cuchulainn
March 3, 2003, 08:53 AM
http://www.startribune.com/stories/587/3729544.html
Is handgun debate another battle of the sexes?
Conrad deFiebre, Star Tribune
Published Mar. 3, 2003 GUNS03
Two women leading the fight to make permits to carry handguns available to most Minnesotans say they are trying to make the state safer for everyone.
And finally, after years of struggle and defeat at the hands of gun-control forces, they are poised for success.
Rep. Lynda Boudreau, R-Faribault, and Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington, are the chief sponsors of the initiative. If it passes, it will be due in no small measure to the persistence of these two women. They each have a background in nursing, live on a farm, love gardening, are comfortable handling firearms and see public service -- from the Legislature to volunteering for 4-H and the Girl Scouts -- as an extension of their Roman Catholic faith.
The debate on handgun rights in Minnesota usually splits along gender lines: On one side are legions of men wearing yellow lapel stickers reading "Have Gun, Will Vote." On the other are the pink-clad women from the Million Mom March whose stickers say "Sensible gun laws, safe kids."
Public-opinion polling confirms this gender gap, but there are prominent exceptions. Some of the most compelling testimony in favor of the long-debated gun-permit initiative has come from women with harrowing tales of personal victimization.
And then there are the two sponsors of the bill, which, if passed, is expected to increase eightfold the number of Minnesotans licensed to pack heat in the street. Both like the measure's chances.
"It's a done deal, if not this year, then next," said Boudreau, noting that Gov. Tim Pawlenty and majorities in the both the House and the Senate now support some form of her legislation.
"If we get it to the floor, it will pass,"said Pariseau, whose bill has been denied a hearing for six years in the DFL-controlled Senate but is expected to receive one next week.
Boudreau, 50, "has more strength than any legislator I can think of," said House Speaker Steve Sviggum, R-Kenyon. "She takes the tough issues and carries them with grace."
In addition to the handgun measure, Boudreau has been chief sponsor of what she calls the Women's Right to Know bill, which would require a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion. In her ninth year in the House, she regularly spells Sviggum in the speaker's dais, and chairs the Health and Human Services Committee.
Pariseau, 66, is a native of St. Paul's East Side who runs an Amway distributorship and farms 120 acres of asparagus with her husband of 42 years, Ken. "She's very passionate about what she takes up," said Senate Minority Leader Dick Day, R-Owatonna. "But she gets along really well with people."
First elected to the Senate in 1988, she also crusaded to repeal state auto-emissions testing. It eventually happened, but only after chief sponsorship was given to a majority DFLer, a scenario that might be replayed on the handgun bill.
Soft sell?
Some critics contend that Boudreau and Pariseau are unwitting pawns in a gun-industry scheme to soft-sell a pistol for every woman's purse.
"I think these authors are very sincere in what they're doing, but it's less threatening to the public to suggest that the people carrying guns are going to be mothers," said Rebecca Thoman, executive director of the gun-control group Citizens for a Safer Minnesota. "It plays to a whole marketing strategy that women need to buy and carry guns to feel safer."
Proponents of the legislation, however, say that women have derived the greatest benefit from reduction in violent crime that followed enactment of more liberal handgun permit policies in other states -- whether or not they carry guns themselves.
Polls show that most Minnesota women prefer a tight rein on guns in public. By nearly a 3-to-1 ratio in a 2001 University of Minnesota survey, women said handgun permits should be issued only for special needs. Men were much more evenly divided.
A 1998 Star Tribune Minnesota Poll found majorities of both men and women opposed to changing the law, with less support among women.
But at nearly every House hearing on the subject in recent years, women have been the star witnesses.
Two years ago, Texas state Rep. Suzanna Gratia Hupp described her helplessness as she watched a lone gunman kill her parents and 21 other unarmed diners in a cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, in 1991. She had left her own pistol in her car, because Texas law then prohibited carrying it. Having her gun with her might not have changed the result, she added, "but it sure as heck would have changed the odds."
Last week, Fillmore County jailer Theresa Schieffelbein of Wycoff, Minn., testified that she was denied a permit to carry a handgun off duty despite threats against her from an inmate she had guarded.
"People don't understand the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys," she said. "They think anyone with a gun is bad. But if I can't get a gun under these circumstances, who can?"
Fillmore County Sheriff Jim Connolly said Friday that Schieffelbein, who appeared before the House Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee in uniform, did not have his permission to do so. He said he had denied her permit application because she listed no personal safety hazard.
