Though the legal system has mostly consoled and protected batterers, when a woman is being beaten, it’s the batterer who has to be stopped; as Malcolm X used to say, by any means necessary–a principle women, all women, had better learn. A woman has a right to her own bed, a home she can’t be thrown out of and for her body not to be ransacked and broken into. She has a right to safe refuge, to expect her family and friends to stop the batterer–by law or force–before she’s dead. She has a constitutional right to a gun and a legal right to kill if she believes she’s going to be killed. And a batterer’s repeated assaults should lawfully be taken as intent to kill.
Andrea Dworkin
Trying to Flee
Los Angeles Times
October 8, 1995
[It’s rare that I would agree with Ms. Dworkin but this time we are in perfect alignment. As we advance through the enemy territory in a post Heller world we need to claim this demographic. Of all the potential supporters and voters women are the single largest and easiest to convert to friends. Let’s make the most of it.–Joe]
Have to get past that multi-faceted emotional protection mechanism; the “violence never solves anything, self defense = vigilantism, make love not war, make art not war, etc.” mantra.
If there’s a method to it, I haven’t found it. Of the five anti-gun women (all but one had been assaulted at some point) I’ve tried it with, all but one ended up crying. The one who didn’t cry was the one who hadn’t (to my knowledge at least) been assaulted.
Maybe I’m just an ass, but I’ve given up trying to convert people unless they show an overt, active interest. There I think is where we have a lot more opportunity than some may realize (and with that in mind, I have some phone calls to make, to a couple of women who expressed interest in learning to shoot).
Just for a lark, as my wife was asking me to donate something for her band booster’s fundraiser, I donated “shooting lessons”. I received zero (open) complaints and several takers. No doubt some people were seething inside, but the fact that they felt it prudent to keep it to themselves is a good thing.