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.
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Re: Ignoring deterrence
Date: 2008-07-02 12:01 pm (UTC)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.