Forfatter billede
4 Works 96 Members 3 Reviews

Værker af Paxton Quigley

Satte nøgleord på

Almen Viden

Kanonisk navn
Quigley, Paxton
Juridisk navn
Quigley, Paxton
Køn
female
Nationalitet
USA
Bopæl
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Los Angeles, California, USA
Uddannelse
University of Chicago (MS|Anthropology)
Northwestern University (BA| Speech)
Executive Security International
Erhverv
Author
Director of Community Relations
Executive Security
Promotional director
Magazine editor
Public speaker
Organisationer
Yo San University, Board of Trustees
Kort biografi
Paxson Quigley was born and raised in Chicago and now lives in Los Angeles. She was director of Community Relations for Playboy Enterprises, Inc., editor of L.A.'s Valley Magazine, and is the author of many articles and two books. (Excerpted in Glamour.)

Medlemmer

Anmeldelser

 
Markeret
ritaer | 2 andre anmeldelser | Apr 23, 2021 |
Uneven and somewhat dated discussion of the use of handguns for self-defense, particularly by women.

Quigley became an anti-gun activist following the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but ultimately reversed her position and now advocates for the possession and use of personal weapons. Her reasons for this position form the first part of the book.

The center section is the weakest, because it is largely devoted to statistical material from the late 1980s, now outdated. It also predates the Columbine school shootings and the many mass shootings of the last two decades.

The most useful portion of the book, for anyone who has decided to obtain a gun for home defense, is the final section. Quigley talks about how to select the right weapon, how to familiarize oneself with it, and how to practice the skills that might be needed to respond to an emergency.
… (mere)
 
Markeret
LyndaInOregon | 2 andre anmeldelser | Dec 25, 2019 |
Reviewing [Armed and Female] is a little like playing Russian roulette – with more than one cartridge in the wheel. There is a short list of topics that produce venom in the public forum and gun control is frequently near the top. In the last week, the NRA and the President have been calling each other names, the pundits have been calling the NRA and President names, and the politicians have been frantically trying to get in on the game to maximize their numbers with the frothing extremes of the electorate.

Meanwhile, only about 40 people in Librarything claim owning this book, and only three of them have rated it while none have reviewed it. What does that mean? It’s a topic that news media and politicians want you to believe is hotly debated – yet very few readers on Librarything, a smart and information-hungry group, have commented on this book. Is the book too esoteric? Is it too controversial in topic or position? Maybe the topic is like many other supposedly important issues – it gathers support without study among the masses.

Part of the problem for [Armed and Female] is that it is a little dated, having been published in 1989. Reading through Paxton Quigley’s statistics, I often wondered if the conclusions at which she arrived could still be supported by modern statistics. One particular conclusion was that any locality that passed restrictive gun laws charted significant upticks in violent crime. But the late 1980s were quite new to the concept, and there have been a lot more gun laws put to the books since then. So, it’s hard to know whether the numbers would bear out her assertions today.

Those oft-quoted studies Quigley is so keen on troubled me in a deeper way. Anyone with a passing understanding of statistics knows that they are extremely flexible. You can support almost anything with almost any study. The numbers that gave me the most pause were from a Florida State University study that declared 645,000 crimes were defended against by a civilian wielded firearm, with only one-third of those guns being fired. She also uses FBI, California, Chicago, and Cleveland crime statistics from 1981 to say that civilians justifiably killed felons much more frequently than do police. I’m suspicious of those numbers and conclusions.

Quigley’s claims that she’s not engaging in rhetoric, but just look at the book cover and judge yourself. Even still, she does a fair job of laying out the gun control side’s positions without taking them to task too much. The book is obviously meant to encourage gun ownership, especially in females. But, having been a gun control proponent in her earlier life, she at least concedes that the issue is more complicated than is often argued by the extremes. The danger is that she combines that fair stance with overwhelming statistics supporting her own position – she’s sly.

Outside the gun control issue, Quigley spends a great deal of time on violence against females, which is part of the reason I read the book. Violence is plentiful, but violence against women has been epidemic in our country and around the world for a long time now. With provocative anecdotes and interviews, Quigley provides a serious wake-up call. Too often, women find themselves in danger. It’s not a blame thing – it’s an awareness thing. And Quigley wants to awaken women to the power they possess to control their safety. Even if part of her solution is gun ownership, it’s a powerful and important message. The early chapters on “Women with Guns”, “Futile Defense”, “Rape and Consequences”, and “The Politics of Self Defense” could be mandatory reading for any female coming of age.

Quigley gets points for thoroughness. She looks at gun control as an issue and female safety, but also covers gun ownership from a legal standpoint, how to choose a firearm, gun and defense tactics, and basic home safety. And she covers the topics after serious study and exposure, using what she learned from multiple shooting and defense courses. If you want to buy a gun, you could do a lot worse than this book.

So, why the relatively low rating for the book? Two things. First, it’s dated, which I’ve already discussed. But second, it’s a book that slyly argues the loosening of gun restriction. Quigley’s ultimate position is that crime would go way down in our country if everyone owned a firearm. I’ll give Quigley some points for her qualification that gun ownership should be responsible, educated, and informed by training. But I can’t go with her basic premise. Perhaps the best counterpoint is one I read in a E.J.Donne, Jr.’s editorial today. He points out that the NRA and many gun proponents are trapped in an endless circular argument. The circular arguments are ones that Quigley uses. The gun proponents claim that there are already too many guns in the United States for it to do any good to stem the violence. Then, they also claim that any thoughtful and reasonable approach to regulating gun ownership is essentially the first step toward total confiscation.

The truth, for me, is that there are too many guns, and that they have maintained a violent history that dates back to the very formation of our country and it’s bloody expansion west. So, I agree with the premise of the NRA and gun proponent’s first argument. But that should, from common sense, inspire us to the extreme solution, on which the second argument from the NRA and gun proponents is based. To say that there’s just too many for us to do anything about is preposterous. The problem is not that there’s just too many for us to be able to do anything about – we have done some pretty amazing things in our country. The problem is that too many people make money from the manufacture and sale of guns, from the jobs they create, to the entertainment industries they support, to the politicians who whip people up about government conspiracies. For my money, I’d like to see some courageous people leading us who say, “Hey, it’s not a secret conspiracy anymore. We’re going to do it, however hard it might be.” It’s not a popular opinion, and it’s a rather idealistic and difficult one in practice, I know. It wouldn’t eradicate violence, but it would stop some of the pretty awful things happening in our country, that make us one of the most violent.

Bottom Line: A little dated and a little imbalanced in position, but there’s some good, thoughtful instruction on safety, especially for females, and how to responsibly go about gun ownership and use.

3 bones!!!!!
… (mere)
2 stem
Markeret
blackdogbooks | 2 andre anmeldelser | Jan 8, 2016 |

Statistikker

Værker
4
Medlemmer
96
Popularitet
#196,089
Vurdering
3.9
Anmeldelser
3
ISBN
7

Diagrammer og grafer