’re a psychopath, you will have guilt from taking a life. Somewhere during that person’s life, somebody loved them. That was somebody’s son or somebody’s daughter, and now maybe they got on the wrong side of the street.”

For these women, training is about both shooting and learning when not to shoot. Or, as one instructor put it, “I train so I’ll never have to use my firearm.” At first, this may sound paradoxical: If the goal is to avoid using a firearm, why train with one at all? Gun ownership is both practical and symbolic. It provides a tangible means of protection while also shaping how women think about responsibility, encouraging them to anticipate danger while attending closely to care and the consequences of using force.

### Living with risk (care work at home)

Public debates about guns tend to focus on dramatic moments such as acts of violence and legislative battles over reform proposals. But most guns in the United States are not directly relevant to those conversations. They are stored, maintained and lived with inside the home. Women play a central role in this hidden work.

Women’s relationship to guns is also shaped by how they experience risk. Women are more likely to report [feeling unsafe](https://news.gallup.com/poll/155402/women-feel-less-safe-men-developed-countries.aspx?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) in everyday situations, especially in public and unfamiliar spaces. They are also more likely to experience certain forms of [interpersonal violence](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-023-01423-4?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including [intimate partner violence](https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

At the same time, women are acutely aware that guns themselves [introduce risk](https://www.rand.org/pubs/external%5Fpublications/EP70757.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), especially in the home, for [accidental injury](https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/unintentional-injuries.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [unauthorized access](https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Women spend significant time thinking about safe storage and reducing harm.

They do so through what I call [precautionary care](https://research.ebsco.com/c/aq3mjw/viewer/pdf/ejlbfajjhb?route=details&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a commitment to preparing for worst-case scenarios while actively working to prevent them. This includes training, planning and building what some described as a “safety toolkit” that extends beyond firearms to include awareness, avoidance and nonlethal strategies.

Gillian’s husband was a [“superowner,”](https://www.thetrace.org/2016/09/gun-super-owners-harvard-survey/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and she described their ongoing negotiations over storage, especially after their child was born. As she put it, the guns moved “from all over the house” to “a high, hidden place,” and eventually into a safe.

These moments reveal that safety is an ongoing process. It requires attention, communication and adjustment. It is, in many ways, a form of labor, one that is often invisible and unevenly distributed. Gun culture is not only something people identify with, but also something they do in daily routines that rarely enter public view.

These accounts complicate familiar feminist narratives. Feminist scholarship [critiques the expectation](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23638964?seq=15&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that women should manage risk by adjusting their behavior in the face of structural inequality. It is seen as anti-feminist, for instance, to change one’s clothing to minimize risk of being catcalled. Yet women who own guns describe their choices in precisely these terms: as a way of taking responsibility for their own safety and the safety of those around them.

The responsibility to protect can feel heavy. Firearms can be tools of empowerment, but they also reflect a world in which safety is not guaranteed and in which the burden of security often falls unevenly.

The care mindset may look different in [urban contexts](https://www.thetrace.org/2016/09/female-urban-gun-ownership-harvard-northeastern-university/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), where density, proximity to neighbors and higher exposure to street violence all shape how women weigh the risks and responsibilities of gun ownership. The same orientation toward protection and restraint is likely present, but the conditions under which it operates and the trade-offs it entails are likely distinct.

### A different way of relating to guns

Public discussions often assume that ownership is [tied to identity](https://research.ebsco.com/c/aq3mjw/viewer/pdf/bzg2anmlyj?route=details&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as though being a “gun person” is a well-defined class of American. But my respondents did not see themselves as “gun people,” nor did they organize their sense of self around firearms.

This stands in contrast to dominant cultural narratives that often link guns to [masculinity](https://www.jstor.org/stable/48586704?seq=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [status](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/citizen-protectors-9780190902148?lang=en&cc=us&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [political identity](https://research.ebsco.com/c/aq3mjw/viewer/pdf/txiuw3ht3b?route=details&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Women are aware of those narratives and resist them. Instead, guns appear in their lives in more limited, situational ways, sometimes necessary but not central to who they are.

For example, Florence was 64 years old and regularly competed at local gun clubs. She said: “Yeah. It’s not my biggest interest. I’d rather talk about crafting or something like that than guns.”

If there is a contrast here, it is not between men and women as individuals, but between different cultural approaches to guns.

American gun culture reflects what might be called [swagger](https://go-gale-com.www2.lib.ku.edu/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=T004&resultListType=RESULT%5FLIST&searchResultsType=SingleTab&retrievalId=2965ce42-17bc-4f60-9742-d66193725ed4&hitCount=1>mSearchId=cb4dadbe-c1ba-4b28-a072-5110e2c3b7bf&searchType=BasicSearchForm¤tPosition=1&docId=GALE%7CA341297484&docType=Editorial&sort=Relevance&contentSegment=ZONE-MOD1&prodId=AONE&pageNum=1&contentSet=GALE%7CA341297484&searchId=R2&userGroupName=ksstate%5Fukans&inPS=true&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), characterized by confidence, performance and the visible assertion of control. This approach is highly visible and influential, particularly where gun ownership is publicly performed and socially validated. By this I include open carrying, which is rare, and also behavior and interactions that communicate possession, such as bragging about guns or other revealing information. Men who own guns may or may not exemplify this, but it’s hard for them to be wholly outside these norms and expectations.

The women I interviewed offered something different. Most chose not to carry at all because they did not feel prepared to accept the consequences.

Women also tend to be more private about their ownership, constituting another duty. Many avoid discussing guns in public or posting about them online. They do not want attention or conflict, or to be drawn into polarized debates.

Vera was relatively new to guns and got one because she travels alone quite a bit. She explained: “Men are, ‘Yeah, I got this gun on me.’ And women are a little more … a little more conservative, quiet, keep it hidden. A little more private.”

### A different starting point for policy

What does all of this mean for a public conversation that is largely focused on the connection between guns and violence?

If we begin with the assumption that guns are primarily about aggression or ideology, we miss how people actually think about them, including the moral work of ownership and their efforts, perhaps imperfect, to reduce harm.

A care-centered approach shifts attention to:

- responsibility rather than identity,
- prevention rather than reaction, and
- relationships rather than abstractions.

It also opens up an opportunity for policy conversations that take real-world experiences seriously, such as how people store guns, how they learn, how they assess risk and how they make decisions under pressure.

Many women are already engaged in careful, deliberate practices, [seeking training](https://www.agirlandagun.org/from-curiosity-to-confidence-what-january-2026-says-about-womens-firearms-training-in-america/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), thinking through scenarios and worrying about mistakes. Policy discussions often proceed as if gun owners lack this awareness, drawing on narrow models that center on urban violence and overlook the wider range of gun-owning experiences. This gap makes it harder to design approaches that resonate with how people, including men, actually make decisions about safety and responsibility. An approach that builds on these orientations toward care would expand access to training that emphasizes [decision-making and de-escalation](https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/what-works-de-escalation-training?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), supports [safe storage practices](https://momsdemandaction.org/work/be-smart-for-kids/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Moms%20Demand%20Action%20volunteers%20partner%20with%20the%20Everytown,program.%20Learn%20more%20about%20the%20program%20at%20BeSMARTforkids.org) and recognizes that, for many gun owners, the central concern is not how to use a firearm but how to avoid using one.

Whatever our views on guns, we share a commitment to reducing firearm injury and promoting safety. A care mindset, grounded in responsibility and a commitment to avoiding harm, deserves a place in that conversation.