Guns as a feminist issue

[catsittingstill]

Over at Feministe, they are saying that guns are not a feminist issue, in response to Megan McArdle saying on her blog that they are.

(McArdle redux: easy availibility of guns is good for women because you can fire a gun (and thus fight off a male attacker) without being strong.)

(Feministing redux: when you get right down to it, it doesn't *matter* that you can fire a gun without being strong; women in practice are more likely to be killed by guns than to defend themseves with one.)

What do I think?  First I think there's a tendency to revere, or revile, guns as guns--for a lot of people they're not just tools; they're symbols and the symbol gets in the way of evaluating the tool.

So I'm going to try to think about a tool to throw lumps of metal very fast.  Theoretically I could indeed use such a tool to fight off a bigger, stronger attacker, just as I could use a crowbar or a chisel or a plugged-in circle saw.  However:

1) Such tools tend to interest men more than women, in my experience (whether because of their symbolism, or because most tools to work metal get more use by men I don't know).  Easy availability of such a tool is more likely, I think, to promote its possession by men than women--just like easy availability of a circle saw is more likely to promote its possession by men than by women.  (Note that of course I agree that women use tools and of course I support a woman's right to use any tool that a man may use.  Just in case anyone was getting confused.)

1a) Such tools don't interest me, given the responsibility of making sure no bystander is hurt by them (I don't carry around plugged in circle saws everywhere I go either, for pretty much the same reason--in any given day I won't have a use for one, and subjecting myself and others to that hazard unnecessarily is stupid).  Like a seatbelt, this tool only works for self defense if you have it when you need it--I wouldn't tend to have it, and I suspect I am not alone or even in the minority among women in this.

2) You'd be amazed how many tools I am not strong enough to use without a mechanical assist.  Some among these have been examples of metal-throwing tools I was not strong enough to cock on demand.  I am by no means convinced that these tools are the promised equalizers that will make it possible for smaller weaker less aggressive people to fight off bigger stronger more aggressive people.

3) my life experience has been that where these metal throwing tools are highly valued and frequently possessed, women tend to be treated less equally.  Sometimes *markedly* less equally.  Make of it what you will.

4) the crucial element in all this is the willingness to seriously hurt or kill somebody.  My limited experience suggests to me that I'm not good at this (I'm fine with it in self-defense, in theory, but in practice I would hesitate).  I think that a lot of people aren't good at this--and furthermore I think women are in general less likely to be good at it than men.  The metal throwing tool does no good without the willingess.  The willingness takes actual training and/or experience.

So, no, I don't think guns are the solution for women getting equality or even for women fighting off attackers.  Some women will choose to carry them and that's fine with me.  But feminist issue?  Unless someone is trying to ban only women from owning guns, no, it's not.  Feministe wins.

Comments

[tradarcher.livejournal.com]

Women often out shoot men in competitions. It is a sport often women excelled in. There are many ancedotal stories that he takes her to the range to demonstrate his prowess at firearm shooting. He hands her a large caliber pistol. She does badly because of recoil but somehow likes the idea of shooting.
She does more shooting and gets quite good at it.
They break up.
She still shoots, often at matches that he is shoot at. She gets a higher score.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oh absolutely--I completely believe that women can be top-quality shooters.

There are several issues at work here--

1) a group can be generally less X but some members of the group can be very X (where X equals some quality--tall, good readers, interested in guns, whatever). I don't think women in general tend to be as interested in guns as men in general, but that doesn't mean that some women won't excell and surpass most or even all men.

2) being good at target shooting and being able to shoot a human being in hot blood to fight off an attacker are skill sets that I suspect only overlap moderately

3) I think to be considered a feminist issue easy availablity of guns would have to benefit most women more than most men, and I don't think it does.

But absolutely I agree that some women are very interested in guns and some become very good shooters indeed. And more power to them.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

I actually think target shooting would be fun, but I have no interest in carrying a gun for defense. So I think there very much can be a difference between them, as you say.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed it when I was twelve and thirteen, but I never got very good at it, and the shiny wore off.

But different people have different tastes, and I would in no way discourage anyone else from trying it.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

There's a saying among the gun fans that "God made Humans, but Smith & Wesson made them equal."

