My wife's "retirement" gift to herself. She still works part time for our church, but this will be the last year for that because she'll be 70&1/2 next year and will therefore have to stop contributing to her IRA.
My wife has had a CCW License since sometime back in the '90s (before I got one myself in fact) and she carries a Smith M&P .380 Shield EZ. Because of the arthritis in her right thumb joint, these days a .380 provides about all the recoil she can handle in a small, easily concealed package - probably in part due to the thousands upon thousands of full-house .44 Magnum rounds she fired in IHMSA competitions back in the '80s.
She uses a semi-custom Model 70 7mm Rem Mag for big game, and her old Stevens 20 gauge SXS for pheasants, chuckers and huns. She had 2, 7mm-08s (a tang-safety Ruger 77 and a Model 70 Featherweight) for a while, but our oldest grandson kind of "laid claim" to the Ruger 77, and our oldest daughter did the same thing to the Model 70 Featherweight.
My wife also has a Model 70 .22-250 for varmints, and she actually brought it along when we were invited over to our friend's ranch to act as ground squirrel "exterminators" last spring. She only killed (I think) one ground squirrel with it though - there were so darned many of the little vermin within 50 yards of where we parked the truck, our .22-250s just seemed like "overkill." So we mostly just used our .22LRs rifles. However, if the ground squirrels popped up within 10 or 15 yards of the truck, we would sometimes just shoot them with our pistols. - I was shooting my then-new Glock 44, and my wife was shooting her old Ruger Bearcat.
I can't remember a sales person in a gunstore ever acting "patronizing" towards my wife (of 50 years come June BTW) though, but maybe some have. However, if one ever did, they didn't make the sale - that's for sure.
Besides that, the summer before last, my wife and I took the Idaho Enhanced Concealed Carry Class together. When the shooting part of the class was over, and the "smoke cleared" (pun intended) the Instructor (a County Sheriff's Deputy) took a look at the targets and told me, "I wouldn't make her mad if I was you."
Trouble with that in this area the last few years is that we haven't had enough rain to have any waterholes and no sunflowers for them to feed on so dove hunting is pretty poor.
