[This is a guest post by freelance writer and recovering attorney Dani Alexis. Dani blogs and is rampant on Twitter.]
Zerlina Maxwell made some fantastic points on Fox News and in her Ebony columns about how telling women how not to get raped – and even arming them in pursuit of that goal – is going about the problem backwards. Here’s another, related question: even if we armed all the women of the U.S. in case of rape, how is that supposed to help them?
Because there is a massive obstacle between women having guns and women[1] using them to prevent or stop another from raping them. It’s called the law of self-defense.
How Self-Defense Works
A person who kills another in self-defense must generally prove two things:
• the killing was subjectively lawful: that is, the person using deadly force in self-defense actually believed she was in imminent (instant, immediate, right-the-hell-now) danger of being killed, and
• the killing was objectively lawful: that is, a reasonable, disinterested person happening upon the scene would believe that the person using deadly force in self-defense was in imminent danger of being killed.
In order for a self-defense argument to stand, both the subjective and objective beliefs must be intact. The threat of deadly harm must also be imminent, or so immediate that the person acting in self-defense had no chance to retreat, call for help, or take any less-than-lethal step in order to prevent being killed.
Self-defense arguments can also be “scaled” according to the harm involved. For instance, if you face an imminent (and objectively reasonable) risk of death, you can respond with deadly force; if you face an imminent (and objectively reasonable) risk of bodily harm, you can respond with bodily-injuring force; and so on.
So What’s the Problem?
Even if we begin with the massive assumption that all women are okay with carrying firearms and with shooting or threatening to shoot potential rapists, arming women in order to prevent rape carries some major legal pitfalls. Here are three of the biggest:
1. Guns are “deadly” weapons.
Firearms fall under the category of “deadly” weapons in every U.S. state. This means that even pointing one at her rapist means a woman has committed assault[2] with a deadly weapon.
Does she have a viable self-defense claim? Not if the rapist wasn’t assaulting her with a deadly weapon at the time – and no U.S. state currently classifies a penis as a “deadly weapon.”
If this seems far-fetched, consider the case of Marissa Alexander. Ms. Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison after firing a “warning shot” into the wall of her home to scare off her husband, whom she felt was threatening her with violence. Arguably, his threat and her response to his threat were relatively equal – it appears he committed assault but not battery, and she did the same. Because she used a deadly weapon, however, and he did not, the self-defense argument wouldn’t hold up in court. [3]
The self-defense argument depends on an equality between the force used by the person acting in self-defense and the force used by that person’s attacker. A gun changes this equation. The fact that a gun changes this equation is exactly why proponents of arming women to prevent rape support the idea – but it also significantly limits the cases in which a self-defense argument by the woman will hold up in court if she actually draws the gun. If she used a “deadly” weapon and he did not, she has no case.
2. Guns make it easy to kill people.
The fact that guns cause damage or death very easily is another reason proponents suggest arming women to protect them against rape. The lethality of guns makes them scary; presumably, scared rapists will behave themselves, and if they don’t, the gun can always be used to actually hurt them, thus stopping any assault. But what happens when a gun fired to stop or prevent a rape actually kills the rapist?
Rape, in and of itself, is not classified as “homicide” in the United States. Rape is not a fatal crime in and of itself; when a rape is followed by or causes death, rape and homicide are charged as separate crimes (if they are charged at all). This is why the death penalty for rapists who do not kill their victims has been found unconstitutional in the United States. Killing a rapist who has not killed the victim is considered a disproportionate use of power.
For the self-defense rule to apply, a woman who kills her rapist with a gun – accidentally or deliberately – must have been in imminent danger of death, not merely of rape. Granted, there are rape scenarios in which a woman would fear that her rapist was about to kill her. But even if she genuinely fears for her life and is able to use her gun to kill her rapist before he kills her, she has one more self-defense hurdle to face:
3. Was her fear “objective”?
In non-SYG states[4], self-defense relies both on a subjective standard and an objective one. The person acting in self-defense must believe her actions were reasonable to prevent an equal or greater harm, and a reasonable person must also believe, considering the entire situation, that the woman’s actions were reasonable to prevent an equal or greater harm.
