Pax, if you're going to be a touch snarky please allow me to inject a touch of realism as well.
First, most self defense doesn't play into the fantasies of brandishing your Talismanic Power Object the Sacred Gun and fighting off the hordes. Most of it doesn't involve physical contact at all. When a gun is appropriate nothing else is nearly as good. When it isn't, and that's most of the time, it's just two pounds of junk.
Second, even if you carry concealed the gun isn't always available, isn't always appropriate, isn't always safe, isn't always legal. And situations aren't always Fun House friendly. They can be ambiguous, develop slowly, involve conflicted emotions and a lot of other things that don't come within a hundred miles of "shoot - don't shoot" or choosing the proper tacticool accessory to balance your tricked out Kimber.
Third, if anyone, especially women believes that self defense starts and ends with a gun she is trading one sort of dangerous dependence for another one.
You can say it several ways "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," is a good one. So is "It's not going to hop out of its box and defend you." Or how about "Your safety starts and ends with you." If it doesn't start with attitude, self worth, agency, awareness, cussed refusal to be a victim and most of all a belief that self protection is a good thing it's not going to work no matter how many hours you've spent on handgun selection.
Take a look at what people have said here. It comes down to "Without a gun a woman is helpless." Dependence. Helplessness. No hope except to put her faith in the Protective Talisman. The only thing that self defense means to a lot of people here - other than the part that fits in with their gun hobby - is "kneeing him...in the nuts". That shows as profound an ignorance of mindset and all of the other tools a woman has at her disposal as I've seen in years. It's what the bad guy is waiting for. It's not a great disabler. There are much better options if the defender is willing to really do violent harmful things to the criminal. Just to pick a random example, how about The Sublime Meditation of the Four Excellent Verbs?
If women really swallow the line "You can't do anything. Your only options are to use a weapon, be rescued by someone else or be a victim" then they will be victims every single time unless someone rescues them or the inanimate object saves the day.
If she rejects the lies, and they are lies, then she is not helpless as long as she is still breathing. And even if it doesn't work out - there are no guarantees in life except that it ain't nohow permanent - she'll almost always be better off for doing the best that she can and failing rather than believing she was helpless and weak and giving up or making a half-hearted gesture.
Yes, a gun makes a very limited set of situations a lot easier. But even the best training doesn't make it the best tool for the job in a single other one. And even in the ones that it does "You have to have the gun or there's nothing you can do" is absolutely the wrong answer. It reinforces in women's minds that they're weak, helpless and can't do a darned thing for themselves.
And they can. We have almost thirty years of evidence from a wide variety of sources, many methodologies, many different sources of data and researchers from all sorts of disciplines that show that women are not helpless if they don't happen to have The Holy Gun to Protect them. That's why about three quarters of rape attempts are not successful. And that's just the ones that aren't dealt with before it gets to the point where we can call it that.
Fourth, a fixation on one tool can blind you to situations that don't fit in with the training. If it's not what you think about or what you practice it's not what you notice. And at up to a thousand bucks a weekend you can be guaranteed that even the best gun training is going to focus on where and how to use a gun.
We tried for years to start women out with weapons. Almost all of the few that we found were unusual. Some were already fundamentally fighters. They didn't need anything except an expanded set of technical skills. Worse, many figured that since they knew how to use that particular weapon they were now safe. They still didn't believe that there was anything they could do besides squeeze the trigger. They were still frightened. And in a strange way most of them were more inhibited about violence. Their solution was to push it away into the delicate act of sight alignment, trigger pull and wait for the police.
Then we started teaching from the inside out. We went down the "posture, voice and eye contact" route and found that it was just acting, and most of the women didn't believe they could act that well.
Then we went with the old truths that the body trains the mind and the body doesn't lie. Once they discovered their own personal capacity to use force they believed they were not helpless. No, they couldn't win a boxing match with Sugar Ray Leonard or out wrestle Rickson Gracie. But they could do what they could do and not be paralyzed by fear. And they had conscious access to the sorts of anger, determination and will to prevail that make all the rest possible.
When we stuck the deterrence stuff at the end of the training it was a lot more effective. Yeah, the woofers we brought in were still big and scary, but the students didn't back down or twist their clothes or giggle or give ground.
Most significantly, they started asking about guns, knives and whatnot as a way of increasing their options. They knew what they had and wanted to fill in the gaps. They didn't feel that the gun (plus training, yes, yes, yes, I know) would make them safe. They made them safe. They were the weapon. The tool was just a means to an end. The confidence and will to use it came from within as an extension of who they were rather than an answer imposed by someone else.
"Only a gun can keep me safe" or "I will take care of myself one way or another. What makes sense for me here and now?"
Which do you think is better? Honestly?
While we're at it, let's kick a few holes in the Mama Bear thing.
Every time we cover legal and moral aspects of self defense we run across a few who couldn't hurt/cripple/kill on their own behalf. But they would do anything to defend a child or some other helpless person in their care. They still don't think that they are worth taking care of. With an attitude like that every gun that rolled off the Colt Assembly lines won't do them a bit of good when they're the ones in danger. There's a change that needs to happen first. And that requires a different course of training than you get at FAS, LFI or Thunder Ranch or from any number of pictures of gals with earmuffs and wraparound sunglasses in Women & Guns.
It plays into a bunch of cultural things which come too close to the "F word" for some people with delicate sensibilities. I won't go too far down that road. Suffice it to say that limiting it to protecting the baby is a nice safe way of channeling a woman's capacity for violent defense into one special area. It still denies she is worth much outside of her children.
Yes, this is a gun forum. But if you want self defense for women you need resources far beyond guns. When the question is "What do I need to know about self defense?" then the answer "Here is a lot of information about guns" isn't the right answer.
) & Pax, but developing a defensive mindset is the single most important thing anyone can do when learning the art of self defence.