My biggest issue with Mcardle is that her arguments apply also to men who are either old and frail, disabled and frail, or (like me) just Miles-sized. could be, it's a "feminist" thing as a subset of a broader "egalitarian" thing.

Then, there's another saying about how "it's not the size of the warrior in the fight--it's the size of the fight in the warrior". There's a lot of people smaller than me who could probably kick my ass just by virtue of wanting the win more than me.

I'm on the fence about guns. On the one hand, there's some evidence that they're like a cursed talisman such that just possessing one does something to change the owner's personality, not in a good way. On the other hand, if the conservative Christians continue their bid for world domination, I kinda don't want their side to be the only armed side.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've seen that saying. I don't know that I buy it, though. I think that differential ability and willingness to use guns means that guns just make people unequal along a different scale.

You have a good point that if guns are equalizers they are equalizers for anybody who is not good at hand to hand, for whatever reason.

The size of the fight in the warrior has something to do with it, I grant you, but I think physical limitations apply to fighting, like to anything else. Professional basketball players do not come in all different sizes, so I suspect the body you're dealt has something to do with what you can and can't achieve physically.

I understand your ambivalence about guns. I share some of it. I just don't think that guns are the path to women's equality.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

McA is over-impressed with muscle--successful defense with firearms generally requires a group or a fortified position; of this tactical reality are gangs, armies, and forts made. In a typical innocent-victim violent-crime situation the attacker has surprise and, usually, position and skill on their side. In that situation, a firearm doesn't help very much--there will be no good opportunity to bring it to bear.

I think the the whole US obsession with firearms is weird, and I wish we'd start paying more attention to violence.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I do think it's kind of odd that you can see somebody "killed" on television on any given viewing evening but never somebody having sex, or even giving birth.

Sort of an odd idea about what is "obscene" now that I think about it.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Oh, you can show someone giving birth, in that you can show that (a) a pregnant woman is on her back with her legs elevated, (b) labor is clearly in progress, and (c) eventually an infant is revealed. You just can't show the actual birth moment, but you can acknowledge that's what's happening.

Sex, you can't really acknowledge. You can show people waking up together, mention that someone was on his honeymoon, allude to needing a cigarette, but you can't ever really say "Bob Smith had sex last night".

Ignoring deterrence

[(Anonymous)]

I think that we may be ignoring the deterrence side of the argument here. Yes, in the final analysis you need to be willing to pull the trigger against a determined attacker, but how many attackers are that determined?

The average mugger or burglar will probably deterred by your brandishing a weapon. They are after money and valuables and see crime as an easy way to obtain them. They are generally unwilling to risk their own lives to obtain them and once they see the intended victim with a firearm, that is what they are doing. After all, you may know that you would be extremely hesitant to pull the trigger and have trouble hitting the broad side of a barn. The criminal doesn't know that.

What we really need are better statistics in this area. Unfortunately, controlled experiments are difficult, and I expect most of the available data concerns actual shootings. I know the NRA has been publishing anecdotes for years about deterrence and self defense uses of firearms, but that is all they are, anecdotes.

I noticed in the comments to the feministing post there were commenters who pointed out the severely questionable nature of the statistics from the VPC the post was relying on. In particular, they ignore the issue of deterrence, leaving it to a footnote. Although, from that footnote (#5) and the following, we learn that there were app 80,000 instances of a crime victim defending themselves with a gun in the early 90s, and fewer then 200 instances of justifiable homicide (defensive killing) in 1998. This suggests that most uses are probably deterrent according to their own statistics

One possible avenue is to look at crime rates in the states where concealed carry laws have been changed to "shall carry". If crime rates go down, and the other variables can be controlled, we may have some evidence.

Donald Clarke

P.S. As for guns being a feminist issue, I think they are more generally a relative power equalizer as Admiral Naismith pointed out. If women think they could profitably use such an equalizer more than men, it may be feminist to that extent. Also, while there may not be formal laws restricting gun ownership by women, I suspect social customs and attitudes tend to do so. Is not part of feminism overcoming such restrictions on what women can and should do?