Even if we assume a woman who shot and killed her rapist did not do so until he was actually raping her (and that she was able to shoot despite being actually raped), we cannot assume that a jury, applying the “reasonable person” standard, will think that it was reasonable for her to use deadly force (the gun) in response to a non-deadly assault (the rape).
“When is it reasonable for women to use deadly force to stop attackers?” has been a tricky area of criminal law for some time. The “reasonable battered woman” standard has been accepted by some courts and rejected by others. Even states that have accepted it, however, restrict the defense only to longstanding abusive relationships. Many women are raped within abusive relationships, but many are not.
Arising in domestic violence and abuse cases, the “reasonable battered woman” standard tries to address the fact that some fears – like the fear that a rapist will also kill them – are reasonable for women in our culture, even if they are not necessarily reasonable for men or for a generic “person.” Many women find a great deal of truth in the quote commonly attributed to Margaret Atwood: “Men worry women will laugh at them. Women worry men will kill them.”
It’s a Trap
Ironically, advocating that women carry firearms in case of rape bolsters the fear that men will not only rape them but kill them, even as it puts women in greater danger of being unable to establish that the same fear is legally reasonable. Advocating that women carry guns to prevent rape argues that women should be afraid of men. They should be so afraid, in fact, that they keep a deadly weapon on hand at all times. Be afraid men will not only rape you, but kill you; but don’t assume a court will find your fears reasonable.
This, as Zerlina Maxwell continues to so eloquently point out, is exactly backwards. Stoking women’s fear that men will rape them continues to put the onus on women to defend themselves, while doing nothing to address the actual cause of rape: rapists. It elides the facts that not all men rape, that not all rapists are men, and that not all rape victims are women. It continues to support rape culture, making future instances of rape inevitable by failing to address rape’s actual sources.
And it does all this by placing a greater burden on women who take the gun-carrying advice by forcing them into a legal trap. The situations in which a woman using a firearm to prevent or stop her rape are legally permissible self-defense are vanishingly few; the situations in which these actions are not legally permissible are legion. By asking women to use guns to prevent or stop their own rapes, we’re asking them to risk sacrificing their personal liberty in exchange for their personal safety – if guns made women safe from rape, which they don’t.
Footnotes
[1]I use the term “women” and the feminine pronoun throughout this piece to underline two things. One is that the argument itself springs from the idea that we should arm women to defend themselves against male rapists, and the other is that the respective sexes in that framing change how we evaluate self-defense in very specific ways.
I do not mean to imply that only women are raped or that only men commit rape; “man rapes woman” is statistically the most common arrangement but by no means the only one. But I do believe that the implication that “women are raped by men” (note the use of the passive voice) lies at the bottom of our belief that “arming women will prevent rape” is reasonable in the first place.
[2] “Assault,” in most states, involves putting someone in fear of imminent harm of some kind. Some states collapse assault and battery (unwanted or unlawful touching) in the same statute, while others separate them. In either case, pointing a gun at someone counts as “assault with a deadly weapon” if the other person believes the pointing is about to lead to a shooting.
[3] The case also turned on a questionable and, I believe, erroneous interpretation of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law; the court held that Ms. Alexander had a duty to retreat, when Florida’s SYG law specifically absolves individuals of a duty to retreat and when common-law “castle doctrine” would have absolved Ms. Alexander of a duty to retreat in her own home even if Florida’s SYG law did not apply. But that point is orthogonal to the point of this piece.
[4] Stand Your Ground states vary in their approach to the “objective” element. Some, like Florida’s, eliminate the objective element entirely – at least on paper. Others still require an “objective” evaluation of “imminent” danger, eliminating only the duty to retreat.
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I can’t speak with any knowledge about other states, but in Colorado just about none of this post is correct.
Within your own home, you may use any degree of force you wish to repel, stop, or kill an intruder, if you believe that a crime is being or will be committed. You are immune both from criminal prosecution and from civil liability.
Outside your home, your scope of action is restricted somewhat. You may only use the degree of force you believe is reasonable and necessary to stop an attack on yourself or another person. However, you are not restricted to using only the level of force an aggressor has chosen to deploy; that would be both morally and pragmatically insane. If you end up killing the aggressor, then to be immunized from prosecution and/or civil suit, you have to show that you had a reasonable belief that you or the person you were defending was in actual danger of serious bodily injury or death.
