Tom Servo
Member
We get lots of women in the shop buying their first guns. It's a bigger step for women than men, and part of the job for us is to alleviate their nervousness. There's still the notion that "the scary rapist will just take it away and use it on you," and I figured I'd do some digging to find the roots of that.
Let me know if I'm missing any pertinent bits. The original, with links is here.
It may come as a surprise, but lots of women own guns. Many of them can shoot quite well, and more than a few can run loops around their male contemporaries.
I teach quite a few, and it’s often a refreshing experience. Women are more open to criticism, they’re better listeners and eager learners. They’re genuinely concerned with safety and technique, and they don’t generally have any pre-formed misconceptions about what shooting “should” entail.
This isn’t exclusively a man’s world anymore, and we’re all the better for it.
Getting into shooting can be a daunting task for women, though. From childhood, they’re fed chauvinistic claptrap that tells them they’re better off being defended by others. They’re told that the idea of defending themselves is somehow distasteful, and it boils down to a very archaic and stupid mentality that self-sufficiency and independence are unladylike.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. When things go wrong, the only person you can truly depend on is yourself. Gender doesn’t make a difference.
Of course, to hear it from the left, women can’t operate guns, and they’ll only end up hurting themselves. What if we said the same of cars?
At the forefront of this misinformation is the Brady Campaign. They’ve got a page claiming that, “Separating out facts from myth makes clear that women are endangered rather protected by the proliferation of handguns.”
As usual, their arguments are facile and bolstered by sources so unreliable as to be laughable. Let’s look at the citations.
Four come from two books: Female Persuasion: How the Firearms Industry Markets to Women and the Reality of Women and Guns and A Deadly Myth: Women, Handguns, and Self-Defense. Wow. Don’t those sound like unbiased academic studies? Notice that both are published by the Violence Policy Center, an organization directly affiliated with the Brady Campaign that provides “research” for use in the Campaign’s many amicus curiae filings.
The VPC gets their funding from the Joyce Foundation. Remember that name; it’ll come up later.
So, four of their footnotes come from their own publications. Strike one.
"Fact: In the US, regions with higher levels of handgun ownership have higher suicide rates.[4] Although women have higher rates of depression than men, it is the handgun-suicide connection, rather than depression, that accounts for higher suicide rates."
Wow, that sounds dire, doesn’t it? I’m going to assume the first clause is patently false, since I can find no correlating evidence in the UCRs. The last clause claims that handguns, and not depression, are responsible for these fictional elevated suicide rates. As usual, blame the tool, not the cause.
Bold claims require strong evidence, and although Injury Prevention may sound like a medical journal, it is in fact more political boilerplate. David Hemenway and Matthew Miller are both on the payroll of the Joyce Foundation, as you can see from the credits at the end of the actual article (which, of course, provides no actual evidence to back its claims). Strike two.
"Fact: Guns are rarely used by rapists - less than 2 percent of rapes are committed with guns, while almost 70 percent are committed with personal weapons (physical violence). Women would be safer knowing self-defense to fight off an attacker than using a gun which can easily be turned against them."
I’m not sure what they mean by “personal weapons,” and neither is the “source” they quote. The Structure of Family Violence: An Analysis of Selected Incidents only covers crimes among relatives, not strangers. I can only assume the Brady Campaign doesn’t expect anyone to check the facts.
Too bad the internet makes it easy for us to do so now. Strike three.
While we’re this far down the rabbit hole, let’s look at where the money for all this is coming from.
According to their site, the Joyce Foundation was established in 1948 by a lumber heiress, and their mission involves, “[making] grants to national organizations for projects that promise to have a significant impact on public policies affecting the Great Lakes region,” for “religious, charitable, scientific, literary and educational purposes.”
Beatrice Joyce died in 1972, and directorship of the Foundation was turned over to a board of directors, who have turned it into an entity that now funds lobbying groups seeking to influence national policy.
Barack Obama is on the board, by the way.
In 2002, their assets totaled $653,771,733, and as of 2005, the total was $892,492,212. In that year alone, their grants came to $26,562,335.