P.P.S. I am an Army Reservist, so I have some familiarity with guns, but have never owned one myself. As for the Heller decision, I question its reasoning, but maybe it will now allow sensible regulation since the pro-gun forces can no longer say regulation is a covert attempt to take their guns since the 2nd amendment is now recognized as conferring an individual right (yes, I know the radicals will continue to say that, but hopefully they will have more trouble convincing the undecided).

Re: Ignoring deterrence

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The average mugger or burglar will probably deterred by your brandishing a weapon

This is, of course, assuming that easy availablity of guns means that the defender will have a gun, but the attacker will not. Since the attacker was presumably planning on the event, and the defender wasn't, that seems to me to be an optimistic assumption.

If the attacker has a gun too, is the defender's gun deterrence ("Gosh, if I escalate this to a shooting contest I might wind up in bigger trouble than if I just mugged somebody") or does it become a dominance issue ("I can't let the bitch back me down.")?

I agree that in the absence of controlled experiments, it's hard to say which scenarios are most likely. But even supposing (for the sake of argument) that a gun was purely a self-defense tool, and couldn't be used for *anything* else, a tool only benefits a person who has it. If women don't buy this perfect self defense tool, easy availability of this self defense tool doesn't differentially benefit women.

"Educating women about the benefits of gun ownership" could arguably be a feminist issue (though I think gun ownership increases the power of aggressive people more than the power of unagressive people, because there's that willingness-to-pull-the-trigger thing, and women tend to be less aggressive, so I don't think even this is a reasonable argument.) But the argument McArdle was making was something quite different. If what we need to do is educate women (and not men) about the benefits of gun ownership, easy availability of guns is peripheral to that.

Hopefully now that most gun owners can feel confident that we're not trying to "take their guns away" it will be possible to have some rational gun laws like requiring people to pass safety tests in order to own a gun. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Re: Ignoring deterrence

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The other thing that occurs to me is that if a gun is deterrence, if all you need to do is *display* the gun to make the criminal back down--

Then you don't *need* a gun. You just need something that *looks* like a gun.

And if it isn't a real gun, 90% of the time and care it costs (making sure every minute that it's not falling into a bad guy's hands, or a child's) goes right out the window. It doesn't matter if the neighbor kids find it; they can't shoot each other. It's not a big deal if a bad guy takes it away from you--now he thinks he has a gun, and you know he's wrong. Mention that the safety is on before you run, if you want to *really* confuse him.

I wonder what the laws on owning gun lookalikes are.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Except if you look at the countries with the highest gun ownership (United States, Yemen, Finland, Switzerland, Iraq) there isn't exactly a strong equality correlation.

[maiac.livejournal.com]

"Guns are a feminist issue" is panderspeak. The translation: "The pro-gun faction wants to enlist women in their campaign to get rid of gun-control laws".

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

Actually, the main angle I'm seeing, politically speaking, is "See, us liberals don't really want to take away your guns."

Some people may get a bit overenthusiastic about it, but I can't blame them. I suppose it mitigates the teeth-grinding realization "if only the gun-control albatross had been cut loose a bit sooner, Dubya would still be cutting brush in Crawford."

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

? Megan McArdle is thought to be a liberal? I haven't gotten that impression from what I've read of her writing, but I haven't read very many of her pieces.

It's an interesting idea that the gun-control issue contributed to W's election. I hadn't considered that. I guess it might have, at that.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Well, I have one friend at least who voted for Bush despite everything because he wouldn't take her gun away from her.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I'm fond of saying that if the radical-right has its way, we will have the right to own firearms and no other rights and this seems to be coming true. But the truth of the matter is that the US left would have to be as pro-firearm as the Mexican left before the pro-pro-firearms types would leave us alone, and then they'd probably find other reasons to hate us. (Like, say, we really would be gun-toting, bomb-throwing anarchists. Some people don't know what "radical left" really means.)

[patoadam]

The gun control issue definitely contributed to W's election as Governor of Texas against the incumbent Democratic governor Ann Richards, who had vetoed a bill that would have allowed licensed gun owners to carry concealed weapons.

[(Anonymous)]

I would describe Megan Mcardle as a small-l libertarian. Liberal on social issues and conservative on economic issues.