There are exceptions carved into that requirement however. You will have to show evidence to support your version of what occurred, but you are specifically allowed to kill someone to repel a burglar (residential or business), you are allowed to kill someone who is attempting a kidnapping, and you are allowed to kill someone who is attempting an assault, including rape. You may use deadly force to protect another person from all of these types of attack, if that force is necessary to stop the attack. Penises aren’t deadly weapons, but you can shoot a male rapist dead and the cops will shake your hand.
Heads up to any vigilantes thinking Colorado might be a good base of operations, however – these protections, except as explicitly listed above, do NOT apply to the defense of property in a business situation. You can drop the guy as you see him come through the window at your house; in your business you have far less right of proactive defense and are held to a much higher standard when the court looks at the force that you ended up using.
I am no vigilante, nor even someone who resorts to force unless at extreme need, which in my adult lifetime has been “never”. But I cannot envision living in an environment where the common-law right of self-defense has become so attenuated and the precious life force of some scumbag rapist/burglar/thief so valorized, that someone who shoots a clear-cut attacker in a clear-cut attempted rape, would be thinking “oh crap, now I’m in trouble with the fucking law.”
Are you people sheep?
I don’t think many states require you to give up your advantage in a potentially deadly situation. If you hold a gun, and order a physically superior attacker to keep his distance, yet he persists in closing on you – allowing him to continue means giving up your advantage and potentially letting him kill you.
Even if he’s unarmed, letting him close on you means he might gain control of the gun and kill you with that, if nothing else.
Isn’t “attacker is physically superior, and trying to get hold of my gun” by itself a lethal treat ?
My experience of being attacked by a stranger at night out of doors tells me that unless one is walking with the gun in one’s hands while visually scoping out the area for danger, there’s an initial moment of startlement on being attacked. During which time the attacker may be able to get the gun that one has. Which, of course, gives the attacker a great advantage. And, of course, in most states walking with a gun in one’s hands while visually scoping out the area for danger is illegal.
“For the self-defense rule to apply, a woman who kills her rapist with a gun – accidentally or deliberately – must have been in imminent danger of death, not merely of rape”
I don’t think this is true anywhere in the US. It’s certainly not true in California, see, e.g., People v. Ceballos, (1974) 12 Cal.3d 470, 478 (deadly force may be used in self-defense from “forcible and atrocious crimes” including “murder, mayhem, rape and robbery… In such crimes from their atrocity and violence human life either is, or is presumed to be, in peril.”)
Furthermore, although the reasonableness of the fear of harm is an objective test, the fear itself is not judged objectively. If a reasonable person in the position of the defendant would have been afraid, it is not relevant that a person with knowledge of all the facts would not have been afraid:
“In emphasizing that the law of self-defense is a law of necessity courts should never lose sight of the fact that the necessity may be either real or apparent.” Vaughn v. Jonas (1948) 31 Cal.2d 586, 599—600.
I’m skeptical about some of the claims in this post, or more accurately some of the language used.
True.
Practically, it does not. that requires a report of assault and a charge to boot.
This is simply untrue. In fact it is SO untrue that it frankly makes me question the truth of the entire post.
Self defense is (generally speaking; I haven’t done a 50-state survey) judged on the REASONABLENESS OF YOUR DEFENSIVE RESPONSE GIVEN THE CIRCUMSTANCES. certain states may vary but the rule is pretty much the same.
If you are in reasonable fear of great bodily harm or death, and there’s not a reasonable alternative such as retreat, then you may usually defend yourself with lethal force. The fact that your attacker used a deadly weapon is a factor in that reasonableness, because a jury is more likely to understand the need to shoot an attacking pistolero than someone who wants to box.
This is a link to some Massachusetts model jury instructions which give some good information.
Anecdotes. Data. Not the same.
Surely there are some bad cases on both sides, whether people who are imprisoned or reasonable defense, or people who get off when there wasn’t really a need to kill someone. So what? the system’s imperfect.
I don’t think that’s an accurate summary at all.
Actually, it has to do with the risk of harm.
The prototypical example is a dark-alley mugging. if the mugger is a huge dude and the victim is a little old lady, she can often shoot him even if he’s unarmed. If the mugger is a little old lady and the victim is a huge dude, then that’s not really true.