And last month, Andrea Murphy of Apple Valley testified that she had been denied a permit after being abducted and sexually assaulted on her way home from work one day. "I don't think you should allow a bureaucrat to determine for me whether I am in danger or not," she said.
Apple Valley Police Chief Scott Johnson later said Murphy's 1999 application for a permit never mentioned the incident, which had occurred at least 10 years earlier in another city.
'Clenching fear'
Boudreau says that although she hasn't sought a permit herself, she sympathizes with the "clenching fear" she has seen in people who have been denied them. She also understands the resistance of police leaders who regard the movement to arm more ordinary citizens as implicit criticism of their own effectiveness.
But, as she testified last week, "in the one moment of your life when you most need protection, the police cannot always be there for you."
Pariseau, who won't discuss whether she has a handgun permit, likes to frame the issue in stark terms of natural law. "Critters have a right to defend themselves," she said.
Both women enjoy target shooting on their rural acreage, Boudreau with a .22-caliber pistol, Pariseau with .22 and 9-millimeter pistols and a .22 rifle. Boudreau hunts, too, but with a bow and arrow.
Boudreau has been a Faribault police reservist and a Rice County family health aide. She and her husband of 32 years, Jim, a home-improvement contractor, raised three children and now dote on three grandchildren. She got into politics in the early 1990s, originally as a DFLer, then switched to the GOP.
Trained as a registered nurse, Pariseau, a Republican activist for 30 years, formerly served on the Farmington school board and worked in the Minnesota office of then-U.S. Sen. Rudy Boschwitz. She has six children, 13 grandchildren and a great-grandson.
"I don't know that I have to carry a gun," she said. "But I want everyone who wants one not to be turned away for stupid reasons."
Neither legislator sees handgun rights as purely a women's issue.
"I don't think everyone should have a firearm," Boudreau said. "But if they feel it's their last resort, that should not be denied them."
Meanwhile, Thoman, of Citizens for a Safer Minnesota, said battered women tend to shun guns for fear they will be taken from them by their abusers. "I think this push to arm more people is offensive to a lot of women who actually have been in vulnerable situations," she said. "It just raises the stakes on the danger and the violence in their lives."
-- Conrad deFiebre is at cdefiebre@startribune.com.
© Copyright 2003 Star Tribune.
Is handgun debate another battle of the sexes?
Conrad deFiebre, Star Tribune
Published Mar. 3, 2003 GUNS03
Two women leading the fight to make permits to carry handguns available to most Minnesotans say they are trying to make the state safer for everyone.
And finally, after years of struggle and defeat at the hands of gun-control forces, they are poised for success.
Rep. Lynda Boudreau, R-Faribault, and Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington, are the chief sponsors of the initiative. If it passes, it will be due in no small measure to the persistence of these two women. They each have a background in nursing, live on a farm, love gardening, are comfortable handling firearms and see public service -- from the Legislature to volunteering for 4-H and the Girl Scouts -- as an extension of their Roman Catholic faith.
The debate on handgun rights in Minnesota usually splits along gender lines: On one side are legions of men wearing yellow lapel stickers reading "Have Gun, Will Vote." On the other are the pink-clad women from the Million Mom March whose stickers say "Sensible gun laws, safe kids."
Public-opinion polling confirms this gender gap, but there are prominent exceptions. Some of the most compelling testimony in favor of the long-debated gun-permit initiative has come from women with harrowing tales of personal victimization.
And then there are the two sponsors of the bill, which, if passed, is expected to increase eightfold the number of Minnesotans licensed to pack heat in the street. Both like the measure's chances.
"It's a done deal, if not this year, then next," said Boudreau, noting that Gov. Tim Pawlenty and majorities in the both the House and the Senate now support some form of her legislation.
"If we get it to the floor, it will pass,"said Pariseau, whose bill has been denied a hearing for six years in the DFL-controlled Senate but is expected to receive one next week.
Boudreau, 50, "has more strength than any legislator I can think of," said House Speaker Steve Sviggum, R-Kenyon. "She takes the tough issues and carries them with grace."
In addition to the handgun measure, Boudreau has been chief sponsor of what she calls the Women's Right to Know bill, which would require a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion. In her ninth year in the House, she regularly spells Sviggum in the speaker's dais, and chairs the Health and Human Services Committee.
Pariseau, 66, is a native of St. Paul's East Side who runs an Amway distributorship and farms 120 acres of asparagus with her husband of 42 years, Ken. "She's very passionate about what she takes up," said Senate Minority Leader Dick Day, R-Owatonna. "But she gets along really well with people."
