Domestic Disarmament: A Women's Issue?
Rosen, Ruth
I've never considered packing a gun. Not after two young women were recently mugged on a sunny Saturday afternoon two blocks from my home. Not after a drive-by shooting occurred less than a mile...
...Progressive legislators should take the issue of domestic disarmament before the Armed Services Committee as a national security problem...
...Don't we women have enough of a political agenda without adding gun control...
...But we have enough empowerment now to move on to broader issues...
...Buying a gun, however, is an "individual solution," which only helps the gun industry turn women's fears into profits...
...They know we fear rape more than burglary...
...On a recent weekend, twenty youths were shot in North Richmond, a poor community slightly north of Berkeley, California...
...In Minnesota, gun owners have become liable for negligently stored firearms...
...They remind skeptics—like myself—of the women and mothers in Chile and Argentina who launched effective campaigns against the military by picketing and plastering neighborhoods with posters of their "disappeared" children...
...Along with a pinkhandled semi-automatic "lady's gun," women are urged to purchase such "fashion accessories" as thigh holsters or modified handbags in which to pack a handgun...
...didn't even make the evening news...
...Curious, I nevertheless trudged reluctantly to the conference, held in South Central Los Angeles one week after the second verdict in the Rodney King case was announced...
...Yes...
...Those who propose a women's campaign to ban all guns have in their mind models of women's power to challenge established auFALL • 1993 • 465 Domestic Disarmament thority...
...To most progressives and feminists, gun control has always felt like a lost cause: the National Rifle Association (NRA) seemed invincible and anyway, wasn't violence merely the symptom of deeper economic inequities and social injustices...
...Some suggest that weapons should be identified as hazardous materials that endanger public health...
...The goal is domestic disarmament...
...About four years ago, gun manufacturers realized that they had run out of male customers...
...It's up to women," she says...
...And to those women seduced by the NRA's ads, we should say, don't pack a gun, ladies...
...There are plenty of good reasons, therefore, why everyone—not only women—should use their organizational skills and lobbying power to push for stricter federal legislation, including bans on all handguns...
...The advertising campaign has even penetrated mainstream women's magazines such as Ladies Home Journal...
...It's seemingly a ludicrous restriction, but it limits the sale of guns to other parts of the country...
...Committed to absolutist positions, the leadership won't even support the Brady Bill...
...Thirty years ago, when the women's movement began," she says, "we wanted to start with the most elementary issues for women...
...In housing projects across the nation, local women have organized their communities against gun violence...
...Moreover, I don't believe that women are inherently more peaceful than men...
...I must confess that when Friedan invited me to a national conference on gun violence as a women's issue, I felt enormous skepticism...
...After losing several relatives to gun violence, Eleanor Montano founded Mothers and Men Against Gangs, a grass-roots group in Los Angeles that enforces street curfews, intercedes with violent gang members, and imposes a neighborhood curfew...
...Every day fourteen children in the United States are killed by guns...
...For starters, we can begin to place domestic disarmament on the political agenda...
...Others advocate educating the public about the cost of gun violence...
...The best way to protect our families and communities is to boycott the gun industry and ravage their profits...
...The time is ripe for challenging the once invincible NRA...
...In the wake of growing gun violence, however, women from different sides of the FALL • 1993 • 463 Domestic Disarmament tracks have begun to identify gun violence as a women's issue...
...464 • DISSENT Domestic Disarmament And it is the young who suffer the most when they find those half-hidden guns...
...In ads for the tiny Derringer and "pen" guns, the weapon has been transferred from a man's to a woman's hand...
...Others want to ban private ownership of all guns, arguing that a civilized society should not allow its citizens to be tyrannized by the constant fear of death...
...Growing numbers of women activists, public health officials, and gun control organizations are now poised to force "domestic arms control" onto the political agenda...
...According to recent reports, the leadership of the NRA appears to be drifting away from its membership...
...They know that empty parking lots and darkened streets frighten us...
...Every year, more than 24,000 Americans are killed— whether by homicide, suicide, or accident— with handguns...
...it has already mobilized women from diverse backgrounds...
...Davis Medical School who has tracked the gun industry's campaign to sell guns to women, says, "The possibility that excited me the most is that gun control might become another area in this century where women act as our national conscience...
...Few of them know, for example, that buying a gun offers a false sense of security...
...More than 135,000 students now carry handguns to school every day...