What the fuck are you talking about? I know you’re posting as a “recovering attorney,” but this isn’t even close to how the law actually works, either in theory or practice.
[i’m skipping the middle section. There’s only so much i feel like responding to]
This. Is. Not. True.
It’s not even CLOSE to true.
Let me give specifics:
When it comes to stranger rape: the ability of a woman to use a firearm in order to prevent a rape (“back away from me you asshole or I’ll shoot you”) is almost unquestioned. Similarly, the ability of women to use firearms is highly protected even when they kill people, because society correctly believes that most women don’t generally go around shooting people for fun.
The ability of women to deter other rapes is also there. But it’s modified and tricky.
The tricky part is (your suggestions to the contrary) NOT just because of the gun issue, but because of the “other shit” issue.
Take the classic wife-shoots-husband case, where a wife shoots and kills a husband to prevent a rape.
Those husband are rarely “perfect” in other respects. And when someone offs a husband that she hates and who beat her last week, and raped her last month… well, she has to deal with the charge that she shot him because he’s a horrible asshole who she (rightfully) wanted dead, and not because he was, at that very moment, trying to rape her. But self-defense doesn’t usually apply to “horrible asshole who she (rightfully) wanted dead.” That has nothing to do with the fact that she used a gun, and almost everything to do with extraneous circumstances unrelated to the weapon of choice.
This is the most accurate thing in your whole post. And it’s entirely true. Guns are a bad idea. But they’re not a bad idea for the ridiculous reasons that you listed above.
“Heads up to any vigilantes thinking Colorado might be a good base of operations, however ”
…
“I am no vigilante, …”
I’ve seen this word misused a lot on the blog, so let’s clear something up. If you are assaulted and use a gun to repel or even kill your assailant, you are NOT a vigilante. If you – presumably not being a sworn police officer in their jurisdiction – patrol the streets and use force to punish someone who you judge has committed a crime against SOMEONE ELSE, then you are a vigilante – you have taken it upon yourself to enforce and adjudicate the law without the legal authority to do so. But if you are defending yourself or your property against a criminal act you are NOT a vigilante. Nor are you a vigilante if you patrol the streets looking for people committing crimes but do nothing else besides call the cops.
To a more substantive criticism of this post; almost all of the scenarios it discusses is when a gun is fired in self-defense. But it has been found in studies of the use of firearms in self-defense that very often a gun is not fired when it is successfully used in self-defense. The sight alone of the gun is enough to discourage the assailant. It also does not take into account the concept that if potential rapists have an expectation that their potential victims may be armed, it reduces the incidence of assaults in the first place – which, to answer the question asked, certainly helps women.
I’m not a lawyer, but I find this in Illinois law:
I can well be wrong, but I’m guessing that rape is either great bodily harm or a forcible felony in Illinois law.
The problem with this posting is that it discusses theoretical concepts of law, but does not look at how the law is actually structured in the various States. As can be see, the law as actually constructed can very well say that despite these general principles of law, in fact you can use deadly force to defend yourself against rape. So it’s hard to treat it as authoritative or meaningful.
A more subjective question is, what are the odds that a jury will convict a woman who shoots her rapist or would-be rapist? No jury I’m on, but I’d be curious to find out what the actual experience is? How often are such cases brought vs. not brought to trial, and how often are convictions obtained?
This may be pure cynicism talking, but since juries frequently disbelieve women who have been raped, I have a whole lot of doubt that they’ll believe women who *haven’t* been raped, and who’ve killed someone. There’s a perverse irony where shooting your assailant, by preventing the rape from happening, also prevents there from being evidence of a rape.
I would be absolutely thrilled to be proven wrong, if anyone can find any statistics on women shooting attempted rapists.
1) I constantly hear from gun people “don’t pull a gun unless you’re prepared to fire it.” But now I hear that there’s no need to worry about what will happen if you shoot someone, since the rapist will no doubt leave just after seeing the gun.
It’s no doubt true that many rapists would leave at the sight of a gun. But that’s not true of all rapists, surely. And asking what happens if one does have to shoot a rapist in self-defense is reasonable.
