Armed Artist Nancy Floyd
She's Got a Gun
by Sandra Schulman
July 29, 2010

One of the artists in residence in the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency program, Nancy Floyd caught the eye of the selection committee with her book “She’s Got A Gun”.

Unusual and informative, personal and national, the book features Floyd’s photos, archival images and extensive writing. In 1991 Nancy Floyd bought her first handgun. Soon she was participating in Ladies Day at her local shooting range and reading Women & Guns magazine. In 1993 she began interviewing and photographing women who were fellow gun owners. In 1997 she started researching "gun women" from the past to see how they were represented in the popular imagination. She brought her work together in a riveting book, filled with remarkable photographs and candid first-person stories, accompanied by an eye-opening illustrated history of female gun ownership in America.

Sympathetic but unsentimental, Floyd presents gun-toting women young and old, including an 11 year-old girl competing in her first gun competition, a woman whose grandmother was killed by an intruder, and a war veteran who experienced firefights while stationed in Iraq. Whatever you might think about gun-toting women before you open this book, your preconceptions are sure to be shattered by the end.
In Nancy’s own words:

In June 30, 1991, I bought a gun. I did not buy it for self- defense, sport, or hobby. I bought it because I missed my brother. The catalyst was Desert Storm. People I knew were being sent to fight in Iraq, and this stirred up strong memories of Jimmy and the Vietnam War. An excellent marksman who had had hopes of becoming a gunsmith, Jimmy left for boot camp when I was nine and died in Vietnam when I was twelve—he was all of twenty-one years of age. Guns were always a part of his life. I bought my gun because I wanted to understand what he loved about fi rearms. By doing what he loved most, I thought I might learn more about him.

I bought my revolver out of curiosity, with no intention of becoming a long-term gun owner. I had ideas of what gun people were like, and I wasn’t going to become one of them. I thought I would shoot for a while and then sell my gun. This didn’t happen. I grew to enjoy shooting for a number of reasons; being in the company of gun women played a major role. I enjoyed target practice—shooting at paper targets and learning how to improve my skills. My gun range welcomed women, and a few of us formed a club and met weekly to shoot. Nothing formal. We talked about our accomplishments and failures, and we encouraged each other. We even invited a female police officer to talk to us about her experience as a cop, and some of us took a shooting class together. I found myself hanging out after practice, talking about different types of fi rearms. The first year I spent with my revolver I read everything I could find on guns, including Women & Guns magazine (1989 to present) and Paxton Quigley’s best seller, Armed and Female (1989). Thelma and Louise (1991) and Terminar 2: Judgment Day (1991), new movies my gun friends and my feminist friends talked about, provoked debate over definitions of self-defense and the reasons behind Hollywood’s increased interest in armed female characters. Because my own documentary projects as a photographer often included research about social or cultural issues, armed women interested me, and in 1993 I began interviewing and photographing some of the women I met at the range. “

"She's Got a Gun is entertaining and informative. Moreover, Floyd's wonderful writing voice has a genuineness that made me trust what she told me. The continuous moving back and forth between real-life gun experiences and representations of gun-toting women in movies and books works really well. This book will have enormous popular appeal. —Martha McCaughey, Director of Women's Studies, Appalachian State University, and author of Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women's Self-Defense.

"Floyd presents a definitive picture of how American culture has portrayed women and guns, from the days of Wild West dime novels to those of pulp-fictional and Hollywood Westerns to the present….A great resource on an underappreciated sector of American culture that is knockout entertaining, to boot; the book hits the bull’s-eye for history buffs and firearms enthusiasts alike."—Booklist