First elected to the Senate in 1988, she also crusaded to repeal state auto-emissions testing. It eventually happened, but only after chief sponsorship was given to a majority DFLer, a scenario that might be replayed on the handgun bill.
Soft sell?
Some critics contend that Boudreau and Pariseau are unwitting pawns in a gun-industry scheme to soft-sell a pistol for every woman's purse.
"I think these authors are very sincere in what they're doing, but it's less threatening to the public to suggest that the people carrying guns are going to be mothers," said Rebecca Thoman, executive director of the gun-control group Citizens for a Safer Minnesota. "It plays to a whole marketing strategy that women need to buy and carry guns to feel safer."
Proponents of the legislation, however, say that women have derived the greatest benefit from reduction in violent crime that followed enactment of more liberal handgun permit policies in other states -- whether or not they carry guns themselves.
Polls show that most Minnesota women prefer a tight rein on guns in public. By nearly a 3-to-1 ratio in a 2001 University of Minnesota survey, women said handgun permits should be issued only for special needs. Men were much more evenly divided.
A 1998 Star Tribune Minnesota Poll found majorities of both men and women opposed to changing the law, with less support among women.
But at nearly every House hearing on the subject in recent years, women have been the star witnesses.
Two years ago, Texas state Rep. Suzanna Gratia Hupp described her helplessness as she watched a lone gunman kill her parents and 21 other unarmed diners in a cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, in 1991. She had left her own pistol in her car, because Texas law then prohibited carrying it. Having her gun with her might not have changed the result, she added, "but it sure as heck would have changed the odds."
Last week, Fillmore County jailer Theresa Schieffelbein of Wycoff, Minn., testified that she was denied a permit to carry a handgun off duty despite threats against her from an inmate she had guarded.
"People don't understand the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys," she said. "They think anyone with a gun is bad. But if I can't get a gun under these circumstances, who can?"
Fillmore County Sheriff Jim Connolly said Friday that Schieffelbein, who appeared before the House Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee in uniform, did not have his permission to do so. He said he had denied her permit application because she listed no personal safety hazard.
And last month, Andrea Murphy of Apple Valley testified that she had been denied a permit after being abducted and sexually assaulted on her way home from work one day. "I don't think you should allow a bureaucrat to determine for me whether I am in danger or not," she said.
Apple Valley Police Chief Scott Johnson later said Murphy's 1999 application for a permit never mentioned the incident, which had occurred at least 10 years earlier in another city.
'Clenching fear'
Boudreau says that although she hasn't sought a permit herself, she sympathizes with the "clenching fear" she has seen in people who have been denied them. She also understands the resistance of police leaders who regard the movement to arm more ordinary citizens as implicit criticism of their own effectiveness.
But, as she testified last week, "in the one moment of your life when you most need protection, the police cannot always be there for you."
Pariseau, who won't discuss whether she has a handgun permit, likes to frame the issue in stark terms of natural law. "Critters have a right to defend themselves," she said.
Both women enjoy target shooting on their rural acreage, Boudreau with a .22-caliber pistol, Pariseau with .22 and 9-millimeter pistols and a .22 rifle. Boudreau hunts, too, but with a bow and arrow.
Boudreau has been a Faribault police reservist and a Rice County family health aide. She and her husband of 32 years, Jim, a home-improvement contractor, raised three children and now dote on three grandchildren. She got into politics in the early 1990s, originally as a DFLer, then switched to the GOP.
Trained as a registered nurse, Pariseau, a Republican activist for 30 years, formerly served on the Farmington school board and worked in the Minnesota office of then-U.S. Sen. Rudy Boschwitz. She has six children, 13 grandchildren and a great-grandson.
"I don't know that I have to carry a gun," she said. "But I want everyone who wants one not to be turned away for stupid reasons."
Neither legislator sees handgun rights as purely a women's issue.
"I don't think everyone should have a firearm," Boudreau said. "But if they feel it's their last resort, that should not be denied them."
Meanwhile, Thoman, of Citizens for a Safer Minnesota, said battered women tend to shun guns for fear they will be taken from them by their abusers. "I think this push to arm more people is offensive to a lot of women who actually have been in vulnerable situations," she said. "It just raises the stakes on the danger and the violence in their lives."
-- Conrad deFiebre is at cdefiebre@startribune.com.
© Copyright 2003 Star Tribune.