2) I agree with Kelly. Given the justice system’s frequent attitude towards rape, I think it’s very likely that any woman who shoots a rapist in self-defense is going to wind up arrested. This is especially true of the vast majority of rapes that are NOT stranger rapes. How many prosecutors are going to take your word for it that you shot your boyfriend because he was raping you?
Ampersand says:
March 17, 2013 at 6:38 pm
1) I constantly hear from gun people “don’t pull a gun unless you’re prepared to fire it.” But now I hear that there’s no need to worry about what will happen if you shoot someone, since the rapist will no doubt leave just after seeing the gun.
It’s no doubt true that many rapists would leave at the sight of a gun. But that’s not true of all rapists, surely. And asking what happens if one does have to shoot a rapist in self-defense is reasonable.
Of course she’ll be arrested, or at least significantly checked out–usually if you kill someone there is a review (as there should be!) and you don’t rely on the cops. Because, you know, shooting someone. That’s not a bad thing.
Quite a few, I suspect, though that’s not usually how it happens. It’s usually “shot your boyfriend because you were scared he was going to rape you” or “shot your boyfriend because he threatened to rape you” or, often, “shot your boyfriend because he just finished raping you.”
And w/r/t non-stranger rape, the problem is that people are often living with their assailant. They often don’t leave (even if it’s happened before.) So the issue becomes that if Jane didn’t shoot Bob before when he abused her, why did she shoot him now? Was it because she was subjectively and objectively in fear for her life at that very moment in time? Or was it because she hated him (not self defense) or was scared of what would happen the next morning (not self defense because it’s not imminent) and so on. The psychological stuff is difficult but the simple explanation is that, as we know, victims of abuse don’t always act “rationally” in the minds of 20/20-hindsight observers. It’s not their fault but hard to find great facts.
I don’t know why people would push guns heavily for anyone, but they certainly don’t seem to help at all w/r/t non stranger rape. Though it’s frankly less of a problem of self-defense and more of a problem that you’re unlikely to be loaded and ready to use a gun when in the proximity of a non-stranger.
Same think I told my son when he asked me to buy him a handgun for his birthday. Among other things, but that’s a post in itself (short version – a) think this through and b) this is something you have to buy for yourself, but I’ll help finance it if you have thought it through).
Naughty, naughty, Amp, putting words that I didn’t say in my mouth like that. I said no such thing.
Well, Amp, we have the same thing here that we have in the original post. You relate a number of theoretical questions. But we have 50 states with various laws on the subject and 300,000,000 guns in the country. So I have a hard time seeing much worth in anti-gun advocates’ theoretical discussions of the general principles of law and opinions of how they might apply. What would be a lot more interesting would be actual numbers of what has really happened in such incidents at the hands of law enforcement and the judiciary.
I did a smidge of Googling. Trigger warning, which I should have put on my first response too, sorry.
One, there are few women shooting rapists. Total gun homicides by women, for any reason, is less than 2,000 per year, out of around 11,000 gun homicides total. About half of those end in a conviction. The reasons listed or defenses attempted weren’t compiled. Gun homicides overall are on a downward trend; gun homicides by women have declined faster than the trend. This doesn’t give us any information about relative likelihood of sucess at trial, but…
Data is hard to come by, about rape, defensive reactions to rape and their success, and about just about everything we’re talking about. A conservative estimate is that there are 90,000 completed rapes reported in the United States each year. About 6% of those attacks involve the use of a gun by the rapist. About 25% of reported cases go to trial, and about half of those end in a conviction.
Assuming that every non-conviction in a rape trial is due to the woman simply being disbelieved (as opposed to problematic evidence, hard-to-untangle fact claims, etc.) and that every prosecution is M rapist vs. F victim, there are 22,500 prosecutions and perhaps 11,000 disbelieved women, at most. So a female rape victim overall might have a chance of reaching the stage of being disbelieved of about 1 in 8.
On the flip side, if every single gun homicide by women was a rape response, and half of those homicides did result in conviction (probably because the jury or judge decided the woman wasn’t truthful), then the chance of a rape victim who uses a gun being disbelieved is 1 in 2.
Lots of wriggle room in those numbers,but there is a roughly apparent trend, too.
RONF: You quoted amp as saying this:
I don’t know why people would push guns heavily for anyone, but they certainly don’t seem to help at all w/r/t non stranger rape.
