The Scary Reason Some Men Like Guns Better Than Women:
The first time I lived alone, my third year of college, I rented a tiny apartment from the type of university-town pseudo-slumlord you’re familiar with if you went to a big state school in a smallish city. His name was Rob, and I wasn’t scared of him — or of living on my own — until I sat down in his office to go over the lease and saw a sign hanging above his desk. It said, “10 reasons why a handgun is better than a woman.”
(8) If you admire a friend’s handgun, and tell him so, he will probably let you try it out a few times. (6) Your handgun will stay with you even if you are out of ammo. (4) Handguns function normally every day of the month.
I have been lucky enough not to know too many violent men in my life. And even though I grew up in a part of the country where hunting and gun shows are common, and gun laws are relatively lax, I didn’t know many gun enthusiasts, either. The landlord’s list rattled me. I thought of that scene in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, where the drill sergeant barks, “You will give your rifle a girl’s name, because this is the only pussy you people are going to get.”
When I read that list over my landlord’s shoulder, it was years before George Sodini mass-murdered women in a fitness center in 2009. Before Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree to teach women a lesson. Before social media helped us catalogue dozens of disparate murders every month in which women were killed by men they knew and, at one point in time, loved. The headlines have come to reflect the message of the list in a way that is chillingly consistent: These men control guns. These men wish they controlled women. These men use guns to control women. What was once perceived as the stuff of women’s-studies classes has become routine news analysis.
The rest of Ann Friedman’s article is more of the same. She says, with approbation, “Paradoxically, the NRA also actively courts female members. “Come explore, connect, celebrate and unite with the women of NRA,” beckons the NRA Women’s channel, alongside clips with names like “Armed and Fabulous” and “Love at First Shot.” (They’re “stories of empowered women like you,” per the site.) Companies offering products like pink rifles and bra holsters promise to help women “look feminine, look good, and still feel safe.”
It’s sickening to her that a woman would have such a thing, and yet she is the one who conflates why we advocate that women be armed, i.e., exactly so that no one does them harm. If men are such abusers, the real paradox Ann doesn’t address is why we would advocate that women arm themselves? But the best is yet to come. Ann has put the ball in play, but the scoring drive is capped off with this comment.
Males are born narcissists and are needier as children. They have to be taught early in childhood to care about something and someone other than themselves. If not taught young that the world doesn’t revolve around them, that extreme weakness for self-absorption edges over into either the weird or dangerous in adolescence, sometimes both and certainly an inability to successfully navigate life outside their own door in adulthood. The desire to control others because of an inability to control oneself is a pathology. To do so with violence is sociopathy and in the extreme psychopathy.
As my oldest son Josh remarked when he read that comment, “This was written by a person who has never raised children.” To his point, the notion that man is a tabula rasa doesn’t survive the first child (and I know, as I have four children and he has three, two girls and one boy). As a Christian, I have an answer as to why both girls and boys are like this. It’s called federal headship. We’re all born with a sinful nature. If you’re not a Christian, you’re on your on to explain evil. I can’t help you.
Or if she is talking about the fact that boys like machines and things that go boom, this certainly isn’t something to lament. We should be celebrating the differences in genders. Guns, like anything else, can be used for evil, or they can help bring out the best innate characteristics in men to protect and serve their familes.
In the end, on a serious note this is a sad commentary on the degree to which Ann Friedman and her commenters don’t really understand what they think they do. On a slightly more whimsical note, I suspect that the men in Ann’s life have abused her, or that she is married to or dating a confused, effete man who loathes himself and all manhood. Or both.
Either way, Ann should buy a gun and demand that the men in her life learn how to use it. It may help change how she sees men and the world around her.