Donald Clarke

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) That's an interesting way of putting it. I don't think I'd heard/read the term "panderspeak" before.

It does kind of strike me as an attempt to muddy the waters on the gun issue--if they can persuade feminists that more guns are the key to women's equality, they could get a lot more people on their side. I'm not entirely sure whether I think this is a deliberate, cynical attempt to delude feminists (as "panderspeak" would seem to imply) or whether I think they honestly believe it.

But whichever, I don't think it's true.

[andpuff.livejournal.com]

Since McArdle seems to be referring to handguns, her theory that they're equilizers for the weak seems to be postulating that they're a 'point and shoot' tech. Well, in a way they are but the actual accuracy of a 9mm handgun -- which would be your most common caliber -- in untrained hands is low. There's always the "put it on full auto and spray the immediate area of your attacker" option I suppose but it seems to me she's vastly oversimplifying and that does make me wonder why.

I thought Susan from Texas' comment raised good points.

4) the crucial element in all this is the willingness to seriously hurt or kill somebody.

I think guns dilute this a bit because of the distance involved but... you can fight off a larger attacker by slamming your pen -- a perfectly legal accessory -- into his eyeball (if you hit hard enough, you'll actually go through the thinner bone at the back of the socket and into the brain) and yet, no one seems to do that so I think you're right on the mark with your willingness requires training and/or experience comment.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I would think that in a "repelling an attacker" scenario, one would be fairly close. Otherwise, how would one know one was being attacked? I mean, yes, bullets flying by would be a clue (though it might just be someone else defending herself from an attacker down the block) but I got the impression McCardle was envisioning "woman with gun defending herself against attacker without gun."

So if one is fairly close, perhaps only moderate accuracy is required. Though I'm not sure I could achieve even moderate accuracy in a hot state (in fear for my life) and I hope nothing less than fear for my life would make me deliberately try to shoot someone. On the other hand, being fairly close might tend to reduce the "dilution of distance" on the violence one is committing.

But in the end, it seems to me that McArdle is presenting herself as an economist, and economics is not about what ought to be, it's about what *is*. So the question becomes "Do women purchase more handguns than men?" If the answer is no, easy availability of handguns does not differentially benefit women, and it's not a feminist issue.

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

"So the question becomes "Do women purchase more handguns than men?" If the answer is no, easy availability of handguns does not differentially benefit women, and it's not a feminist issue."

I don't think that there's necessarily a direct correlation to how often people purchase something and how much benefit it produces.

That said, the framing as a "feminist issue" does seem a bit like special pleading.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I don't think that there's necessarily a direct correlation to how often people purchase something and how much benefit it produces.

I'm suggesting something a bit more complicated than that. "If object X benefits Group A more than it benefits Group B, Group A will want it more, and will express that want economically, by buying more of it or paying a higher price for it." This does depend on people knowing what will benefit them, but that's a pretty common assumption in economics.

Plus it seems to me that a self-defense tool is going to benefit the people who own it more than the people who don't. If women don't own it, it doesn't benefit women much. If women don't buy it, they mostly don't own it (I suppose a few might be bought by men as gifts for women, but suspect that most men who buy them buy for themselves).

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

I was listening to Talk of the Nation a few weeks ago, and the guest (whose name I forget) pointed out that it is fairly common for a person who wields a gun in self-defense to end up having the gun turned on him or her.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I've heard this too, but the pro-gun faction keeps rejecting it as lies. I haven't actually seen any study on this.

I'd guess it's pretty easy to take a gun away from someone who can't bring zirself to fire, and much harder to take it from someone prepared to do lethal violence at a moment's notice.

[(Anonymous)]

I have not seen any accounts of this being a problem with civilians defending themselves, although it probably does happen. It is a bigger problem with police. There have been multiple instances of police officers being killed with their own weapons, when suspects being arrested try to grab the officer's gun while the officer is cuffing them.

Donald Clarke

[thymidinekinase.livejournal.com]

This xkcd comic resonated with your treatment of guns as tools. http://xkcd.com/444/

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-)

Speaking of firearms in Mexico

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Look here.