But that was me, not Amp.
I’m not an anti-gun activist.
It’s just that there are obvious problems w/r/t non-stranger rape. The biggest one is that folks don’t usually carry a gun on your hip when in their own home. If it’s in another room it has zero deterrent effect. And a gun that’s generally accessible possibly has a reverse effect (your rapist can grab it just like you can.) Etc. Even without the inherent problems of non-stranger shootings then it seems like a negative; add those problems and it’s even worse.
nm@4 – Thank you for sharing that. It always comes to my mind during discussions like this about freezing/startlement and I think anyone who carries a gun should be aware that their first reaction is going to be to assess the situation, not to start shooting. You cannot carry a gun in your hand. It must be strapped to you and secured. You will have a period where you are not able to react because your brain is processing and sending signals.
This is important because the only time a gun is useful is either passively in preventing the initial attack, or if it is in your hand aimed at the person. Otherwise, the gun is a bigger danger to you than anyone else because it becomes something you can be attacked with.
FTR, I don’t advocate gun ownership to people out of fear. If you want to be a responsible gun owner, great. But telling women they have to take on the moral and spiritual implications of being willing to shoot someone to not be raped is a whole new form of predation on women I’m not willing to support.
Whoops! Sorry about that, Amp!
GIW – “It’s just that there are obvious problems w/r/t non-stranger rape. The biggest one is that folks don’t usually carry a gun on your hip when in their own home. If it’s in another room it has zero deterrent effect. And a gun that’s generally accessible possibly has a reverse effect (your rapist can grab it just like you can.)”
If the non-stranger is already in your house on some pretext and all of a sudden grabs the victim, you’re probably right. If the non-stranger has been watching your house and then forced a door or window my guess is that you’ll get to that gun a lot faster than someone breaking in will. And non-stranger rapes need not occur in the home – they could have been stalking their victim and may attempt the assaults in a parking lot or outside a bar or numerous other places, in which case concealed carry could be useful – especially if you have reason to anticipate the assault and are staying aware of your surroundings.
Is it a perfect solution? No. Does it work for some people? Apparently. Is it legal? Also apparently – and that’s the point of the posting. The posting holds that it’s unlikely to be legal through an analysis of theoretical points of law. But examination of the actual laws in at least a few states shows that the author’s analysis is incorrect.
Telling women that they should not have to use deadly force in order to not be raped works for me. Women should not have to worry about being raped. But the author holds that it is not legal to use deadly force in order to prevent from being raped. Commenters here have shown that’s not true in some States – and I suspect it’s not true in the majority, if not all.
Telling women that reality is that they may one day face the choice of either using deadly force or being raped is not predation. It’s an acknowledgement of fact, sad as it is. And what we are finding is that the American judiciary is coming around to the concept that the 2nd Amendment prevents the state from taking that choice away from them by disarming them.
20 years ago I was definitely in the glib “stop rape by arming women, its just that easy” camp. Well, years add experience and information and insight, and I agree with most here that a) for defending against a lot of rape, a gun would be useless or worse and b) it most certainly is NOT the job of women to fix the rape problem by becoming gunfighters. The moral locus for such attacks is on the attacker and nowhere else and there it must be placed and there it must remain. For far too long people (me included) have sought every possible way to move the moral agency onto victims instead of perpetrators.
That said, I think there’s a bit of a pushback in liberal society against the idea that a woman might CHOOSE to seize some agency and initiative even though that isn’t her job, and arm herself. (I don’t mean ‘not her job’ in the sense that she ought not to do it, just in the sense that isn’t a legitimate expectation to have of women in the mass. It’s not my job to heroically homeschool my special needs kid, but I might choose to do it anyway.)
Here in Colorado we had a lot of legislative hearings about guns and gun control in the wake of Sandy Hook. A woman who had been raped and afterwards started carrying was harangued by a Democratic state legislator who told her that a gun couldn’t possibly help her and she should, in essence, go home and behave.
This post, frankly, seems intended in that same direction, if not with the same hostility. It’s illegal to defend yourself. The law is on the other guy’s side. You cannot possibly be an agent in your own life; others have all the power and if you try to reclaim it you’ll be punished. It would be harsh medicine if the underlying legal case was sound, but having heard from people in other states and having the outright ‘whadarya, nuts or somtin?’ from Alas general counsel-at-large G&W, it seems that the underlying legal case is flatly wrong.
