WOMEN AND GUNS

Excerpt from John Lott:

What should a woman do when attacked by a criminal? Should she behave passively? Use pepper spray? A gun? ...It turns out that pepper spray may not do you a lot of good when it is raining or snowing. A woman is just as likely to disable herself as the attacker when it's windy or when using the spray indoors. Knives and baseball bats are particularly problematic, because women have to get very close to their attackers to use them, and male criminals--that is, most criminals--tend to be much stronger physically than their female victims. ...women who used a gun to resist an attack were 2.5 times more likely to escape uninjured than those who behaved passively.

Comment from here:

Growing up in Alaska, we took the low crime rate for granted. Nobody locked their doors. We counted it as one of the benefits of living in a small isolated community. Then the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline began and Fairbanks doubled its population in a year. One extremely cold night, three white males in Alyeska parkas decided to have some "fun" at the expense of local residents. First, they entered an unlocked and occupied cabin, beat up the owner (a Native man who, because of a previous felony, was not allowed to own a gun), raped his daughter and set fire to his cabin. Seeing as the police and fire departments were now busy, they then went down the street where my mother (all 92-pounds of her) met them at the backdoor with her loaded .357. They decided raping two women alone might be a bit problematic, so they went down the block a bit farther and tried the Mitchell cabin. Mrs. Mitchell (a fiery Irish immigrant with two teenage daughters and a husband on the Slope) discharged her shotgun through the woodstove vent to make the point that they didn't want to be kicking on her door any longer. Whoever they were, they went off into the Alaskan ice fog never to be seen again. The next day, on the front page of the paper, the police chief reminded local residents to install locks on their doors and to make sure they were prepared for "home protection." He didn't say the word "gun", but everyone who read the article knew what he meant. It was clear that the gun owners (small women with children both compared to a physically-strong ex-felon)had been the ones who weren't victimized. Guns make us equal and I have to wonder why anti-gun folks have such an objection to that.