One thing that absolutely exhausts me is having to wrestle the image of a gun owner in America away from the typical uninformed citizen. After all, we can’t all be old, Southern white men.

GQ’s Ashley Fetters’ article “Why Women Own Guns” illustrates exactly how hit-or-miss the general public is when it comes to gun owners in America.

Picture the “gun owners of America,” and it’s all too easy to imagine bearded white guys toting long-barrel shotguns into pheasant country. But these days, a curiously large proportion of U.S. gun owners are women, and more gun owners than ever are arming themselves for self-defense. Who is the new American female gun owner, and what’s she taking up arms against?

Female gun owners are not a curious thing, nor is the reason millions of women have been purchasing firearms and opting to become concealed carry permit holders. Self Defense is the number one reason women buy and carry a gun. From Detroit to Pennsylvania, Florida to Arizona, women across the country are signing up for firearms training to strengthen their personal protection plan.

To answer her own question, Ms. Fetters’ article details her own hoplophobia and a personal, and somewhat questionable experience she had with a gun owner: an ex-boyfriend.

I didn’t grow up around guns; as an adult, I’ve never liked them. I get nervous around them. But I have a distinct feeling that any fascination I ever had with guns—any faint arousal I’d felt as a teenager watching the hyper-violent action sequences of The Matrix or Angelina Jolie, all pouty lips and short shorts, double-fisting pistols in Tomb Raider—disappeared one night in my early twenties. That’s when a particularly volatile boyfriend showed me a short, grainy video of him, taken the summer before, brandishing a chunky silver handgun a little too zealously. Waving it around, cocking it gleefully like a John Woo protagonist.

I remember squeezing my eyes shut, jerking away; something about the image of my boyfriend with a gun in his hand tripped an alarm. We’d been arguing lately, even as we’d started making plans for where we’d live when college was over—and a few times, instead of bickering back at me, he’d just grown silent and loomed. An uneasy thought unfurled: Did I trust this guy I loved, this guy who knew the key code to my apartment and knew where to find me at any given hour, with a gun? Did I want to build my future around someone who looked so turned on by the weapon in his hand?