Arm The Women - A Black Feminist Thoughts On Gun Ownership

There was a sadly a rape on the Loyola campus this past weekend. See NOPD: Student raped inside Loyola University parking garage .  The fact pattern here does not indicate here that a having access to a firearm would have helped this alleged victim since this is a scenario where the victim had put some degree of trust in the rapist.

 Still though rapes and other violent crimes happen to women at the Loyola campus and the campus right next to it Tulane sadly way too much.

The always never boring  Austrian Economist and Libertarian Theorist Professor at the Loyola Walter Block is never afraid to give his two cents on this.

 From Arm the Coeds in 2011 :

According to police and newspaper reports there has been a spate of robberies and sexual assaults aimed at university coeds in uptown New Orleans.  A single black man approaches girls walking in the street in pairs at night and then proceeds to rob, confine, and sexually assault them.

The reaction on the part of the police authorities is the usual blather about being “street smart,” not carrying a weapon, not resisting, and not venturing out at night.  If going unarmed was such great advice, why don't they follow it themselves? Further, why should the victims have to pay twice, once in the form of being robbed and raped, and then, again, in the form of having their liberties to walk on the public streets curtailed?   

The response from school authorities is, if anything, even worse: holding candlelight vigils, praying, having “take back the night” marches, and organizing teach-ins attempting to indoctrinate the students with the usual leftist feminist and liberal shibboleths, ad nauseam. If these things give university students any comfort, it is a false sense of security, which could prove to be their undoing.  Quite possibly the assailant joins the very parade set up against him, biting his lip to keep from laughing outright, which might well be the only harm that befalls him from these events.  Such tactics might make some people feel good, but they do nothing to address the problem.

He then proposes a five part plan which includes  requiring female students own a pistol or other means of self defense .Objectors could be grandfathered in

He recently was at it again in this column  Several fatal flaws mar the feminist movement  

Feminists oppose arming women. When confronted with the scourge of rape and molestation, feminists respond by holding "Take Back the Night" marches, whining about how horrid these attacks are. Of course they are! But why not encourage young women to avail themselves of their Second Amendment rights to bear arms? The gun is the great equalizer. Face it: unarmed women are at a disadvantage vis-a-vis rapists, who are usually bigger, stronger and heavier than they are. With a pistol in their pocketbooks (sorry, I can't help my stereotyping; I relish it) they confront their attackers on an equal basis.
There is a wealth of empirical evidence, as well as common sense, attesting women known to be well armed are safer. Pistol and rifle target shooting is an Olympic event. Why don't universities have girls' (there I go again) teams in these sports? But wait: there is one benefit to "Take Back the Night" marches, and I do want to be fair: whenever rapists contemplate these events, they keel over in laughter. They are laughing so uproariously that at least during these times they are incapable of raping anyone.

Block faces I suspect a uphill battle at Loyola in arming the Coed.Especially since the Jesuit run America Magazine just came out for REPEALING THE SECOND AMENDMENT .

This is all a sort of run up to one of the more interesting articles on the gun issue I have read all week that is written by black female feminist and her experience of getting a gun and a concealed carry permit. See

Target Market  Black women with guns: frontier feminists or insurrectionists?

 

The article has some interesting facts one of which includes that the fastest growing number of people that are getting concealed carry permits in Texas is black women.

 

However she mentions something similar as Dr Block does.

 

For women, part of the tension around this topic is that female gun owners are marginalized in a feminist culture that promotes unarmed resistance and “clean” fighting techniques. These send the message that as long as a woman does not have a lethal means of protecting herself, she is still feminine and worthy of “real” protection—either from a man, or from the police. I grew up with the notion that self-defense achieved via martial arts, pepper spray, and the biggest keys on the key ring are how women combat sexual assault. Movies, media, and college self-defense classes reinforced the emphasis on clean fighting as the feminist way. And as I got older, my reporting on public safety in Texas led me to stories about pink personal Tasers and women involved in restorative justice—but never to women (rape survivors or not) who had decided to use more assertive means to protect themselves. To be a gun-owning feminist, to prepare to protect oneself against two of the most frightening enemies of female-identified people—rape and/or domestic violence—still strikes at the heart of what could be described as a feminist identity crisis, wherein women oppress each other with our inability to make room for alternative models of self-protection.

I find that interesting. How did that viewpoint develop that the only acceptable defense is supposed "clean fighting" Is this an accident of history perhaps because when the Feminist movement was rising many of its friends were at the forefront of gun control?

In my neck of the wood husbands and dads very much supplement clean fighting with  gun skills to their wives and daughters. No on bats a eye. Anyway a very interesting article.