Opinion | The girl with a gun
The Washington Post · by Molly Roberts · July 26, 2018
Maria Butina was a girl with a gun, and there’s little a guy with a gun likes better. If, that is, she’s the right kind of girl.

On its surface, the phenomenon perplexes. The firearms industry runs on masculinity; if you’re really a good guy with a gun, you’re there to save the damsel in distress. Researchers explain that financially insecure men in particular conflate their ability to bring home the bacon with their ability to shoot anyone who tries to steal it — or who tries to harm those society has tasked them with protecting.

“Consider your man card reissued,” read the ad for the Bushmaster 15, the assault rifle Adam Lanza used in the Sandy Hook massacre.

A woman wielding a 12-gauge, then, should seem a threat to men’s sole proprietorship of stereotypical manhood. She should turn men’s insecurity sensors on and turn men off. Instead, though, she seems to do just the opposite.