...When blacks kill blacks, it doesn't make the front page...
...Despite stiff opposition, four states—Connecticut, New Jersey, California, and Hawaii—have been able to ban the sale of assault weapons...
...According to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a handgun in the home is forty-three times more likely to kill a member of the family or an acquaintance than an intruder...
...At the same time, Adelle Simmons of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Marjorie Craig Benton, a longtime political activist in Chicago, contacted Betty Friedan with an idea whose time they felt had come: identifying gun control as a major women's issue of the 1990s...
...Women, however, had barely been tapped...
...Media critics can expose the fallacies of NRA ads...
...Finding the right language is important to this campaign...
...It is largely middle-class women, assured by the gun industry that they can purchase protection, who must be persuaded of their folly...
...Gun violence is so pandemic that the Centers for Disease Control have identified it as the nation's number one public health problem...
...Add that to the estimated two hundred million firearms already in private hands and it's no wonder that more and more people die in front of a gun barrel...
...According to a recent Louis Harris poll, American public opinion is rapidly swinging in favor of more stringent gun control measures...
...Garen Wintemute, a professor of community and international public health at U.C...
...The people who bought them are not going to complete their training and those guns are headed for tragedy...
...The possibilities are endless...
...This is the story of that intellectual conversion...
...Montano is a tough, articulate woman who commands grudging respect from kids on the street...
...Or they point to the women's peace encampments of the early 1980s, which publicized the lunacy of stockpiling cruise missiles in Europe...
...But it is women, from grassroots neighborhood groups to the PTA to NOW, who are the best organized constituency in American civil society...
...They know that neither our bedrooms nor our offices feel safe...
...Or they point to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which arguably became the primary force behind the successful effort to change the nation's drunk-driving laws...
...During the 1970s and 1980s we excavated and publicized all kinds of hidden injuries, including marital and date rape, sexual harassment, and wife battering...
...Let's destroy guns," is one of the popular slogans of this incipient movement...
...Organizers can gather women and children to picket gun manufacturing sites...
...Many tactics are being bandied about...
...But if the gun industry has its way, it would sell me and every adult American woman a small, pearl-studded handgun to match her wardrobe...
...The well dressed woman of the nineties will be armed," declares one gun advertisement targeted at fashion-conscious middle-class women...
...To her, the struggle against gun violence is a "women's issue" by default...
...Now is the time, Friedan argues, for women's organizations to resist the campaign to sell women guns and join women in the poorest communities who have been fighting to save their communities...
...One ad shows a mother gently putting a child to bed...
...She and others rein in gang members by assigning them graffiti removal and other improvement projects...
...More Americans recognize that rather than protecting us from potential tyranny—as our forefathers imagined—guns now threaten the very survival of the nation's citizens and communities...
...some schools have had to install metal detectors and build high concrete walls just to protect their students from stray gunfire...
...Not after a drive-by shooting occurred less than a mile from my neighborhood...
...Rather than pushing for regulation, both feminist and grass-roots activists, who cross class lines in this struggle, are asserting freedom from fear as a basic human right...
...They should also try to convince the print and television media to name the gun manufacturer in every story they publish on gun violence...
...For the first time, a majority of Americans (52%) expressed their support for a ban on all handguns...
...And there is a gender gap among those polled: 61 percent of women but only 41 percent of men favored such a ban (with exceptions granted, only by a court...
...Guns destroy families...
...in poor neighborhoods too many men are dead or in prison...
...The real feminist solution to our fears, Friedan insists, is for women to organize and fight for "domestic disarmament...
...Four out of five U.S...
...Also promoted is a midriff holster—beige with lace trim—that conceals a gun between a woman's breasts...
...Like the Madres in Argentina, perhaps women would carry pictures of the children who have died from drive-by shootings, or from playing with carelessly hidden loaded guns...
...Just another drive-by shooting...
...These are not the women buying guns...
...More than two million weapons are churned out by gun manufacturers every year...
...Nine out of ten Americans support the Brady Bill, a relatively weak proposal that would require a five-day waiting period before a handgun may be purchased...
...Not after a crazed former client entered a San Francisco law office across the Bay, pulled out a satchel of assault weapons, and turned a high-rise office building into a killing field...
...The second reason gun control is a women's issue is that no one else is as well organized— or seems to care enough— to protect our families and communities from random gun violence...
...I confess to a certain aversion to act as men's national conscience, but I see his point...
