Barrel Fever: Women and Their Guns

A surveillance camera catches American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst during a bank robbery in San Francisco in 1974. She was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army on Feb. 4 of that year; later joined her kidnappers in this bank robbery; and was imprisoned for almost two years before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. The image of a machine-gun-toting, black-wigged Hearst became an emblem of the early '70s -- not least because the notion of an armed, privileged white woman cavorting with a handful of self-styled revolutionaries seemed to so perfectly capture all that was cartoonish, volatile, and berserk about the era. Through the years, other images of women bearing arms have ranged from chilling to amusing to formidable to banally erotic.