That’s almost a billion dollars spent to tell you that you’re not intelligent or competent enough to use a gun.
Buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll prove them wrong. Sound like a deal?
Let me know if I'm missing any pertinent bits. The original, with links is here.
It may come as a surprise, but lots of women own guns. Many of them can shoot quite well, and more than a few can run loops around their male contemporaries.
I teach quite a few, and it’s often a refreshing experience. Women are more open to criticism, they’re better listeners and eager learners. They’re genuinely concerned with safety and technique, and they don’t generally have any pre-formed misconceptions about what shooting “should” entail.
This isn’t exclusively a man’s world anymore, and we’re all the better for it.
Getting into shooting can be a daunting task for women, though. From childhood, they’re fed chauvinistic claptrap that tells them they’re better off being defended by others. They’re told that the idea of defending themselves is somehow distasteful, and it boils down to a very archaic and stupid mentality that self-sufficiency and independence are unladylike.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. When things go wrong, the only person you can truly depend on is yourself. Gender doesn’t make a difference.
Of course, to hear it from the left, women can’t operate guns, and they’ll only end up hurting themselves. What if we said the same of cars?
At the forefront of this misinformation is the Brady Campaign. They’ve got a page claiming that, “Separating out facts from myth makes clear that women are endangered rather protected by the proliferation of handguns.”
As usual, their arguments are facile and bolstered by sources so unreliable as to be laughable. Let’s look at the citations.
Four come from two books: Female Persuasion: How the Firearms Industry Markets to Women and the Reality of Women and Guns and A Deadly Myth: Women, Handguns, and Self-Defense. Wow. Don’t those sound like unbiased academic studies? Notice that both are published by the Violence Policy Center, an organization directly affiliated with the Brady Campaign that provides “research” for use in the Campaign’s many amicus curiae filings.
The VPC gets their funding from the Joyce Foundation. Remember that name; it’ll come up later.
So, four of their footnotes come from their own publications. Strike one.
"Fact: In the US, regions with higher levels of handgun ownership have higher suicide rates.[4] Although women have higher rates of depression than men, it is the handgun-suicide connection, rather than depression, that accounts for higher suicide rates."
Wow, that sounds dire, doesn’t it? I’m going to assume the first clause is patently false, since I can find no correlating evidence in the UCRs. The last clause claims that handguns, and not depression, are responsible for these fictional elevated suicide rates. As usual, blame the tool, not the cause.
Bold claims require strong evidence, and although Injury Prevention may sound like a medical journal, it is in fact more political boilerplate. David Hemenway and Matthew Miller are both on the payroll of the Joyce Foundation, as you can see from the credits at the end of the actual article (which, of course, provides no actual evidence to back its claims). Strike two.
"Fact: Guns are rarely used by rapists - less than 2 percent of rapes are committed with guns, while almost 70 percent are committed with personal weapons (physical violence). Women would be safer knowing self-defense to fight off an attacker than using a gun which can easily be turned against them."
I’m not sure what they mean by “personal weapons,” and neither is the “source” they quote. The Structure of Family Violence: An Analysis of Selected Incidents only covers crimes among relatives, not strangers. I can only assume the Brady Campaign doesn’t expect anyone to check the facts.
Too bad the internet makes it easy for us to do so now. Strike three.
While we’re this far down the rabbit hole, let’s look at where the money for all this is coming from.
According to their site, the Joyce Foundation was established in 1948 by a lumber heiress, and their mission involves, “[making] grants to national organizations for projects that promise to have a significant impact on public policies affecting the Great Lakes region,” for “religious, charitable, scientific, literary and educational purposes.”
Beatrice Joyce died in 1972, and directorship of the Foundation was turned over to a board of directors, who have turned it into an entity that now funds lobbying groups seeking to influence national policy.
Barack Obama is on the board, by the way.
In 2002, their assets totaled $653,771,733, and as of 2005, the total was $892,492,212. In that year alone, their grants came to $26,562,335.
That’s almost a billion dollars spent to tell you that you’re not intelligent or competent enough to use a gun.
Buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll prove them wrong. Sound like a deal?
