Gunslinging? It's a gal thing

When Judy Rhodes founded a group more than a decade ago to encourage women to shoot and hunt, her own outsize personal ity guaranteed that members would be a force to be reckoned with in the outdoors. The group - DIVA . . . Women Outdoors Worldwide, or DIVA WOW - now counts more than 1,500 members around the world. Rhodes, the daughter of a Texas rancher who learned how to handle a BB gun at age 4, said that about half of the women who join also have strong outdoors backgrounds, while the other half haven't picked up a gun before. "That was just second nature to me to see a shotgun or a rifle in the gun rack," said Rhodes, a feisty blonde with a Southern accent. "Whenever something slithers, crawls or hops, you've got to pop it." The group offers clinics and seminars in fishing, archery, dog training, and how to handle handguns, shotguns and even an AR-15. They also organize hunts all over the world. Statistics from the National Sporting Goods Association show that the number of women hunting and shooting has been on the rise. According to the latest statistics, women hunting with firearms have increased from about 2.7 million in 2000 to about 3 million last year, and the number target shooting reached about 4.7 million...more