HUMAN EVENTS alumnus Jason Mattera sallied forth to the Washington, D.C. branch of a mass demonstration opposed to violence against women called “One Billion Rising,” and asked a simple question: wouldn’t greater access to legal firearms and concealed-carry permits go a long way toward reducing violence against women?
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Mattera didn’t find a lot of enthusiasm for his idea among the “One Billion Rising” demonstrators. The rambling, incoherent nature of their responses is illuminating, as is the way his first interviewee slips easily into the rhetoric of “occupying” public spaces. One fellow essentially offers the “cycle of violence” argument – women arming themselves will only escalate the level of violence between themselves and the men who abuse them. Instead, he suggests gestures of solidarity as more ideal defense against brutishness, ultimately implying that women will be safer if they just refrain from being alone with men.
Notice how another demonstrator Mattera encounters uses the new left-wing code phrase, “gun safety,” to refer to gun-control legislation. The Left’s ability to program its footsoldiers with the latest political terminology is impressive. They only hit on the idea of using the Orwellian formulation “gun safety” a few months ago. I find myself wondering if the woman he was chatting with understands that not many of the abusive men she’s supposedly protesting against need guns to perpetrate violence against women. Even the complete confiscation of civilian firearms wouldn’t slow them down a bit.
The new catechism of the Free Condom is expounded upon as well. Here’s another demonstration of the Left’s amazing power over its followers. It has been almost exactly one year since the drive to re-define the compulsory funding of birth control as the ultimate expression of American freedom began. Now it’s accepted as a matter of course that requiring people to pay for their own birth control would somehow enslave or oppress them – “denying them access” to these vital life-sustaining supplies, as Newspeak would have it.
On the original point Mattera set out to investigate, there are few better examples of ideology trumping simple common sense. Hopefully abused women can find ways to make a clean exit from dangerous relationships… but sometimes they can’t, and ultimately a firearm is their only real chance to level the playing field against male attackers. It’s chilling to watch activists against predatory violence – from domestic abuse to random criminal assault – pretend that government programs and consciousness-raising exercises are somehow an acceptable substitute for self-defense.
And while this group claims to have global ambitions, something tells me their official awareness of the unequal distribution of violence against women between different societies will be tastefully muted.
