Women And Guns At The Senate Hearings - TheNewYorker [View all]

[WillyT]

WOMEN AND GUNS AT THE SENATE HEARINGS
Amy Davidson - TheNewYorker
January 30, 2013



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What gun does a woman want? AR-15s are “easy for women to hold,” Gayle Trotter, of the Independent Women’s Forum, said to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in her explanation of why an assault-style weapon was just what a young mother needed. She praised their weight, handling, “and most importantly, their appearance,” since “the peace of mind knowing she has a scary-looking gun gives her more courage.” When Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island asked whether a more modest weapon might not do the trick, Trotter said, “You can not understand. You are not a woman.” The senator was “a big man,” while women were little. A woman, Trotter said, might have to fight off four or five criminals “with her children screaming in the background.” She deserved “a right to choose” a weapon with a thirty-round magazine.

Women, as much as criminals and the mentally ill, were the subject of caricaturing at the hearings Tuesday. They were the besieged victims with only an AR-15 between themselves and a chaotic world of rapists and home invaders. To hear Trotter and her fellow-witness, Wayne LaPierre of the N.R.A., tell it, a gun is the sort of thing one ought to keep near a baby, like syrup of ipecac or a box of Band-Aids. Senator Chuck Grassley asked Trotter whether “banning guns which feature designs to improve accuracy disproportionately burdens women”—women apparently being not only small but also wild shooters. She thought they would. (Neither mentioned what might be the disproportionate benefit of closing a loophole that allows people with domestic-violence records to buy guns without background checks.) There was also a digression about how women, unlike criminals, quietly obeyed laws. Senator Lindsey Graham, in arguing about limits on magazines, told a story about a woman hiding in a closet who managed to put five of the bullets in her six-shooter into the body of a criminal who nonetheless drove away: “There can be a situation where a mother runs out of bullets because of what we do here.”

And yet, as I’ve written before, a gun in the home tends to do little more than make bad situations worse. When a gun is involved in domestic disputes, the chances that a woman will end up dead are far higher. A follow-up of a survey of women who had been the victims of domestic violence found that those who’d said they had a gun in the house were six times more likely to have been murdered. A gun kept within reach of a mother at all times is also something a toddler, or an older child, can find. Nancy Lanza had a lot of guns in her house. They kept neither her nor the children of Newtown safe.

But the talk about women was, in many ways, just a more crystalline version of a general vision of society and the law. In one of the day’s stranger exchanges, Senator Graham asked James Johnson, Baltimore’s chief of police, if his budget had been cut (it had), and told him that he should expect it to happen again: “I can tell people throughout this land, because of the fiscal state of affairs we have, there will be less police officers not more over the next decade. Response times are going to be less, not more.” This, according to the logic of the G.O.P., is an argument for turning homes into arsenals, not for protecting police budgets. You’ll need a gun, Graham said, because of who is “roaming the streets.” While gun ownership is presented as an expression of liberty, it is defended with images of universal victimhood. We are a nation of damsels in distress, left to reach for an AR-15.

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