Perhaps the original poster just wasn’t expecting a lot of feedback or pushback (or maybe they just have a job) but I think there ought to be some resounding defense of the true legal principles espoused above, or an explanation offered by the OP about why they think what they think in apparent contradiction to the current state of play on these issues.
@RonF:
I do agree that the OP had a very different message, and that it isn’t and shouldn’t be illegal to defend yourself from a rapist. This is where you and I differ:
Actually, that’s an acknowledgement of the fantasy that most rapes will be stranger rapes, rather than your boyfriend/husband/friend/guy at a party.
How? I don’t see the connection at all.
Unless you’re asleep, or in another room, or any of a number of things. Or, if your gun is safely stored because you have children in the house, you need to go get the key to the gun safe, then go back to the room with the safe, open it, load the gun, and by this point, if the guy who broke in also had a gun, you’ve really got no chance. And you also need the time to assess whether this is actually a dangerous situation or someone relatively harmless sneaking in. (And if you have teenage children, I can easily think of at least ten scenarios where someone would be breaking into your house with no intent to harm you.)
Yes, there are scenarios where the non-stranger would have an advantage over you such that you would not have an opportunity to use your gun. But there are also scenarios where the non-stranger would NOT have such an advantage, and you would have an opportunity to use your gun. You may not have children in your house and feel perfectly comfortable having a loaded gun readily accessible. You may think that a gun safe is not necessary, that a trigger lock that can be quickly removed is sufficient. The guy who breaks in may NOT have a gun. And there are plenty of stranger rapes that go on as well.
People have to weigh what they think their risks are and make their own decisions. Without interference from the State, whose job it is to preserve our liberties, not remove them.
Robert, your statistics don’t account for the large number of rapes that are unreported. There’s not a real good way to tell if someone doesn’t report because they don’t expect to be believed (though from what I’ve seen from survivors’ comments and posts on various blogs, I’m pretty sure that’s part of it). So it doesn’t quite work as an assumption.
Also, to be clear, I’m not anti-gun. I absolutely think that if someone wants a gun for self-defense, they should be able to have one (assuming they haven’t committed a crime that makes them ineligible for gun ownership). I think gun ownership is a huge responsibility, though, and that it’s very glib and stupid to say “Just get a gun and nobody will rape you.” (I don’t think Ron or Robert is making that assertion, but a lot of conservative gun-fans have.)
You are absolutely right, Kelly. On the other hand, there are a lot of defensive gun uses that don’t get reported either. It’s hard to make a definitive case.
For me it is a little bit akin to hearing that Justice Stevens, in the gay marriage cases, has been waffling because the social science isn’t solidly-time-tested enough, or something. That misses the point; you might use the social science to try and persuade someone that their opinion is wrong, but if a thing is a right then it is a right no matter what the survey says. If guns are hugely effective, a little bit effective, or hugely counterproductive for women to have as a rape countermeasure, then by all means the women ought to get that information…but it’s immaterial to whether they should be able to have a gun if they want one. Of course they should. Gun ownership is a right.
I appreciate your acknowledgement that Robert and I are not making that assertion. Too often people will use such a straw man argument.
Robert cuts to the heart of the matter. The right to own a gun and to carry it (“keep and bear arms”) is, in fact, a right and not a privilege. And, just as in the case of the other civil rights in the Bill of Rights, while the right can be restricted under certain limited circumstances, the government has no proper power to require you to demonstrate a need to exercise a right in order for you to be able to legally to do so.
Chicago’s current law for owning a hand gun requires you to take a course in the safe handling of a gun, which includes work on a gun range. Chicago also refuses to issue a building or business permit for anyone to build and operate a gun range (except for a very few that are open only to law enforcement and professional security personnel). The claim is that they are unsafe – as if a handgun bullet is going to go through a brick wall somehow. The City says that this is Constitutional because you can go to a suburb and use one of their gun ranges. Imagine if you had to take a proficiency exam in English and demonstrate a knowledge of libel law before you were allowed to post on a blog. Imagine if you were told that building churches is banned in Chicago but that this is not a restriction on freedom of religion because you can always drive to a church in the suburbs.
