POCKET BOOKS, 336 PAGES, $13 CAITLIN KELLY asks me if ...

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POCKET BOOKS, 336 PAGES, $13

CAITLIN KELLY asks me if I have ever fired a gun. I regretfully answer "no." "Regretfully" because of the rage I feel at being a statistic, among the three out of four women in this country who have been or will be victimized during their lifetime. But in many places, including New York City, we cannot legally arm ourselves for protection.

In Blown Away, Kelly describes herself and the estimated 17 million American women who carry guns as "transgressive and frightening." A journalist and a four-time crime victim, Kelly found herself excited by the sense of power and freedom she experienced during a defensive weapons class at the Smith & Wesson Academy in Springfield, MA. She was also put at ease by the emphasis on safety measures and responsible care of firearms-points that instructors and gun owners make over and over in her book.

Kelly's experience triggered a desire to explore how American women, usually portrayed as the vanguard of the antigun movement in this country, really feel. She spoke with women in law enforcement, such as Giuliani's bodyguard of nine years, Patty Varone, as well as battered women, researchers and academics, politicians, female competitive shooters and hunters who consistently outclass their male counterparts, a transsexual whose perceptions of danger have changed as radically as her gender, and women conflicted about their partners' demands to have guns in the home.

Her book proposal-which made it clear that she wished to present an unbiased exploration of these complex issues informed by extensive research for a mass-market audience-was rejected by 25 publishers. She describes these rejections as "visceral group think, no rational conversation about the market seemed to inform their decisions." It was only after 9/11, when Kelly believes a climate change in attitudes regarding personal safety occurred, that she sold the concept. Now, both the NRA and NPR are endorsing her neutral approach.

"Name 10 women whose image is associated with guns," Kelly challenges. "Most people can only come up with Annie Oakley-and she was shooting in the 1890s!" Babes with bazookas may be portrayed in gun magazines or Bond films, but it's always in bikinis-both sexualizing and neutralizing their power. Mainstream depictions are rare.

In the frontier days, women had to be capable of shooting to kill and routinely armed themselves against marauders and bandits. They hunted game for their families and were proficient in cleaning, assembling and loading their weapons. Rural women are still more likely to arm themselves than those in the city, for which Kelly cites a complex set of sociological and cultural circumstances.

"In Manhattan, odds are you live in an apartment building," she says. "When you fire a gun, the bullet may keep going into your neighbor's wall and your neighbor's child. There are purely practical considerations from the point of view of public safety; you cannot control the trajectory of a bullet." In remote areas, women often drive hundreds of miles alone at night, seemingly easy targets for opportunistic predators. "You can't be waiting for the man in blue to come and save you," she added.

Two women profiled by Kelly are four-term Democratic congresswomen Carolyn McCarthy, a gun-control advocate from suburban Long Island, and Suzanna Hupp, a thrice-elected Republican member of the Texas legislature. Both lost family members in highly publicized tragedies: McCarthy's husband was killed and her son seriously wounded by Colin Ferguson when he opened fire on the Long Island Railroad on December 7, 1993, while Hupp (who had left a handgun in her truck) witnessed her parents and 20 others being slaughtered by George Hennard in the October 1991 Lubbock Luby massacre. (Hupp's compelling testimony in support of a concealed-carry law in Texas helped convince George W. Bush to sign the bill when he took office in 1995, after defeating the popular incumbent governor Ann Richards. It was a victory some attribute to Richards' refusal to endorse this piece of legislation.)

Kelly understands both sides of the debate. "Attempts to make the industry pay are driven by great frustration and impatience with rampant crime, which is fully justifiable," she says. But lawsuits against manufacturers and distributors, which Kelly considers a well-meaning but problematic effort to fix an insoluble problem, have all been thrown out. She contends that such lawsuits are ineffectual and only stunt effective discourse. "It's easy to demonize the guns, but go back to the root causes of poverty. These are complicated social problems." As a former district attorney in New Orleans told her, "You cannot perpetrate the drug industry without guns, they are like wheels to a vehicle."

Kelly scoffs at people who say getting rid of guns will get rid of crime. "That's magical thinking. You have an enormously profitable drug industry, the economic engine in some neighborhoods. In New York City the current rate of unemployment amongst black men is about 50 percent, how many choices have they got? I'm not defending anything, but this is the reality."

Some of the most vocal supporters of gun control, Kelly points out, are "wealthy, powerful people with an arsenal of fancy weapons who hunt upstate at their country estates," such as those in Millbrook, NY. "There's a level of real hypocrisy. Look at celebrities like Rosie O'Donnell; if I ever met her I'd ask her one question: 'Does your bodyguard carry a gun?' If the answer is yes, then you have no credibility and you should shut up." Women who live in affluent enclaves or gated communities have built-in protection. Poor women do not.

Then she shares a story. A nurse in Miami was accosted late one night in the parking lot of her hospital, by a man who held a knife to her throat. As she blasted him to save her own life, his last words were, "That's not fair."

Isn't it though?

JUDY JACKSON