Carrying a gun and shooting at the range isn’t just for men. That’s probably never actually been the case, but that’s especially true these days. Women are a growing sector of the firearm market.
However, are they being undercounted?
Obviously, groups like the NSSF and the manufacturers try to do their best, but as my friend Robyn Sandoval pointed out recently, there’s a reason they might be getting missed.
She was watching Disney+ on someone else’s account, and it made her think a little about how the algorithm works and how internal tracking functions. Streaming services make a lot of assumptions about their programs based on that tracking data, but a lot of people use a service that’s created by someone else.
And not all of them create sub accounts like I did for my family.
What does this have to do with guns? Well, she’ll tell you.
The more I thought about Disney’s assumptions, the more I began wondering whether similar blind spots might exist in industries that rely heavily on customer data to understand their markets. My mind kept returning to firearms.
Last week, I was discussing this issue with Barbara Baird of Women’s Outdoor News. Barbara has spent decades documenting women in the shooting sports, and our conversation kept returning to a familiar contradiction. On one hand, women have become one of the most significant growth segments in the firearms industry. We see it at ranges, training events, competitions, and industry conferences. On the other hand, many companies continue to describe women as an emerging audience or a niche market despite years of evidence suggesting otherwise.
As Barbara and I talked, we kept returning to the same question. The women we see at matches, training events, conferences, and range programs do not look like a niche audience. The growth has been visible for years. Yet many companies continue to talk about women as though they are a future opportunity rather than a present reality. The question is not whether women are participating. Anyone paying attention can see that they are. The question is why participation sometimes appears more obvious in the real world than it does in the data.
That disconnect immediately brought me back to Disney. If women are entering the firearms market in record numbers, why do some brands still struggle to see them? What if companies are not underestimating participation? What if they are undercounting it?
When the Data Can’t See Her
Last year, A Girl & A Gun encountered an example of this challenge through our partnership with Dawson Precision. Dawson had invested in supporting women shooters and wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of that investment. Like any responsible business, they turned to the data. They reviewed purchases made using the A Girl & A Gun member discount code to determine whether the partnership was helping them expand their reach among female consumers.
The numbers raised questions because many of the orders appeared under men’s names.
Now, this might well have been a case of a woman getting the discount code, but her husband or boyfriend wanted something from Dawson Precision, while they didn’t, so they just handed over the code.
Or, it could be that they just asked the men in their lives to handle it.
In my household, there are some things that I consume, but I just trust my wife to handle getting. There are other things that I get that she consumes. Yes, that also involves guns. All the 4473s for the guns I own have my name on them. I bought them for myself because I’m the one into guns, who does research on guns, and who likes them simply for what they are.
But my wife is a pretty good shot, and she values the ability to protect herself as much as any pro-gun dude ever could, so when I head out of town, she picks which gun has to stay behind for her to use.
She’s unlikely to show up on any company’s list of customers because I’m the one who does the buying, even if it’s for her. Meanwhile, she’s the one who hunted down a yoga mat I needed for some physical therapy I’m having to endure, because that’s more in her wheelhouse. Some couples do this, while others don’t.
As a result, my wife will not be counted among women shooters. She’s not a die-hard gun person, mind you, but she does shoot and does value the right to keep and bear arms.
So I think Robyn has a point. Women may well be undercounted, which is something we probably need to figure out how to address, because while anti-gun Democrats try to court the vote of American women, it would probably behoove them to recognize that there are a lot more of them who are pro-gun than they want to believe.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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