Ownership and carrying a gun is a civil right. The government can put some restrictions on that, but it cannot make a law abiding citizen prove they have a need to exercise that right. A woman may or may not choose to carry a gun to prevent rape. A gun may or may not be effective in keeping a woman from being raped. But the truth or fallacy of these statements is none of the government’s business when it comes to enabling or preventing a woman from carrying a gun as she pleases.
All true. Though I have never heard any gun-control proponent arguing that you should have to prove you need a gun before you get to own one. Arguments about which types of guns it’s actually a civil right to own, sure. Arguments in favor of universal background checks, all the time.
I’ll also agree that that is really unreasonable of Chicago. I personally don’t think anyone should own a gun without knowing how to use it safely either, but in that case, it really does look like an obstacle for the sake of an obstacle, rather than a legitimate safety concern.
But none of that means that it’s appropriate to try to claim that anyone proposing any form of gun control must want women to be raped. (Again, not the argument you guys are proposing.) Nor does it mean that everybody carrying a gun at all times will actually lead to a safer society, rather than a Wild West-style clusterfuck.
It also doesn’t mean it’s responsible to recommend to women that they *should* carry guns to prevent rape without having verified that that is actually useful advice, rather than advice that’s likely to get them killed or convicted of murder. (It’s hard to say either way since it’s so situationally dependent, but I think the burden of demonstrating that it’s a good idea falls on the person dispensing the advice.)
As a side note, I also think it’s funny that the same people who are so concerned for women’s safety when it’s a good talking point for them cease to give a damn about the safety of women with mental illnesses. I’ll spare you the profanity-laden screed about the head of the NRA wanting a mental illness database and how messed up that is, but I will note that it infuriates me that the same people who say guns are both a civil right and a safety necessity would be totally fine with taking mine away if it means they get to keep theirs. (I have anxiety disorder, so it’s not like owning a gun makes it likely that I will kill myself or someone else. I’ll absolutely agree that there are mental health diagnoses where someone should not own a gun, but I think the bar for that should be similar to the bar for involuntary commitment–you have to actually be a danger to yourself or others.) That leads me to believe that no damns are actually given about women’s safety by the majority of people making that argument, as long as they get to own as many guns as they want, of whatever type they want, without ever having to pass a background check or demonstrate competency to use those weapons.
Oh, and Happy Easter!
Maybe not (I’d have to check). But there are plenty of jurisdictions where you have to demonstrate a need before you can get a permit to carry one – note that the civil right the 2nd Amendment requires the government to defend is to “keep and bear arms”.
And happy Easter to you! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
The State of Illinois has been told by the 7th Federal Court of Appeals that it’s concealed carry permit law (short version – “You can’t have one.”) is unconstitutional, and it has up to sometime in June to come up with one that IS Constitutional. The response has been a) the Feds have no standing to tell the States this, and b) let’s come up with the most restrictive law possible. It’s the strategy of Cook County and the City of Chicago to keep passing unconstitutional laws and wage a war of attrition against people who are insisting on their civil rights – using their own tax money to do it!
There’s a distinction drawn with concealed carry permits wherein they can be classified as “shall-issue” or “may-issue”. “Shall issue” means that the Sheriff of the local County (or other law-enforcement official, but the Sheriff’s office is the usual one) must issue you a concealed-carry permit unless you fail one or more of specific criteria set forth in law (e.g., a felony conviction on your record). “May issue” means that the Sheriff has discretion as to whether or not to issue you a permit. Some Sheriffs in such a situation (usually in the State’s more rural counties) issue a permit to any law-abiding citizen who wants one. Other Sheriffs basically give them out only if you answer a bunch of questions that satisfy them that you have some fashion of demonstrable need based on criteria that they get to make up. In some counties, based on public records those criteria include whether or not you contributed to the Sheriff’s re-election campaign …. My hope is that the NRA or some other entity will fund a court case to strike down “May issue” laws next.
It’s as if these people have never thought about what their oath of office means, which is “I do solemnly swear (affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of the State of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of (name of the office here) to the best of my ability.” They’re not looking to support the Constitution. They’re looking to subvert it.