...The mothers of the children who are daily killed by drive-by shootings have to banish guns...
...Every twenty-four hours handgunwielding assailants rape thirty-three women, rob 575 people and assault 1,116 people...
...The first reason that women should confront gun violence is that we are being targeted by an industry that wants us to join the vigilante crowd...
...Some gun ads promise equal access to the wonderful world of guns...
...After three days of listening to feminists, public health officials, gun-control advocates, police officials, and, most impressively, grass-roots activists from impoverished and devastated housing projects, I returned home a convert...
...During the past year, drive-by shootings have plunged 49 percent in her area...
...Women have secured many rights," the feminist leader observes, "but now they must fight for the fundamental right to be free from fear...
...Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams worries about the thousands of guns purchased just before the second trial of the four officers accused of beating Rodney King...
...Like the tobacco industry in the 1960s, which tried to convince us that truly emancipated women smoked long, thin cigarettes, the gun industry has launched a new and sinister marketing campaign aimed at American women...
...Lawyers might bring liability test cases against gun manufacturers...
...As Eleanor Roosevelt used to say when a problem seemed intractable, "Let the women do it...
...q 466 • DISSENT...
...In 1990, American Firearms Industry, a trade journal, informed retailers that "One of the quickest ways to boost firearms sales is to inform the public that you are offering women the same fun shooting opportunities as the men...
...It is called the Lady Smith Revolver and is displayed alongside a rosebud and fur coat...
...Most often the ads play upon women's fears of random violence and rape...
...She personally takes kids loaded on drugs to Narcotics Anonymous and has even started a tattoo-removal program...
...When a disgruntled white man kills lawyers in a fancy high-rise building, the media rush in and broadcast the news across the nation...
...we just haven't been given the opportunity to demonstrate how many atrocities we might commit...
...In projects all over the country, such women have already organized against gun violence...
...Guns are killing us, not protecting us...
...What might progressives and feminists do...
...This is a dramatic change from the past...
...In contrast, the membership wants to keep its hunting rifles and shotguns, but is horrified by the growing number of military weapons in the hands of urban criminals and gangs...
...The Second Amendment Foundation, a nonprofit organization that fights gun control, recently started publishing a new magazine called Women and Guns...
...senators are sponsoring legislation that would ban the manufacture, sale, and possession of semi-automatic assault weapons...
...citizens surveyed believe that the easy availability of guns has contributed to an atmosphere of violence that endangers children...
...A new consensus is shaping up...
...Although progressives and feminists must confront the social and economic inequities that give rise to hopelessness and rage, we must also ban the weapons people use to kill each other...
...Some U.S...
...These women, unsung heroines of local grass-roots organizations, receive relatively little publicity but are responsible for maintaining whatever safety zones exist in their communities...
...The text ominously warns women, "Self protection is more than your right—it's your responsibility...
...Imagine thousands of women in the Connecticut River Valley and in Southern California— where most of our guns are manufactured— attracting media attention to the products that threaten the safety and health of those we love...
...A recent Smith & Wesson brochure displays an old handgun reconfigured by "ergonomic research" to fit a woman's hand...
...Rather than using the umbrella term "gun control," which only plays into the rhetoric of the NRA, women are addressing gun violence as an issue of safety and public health...
...My biggest fear: Those guns are under pillows and they are on night stands...
...Each gunshot wound costs about $13,000 in health care, 80 percent of which is paid by the public...
...Through long nights, they walk the streets, arms folded across their chests, trying to convince gang members to turn in their weapons and handing over kids who break curfew to the police...
...The statistics quickly numb the mind...
...For teenage boys, gunshot deaths outnumber all natural causes combined...
...These are persuasive arguments, even to women like myself, who have preferred to argue our causes as citizens, rather than claim moral superiority as women or mothers...
...picket a gun manufacturer instead...
...Domestic disarmament, moreover, crosses class and race lines...
...And I am reluctantly seduced by his current fantasy: "Think of the power of women protesting around the Smith and Wesson building...
...So they target suburban women, exploit deep-seated racism, and promise protection from "them," code word for inner-city marauders...
...Virginia narrowly passed a bill limiting the purchase of handguns to one per month, a defeat for the NRA...
...Gun violence is not such a hidden problem...
...Betty Friedan is convinced that her political Geiger counter is as accurate as it was when she wrote The Feminine Mystique or founded NOW...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
