Why Arming Women Won’t Stop Violence Against Women

So here’s our heroine’s choices. She can shoot him and get convicted of a variety of crimes, because you can’t just go around shooting guys. The only guys you can shoot are burglars and guys who Don’t Look Like Us. So she goes to jail. Then what do the rest of us do? She becomes like Andrea Yates or Susan Smith—the real life version of all those Evil Disney Mothers, while real life male scumbags get tossed into the collective dustbin of consciousness. We can’t think ill of those that rule us. We can’t look too closely at how they do it.

So tell me how giving women guns without changing the culture will do any damned good at all. It won’t protect women, and chances are it will enrage the men who laugh at the idea that a woman has a right to enjoy her body while he does not. I have to say, too, a stray thought occurred to me. Guys who think they have such rights to women’s bodies—what do you suppose their attitude is toward other methods of controlling those women’s bodies? Do you really think you have to right to do anything with your body if they don’t get off on it? Do you think they care about your body except if it gets them off? Do you really think they give a shit at all?

Giving women guns is just going to put more women behind bars. The very men who proclaim that this will solve the problem are removing themselves and their buddies from the responsible party list by suggesting it. “Hey,” they whine, “We gave you an option, you chose not to take it. Not our problem any longer.”

The Latest

These Savage Stars

Killing Eve meets Die Hard in this explosive science fiction thriller by the Hugo Award-winning author of The Light Brigade.

Hurley returns to the biogothic space opera universe of her cult classic The Stars are Legion for a riveting novel of obsession, betrayal, and ruinous choices.

Dragged out of retirement for one last job, former spy Rekha must board a dying worldship to hunt down an assassin she thought she killed twenty years ago. She has forty-one hours to do it, or the ship becomes their tomb.

Get Subscriber-Only Stories

Unlock a steady stream of strange, sharp fiction from the Hurleverse that you can’t access anywhere else. New shorts monthly. Cancel anytime.

Scroll to Top