That’s right Ask a woman. Or a slave. The rights of omen and slaves didn't figure at the time the Constitution was born. The Second Amendment was ratified in 1791.Women and slaves were alive, of course, but owned. Owners made all the decisions. Women and slaves could not own property, vote, or make financial decisions. Neither could serve in the military or move without permission. Pioneer women could shoot, but like today, they shot very seldom. At the birth of America, leaders wrote about maintaining “a well-regulated militia.” All male writers, of course.
Well regulated? Face it ladies. Men didn’t do a whole lot with regulation, then or now. With all the mass murders we have seen in the past ten years only three were done by women. One hundred and ten mass killers were MEN. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/476445/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-gender/)
Why haven't women seized weapons and gone off the rails? Women and children were harmed in virtually every mass shooting. Why are men doing this?
Men are conditioned to see themselves as having the right to dominate, to fight, to prove themselves in battle and whatever they perceive as a battle. Of course some of their perceptions, like an immigrant invasion, are complete nonsense, but many are publicly touted and rewarded. It all keeps them being men.
Women are culturally conditioned to relate, to connect, to communicate, to negotiate, to care and show concern. Those intellectual and behavioral weapons, over time, have been powerful enough to run whole countries and solve problems that make life better for everybody. Powerful women may have been angry enough to kill, often for good reason, bot they don't shoot. Women don't shoot other people to further some warped sense of strength or revenge. If women see something, they say something.
The deadly impact of guns on American children is in the news every day. “Annually, nearly 2,900 children and teens (ages 0 to 19) are shot and killed, and nearly 15,600 are shot and injured—that’s an average of 51 American young people every day. And the effects of gun violence extend far beyond those struck by a bullet: An estimated three million children witness a shooting each year. Gun violence shapes the lives of the children who witness it, know someone who was shot, or live in fear of the next shooting.” (https://everytownresearch.org/impact-gun-violence-american-children-teens/) The Harvard School of Public Health has declared gun related injuries as the second leading cause of death for children and teens in the US. (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/reducing-youth-gun-violence/)
Recent polls show more than 2/3 of Americans, both men and women, want stronger gun laws and stronger background checks!No amount of mayhem, even the murder of children, seems to demand that men deal with the American gun problem. It is time for women to regulate guns. Logical, community and family oriented women should decide who gets a gun and what guns should never be available. That idea means we must focus on electing a majority of law-making women to Congress. The only men under leadership consideration must be those that demonstrate personal antipathy to continuing Tgun violence.
While we wait for new leadership there is much that individual women (and the men who support them) can do. Get the guns out of your house. Guns for protection is yet another myth perpetually perpetrated by gun-slinging-have-to-be armed-to-be-real-men men. Even after adjusting for confounding factors, individuals who were in possession of a gun were about 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession.(Charles C. Branas, et al, Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault, 99 Am. J. Pub. Health 2034 (Nov. 2009)
Living with a man with a gun makes a woman more likely to be shot. If the man you live with has a gun tell him the gun must be locked away, with the ammunition locked in a separate place. There is an American epidemic of children hurting themselves or someone else by firing a gun they found loaded and unlocked somewhere in the home. In 2018 federal statistics reported that 8 children were shot EVERY DAY by taking an unsecured firearm in the home. (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/end-family-fire-guns-shooting-brady_n_5b68b9e8e4b0b15abaa6008b)
Ok, ladies. You have marched for the families of Sandy Hook, you have cried for the families of El Paso, you have wept and you have registered voters for the children of Parkland. Your voices have made a mark. Now you can get the guns out of the lives of your families and your communities by keeping on, stepping up. Women must focus on electing a majority of law-making women to Congress. How hard can it be to figure out that the only purpose of an assault weapon is to kill people? Gun ownership should be counted, reported, regulated and require liability insurance. The silence and indecisiveness from men and the men who control guns (NRA, the US Senate?) has gone on long enough. It is time to call upon women to get the change we all want. Women can do it. Women have always had better weapons.
Ann Melby Shenkle
Doylestown, PA
August 25, 2019