She said that when Nancy Lanza was identified as the owner of the guns her son Adam used to kill 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December, some seemed to blame her. Ms. Lanza, who owned at least five firearms, including a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used in the shooting, was labeled in a headline as a “gun-crazed mother” and was described in some accounts as “stockpiling an arsenal.”

“What strikes me is the way that, rather than really trying to understand what may have been going on, there is this tendency to want to latch on to conventional arguments and stereotypical images,” Professor Stange said. “There’s this idea that women are more affiliative, more peace loving, more pacifistic, which should then make women as a group gun averse.”

It is difficult to pinpoint how many gun owners in the United States are women — the federal government does not break down background checks by demographic, and most manufacturers do not release information on sales. But Peggy Tartaro, the editor of Women and Guns magazine, a nonprofit publication of the Second Amendment Foundation, said she had found estimates varying from 12 million to 17 million.

They cross the political spectrum. Professor Stange, who hunts regularly and owns several rifles and shotguns, describes herself as a liberal Democrat.

Of those who attended the breakfast in Painesville, Ms. Froebe votes Republican. Terri Herbert, 57, a retired special education teacher who said the nephew of a close friend had been killed in a school shooting, is a registered Democrat. She favors background checks on private sales but opposes a ban on military-style semiautomatic rifles or high-capacity magazines. “I’m not sure gun control is the answer,” she said.

Tamara Wysocki, 52, a caterer, said she wanted a handgun for protection at her business, but would not keep a gun at home. “If you have a gun and they have a gun, somebody’s bound to get shot,” she said.