Women and scare tactics

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 they 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. Although women have higher rates of depression than men, it is the handgun-suicide connection, rather than depression, that accounts for higher suicide rates.

So, the very presence of guns causes suicide? Strange that there is no corroboration in the UCRs for such a statement. There are statistically higher rates of suicide some Red States to a slight degree, but that doesn’t take into account depression, substance abuse, income or any number of social factors.

An article from Injury Prevention is one of the works cited for this claim, and though it may appear professional on the surface, it turns out to be political boilerplate. The “survey data” they quote is not available for public review, and authors David Hemenway and Matthew Miller are both on the payroll of the Joyce Foundation.

The only other source I’ve located is Gary Wintemute, who also makes some bold claims, but he fails to provide any sort of provable evidence. Also, notice where the funding for his study came from.

In an effort to find out where they were getting this stuff, I figured I’d dig through the WISQARS database, which is what Brady and the VPC use to make some of their points. According to the 2004 lists of “causes of death,” suicides in this country take a huge jump (~50%) in the 34-44 age group, so I started there.

For men, firearms were used 46.9% of the time, and 2,376 times total. Out of that, women only used firearms 492 times, for 31.3% of the total. In contrast, poisoning was the most common method for women at 43.6%, while for males, it was only 17%.

Total suicides, all methods, numbered 5,067 for men and 1,571 for women. Men commit suicide 3.23 times as often as women, and tend to use firearms, while women tend to resort to poison.

What’s more, if we look at the situation worldwide, the inverse is true. The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy has an article by Gary Mauser and Don Kates that goes into detail on the subject. Additionally, U.N. World Health Organization statistics show that the Japanese suicide rate among women is almost three times that of the United States, and civilian gun ownership is outlawed there. Sweden, Australia and Canada all beat us, too.

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 stewardship of the Foundation was turned over to a board of directors. They 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 behind the notion 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?