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Years ago, my wife was very adamant against having guns in the home. We worked through those issues and now have a home brimming with beloved (or tolerated, depending on who you ask) firearms. The other night we watched World War Z. During the initial scenes, where the protagonist is trying to get his family to safety, I could tell she was a little on edge, so I asked her if this scene made her more or less happy that we have firearms in the home. She quickly admitted that it made her more happy.

That got me to thinking, what would be the best list of movies to show a gun-fearing spouse/loved one, that would, at least on some psychological level, make them more amenable to having firearms in the home? This is meant to be fun, not a discussion for whether this is a healthy approach.

Go.

Just have her read "The Armed Citizen" page in the NRA magazine every month.

Movies are mostly untrue. These stories are right out of local newpapers!

It's not a movie but a TV show
Criminal Minds (Pack Mentality) Everyday news headlines have this very often in real life.
This show pushed us into pursuing our CHL We already have lots of guns in the house.
My Wife was three state female small bore champion in her teenage years and went to Olympic tryouts in Colorado. She did not make the team, but being good enough to get the invite to tryout is impressive to me. I was raised around guns and the outdoors all my life, in my preteen years what my Dad killed or caught was part of our food supply.

Setxjeff wrote:It's not a movie but a TV show
Criminal Minds (Pack Mentality) Everyday news headlines have this very often in real life.

Agreed. There are many episodes where if the victims had access to a firearm it'd be over in about 30 seconds with the bad guy bleeding out on the floor. The episode that perhaps bothers me the most is the one with the two young guys that tie up and murder entire families in their homes.

Walking Dead. Not only must you have guns but tons of ammo. Fortunately my wife loves shotguns so we have no problem with having many zombie killers.

Tremors

The Strangers, The Last House on the Left, Straw Dogs and Death Sentence.

"Helter Skelter" (made for TV movie), or any other documentary on the Tate-Labianca murders.

Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze.

Ed4032 wrote:Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze.

Just watched it again the other night. Much better than the remake.

The Kardashians, Honey Boo Boo


Serious answer: The First 48

jmra wrote:

Ed4032 wrote:Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze.

Just watched it again the other night. Much better than the remake.

Thank you! I agree!

Walking Dead.

Taken. If Liam's daughter had a nice piece in her purse, there would have been some ventilated would-be kidnappers, and no movie.

ddstuder wrote:Just have her read "The Armed Citizen" page in the NRA magazine every month.

Movies are mostly untrue. These stories are right out of local newpapers!

Absolutely! My wife was never "anti" gun per se when we first met; they just weren't part of her landscape. I got my first "all my own" gun after we were married....which by the way, will be 26 years ago just 12 days from now....and I joined the NRA right about that time. And that gun was inherited, not purchased. So other than ammo for it, there was no real financial investment in it. I began reading her those Armed Citizen stories every month from my first issue of American Rifleman on. To this day, now that she is also an Endowment Member and gets her own magazine, she still reads those out of each issue....often before I get around to reading them.

Now mind you, this sharing of these Armed Citizen stories goes back to looooooooong before we ever left California for Texas. Having already been a gun guy for a long time by then, I had made it a point of order as soon as we started planning the move that, as soon as possible after getting here, I would get my CHL. As soon as I got mine and my wife saw how much sense it made to be armed at all times, she got hers not too long afterward.

So for her, she wasn't so much "antigun" as she was pretty sure that they weren't a necessary expense. Her first gun was a 642CT I bought her for Valentines Day, the month before she took the Class. The day after she took her CHL class, she had me take her out and help her buy her very own Glock 19. Later, after she tried my PM9, she bought a CW9. After the first time I took her shooting AR15s, I asked her if she'd like my son and I to build her one. Yep, she did. So I gave her an AR15 for her birthday. Then after AndyC introduced me to Skeet and I told her how much fun I had, I suggested that it was something she could try the next time we went as a group. She came along and had a ball, using someone's borrowed youth-sized 20 gauge pump. A week later, she had her own Yildiz 20 guage over and under.

So, thanks in no small part to those Armed Citizen stories every month, she went from being a wife who tolerated my own meager collection (at the time) of a couple of pistols, a .308 rifle, and a .22 rifle, to being a woman with her own:

• 642CT .38 Special revolver
• Glock 19 9mm semiauto
• Kahr CW9 9mm semiauto (her EDC)
• M4gery AR15 carbine with EOTech sight and MBUIS
• Yildiz 20 gauge over and under Skeet gun

She has fired all of my handguns except my .357 snubbie, but including my Model 29. She has fired one of my .308s a long time ago and didn't care for it much, but she likes her AR with EOTech, and she likes my little .22 AR. She is cross-eye dominant so she has a lot of trouble with scoped rifles, and until she had her rotator cuff repaired last June, she had a bum shoulder on her strong side and couldn't take recoil stronger than that AR. In fact, she stopped shooting skeet because of that shoulder. Maybe now that her shoulder is better, I can get her interested in it again.

So, long story....and not really ANTI gun to begin with...but those Armed Citizen stories were instrumental in converting her from being tolerant of my having a few of them, to having her own collection which is larger today than my own was for a long time.

Heck YES start reading those stories to her now, if she doesn't already read them herself. And I want to add this: it seems that "empowering women" has been all rage in the cultural/political landscape for the past several decades...."empowered" to do what, I'm not exactly sure. Women have always been superior beings to men. If not, they would not have had men wrapped around their little fingers for eons. Anyone who doubts that this has been true for thousands of years should read the book of Esther in the Bible. If "empower" means to make them just like a man, that is a step down for them, and I don't know why any rational woman would want that. But, there has always been one area in which men were generally superior: physical strength and its various manifestations. SINCE my wife has become armed, she has been empowered to fatally whup a man's hindparts if he ever gets frisky or assaultive with her, and that is the ONE area in which she, probably like a lot of women, worried about sometimes.

Not anymore.