On April 18, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll that showed 51% of Americans feel that guns in the home make it safer, compared to 29% who think otherwise. More telling is that fact that 51% of white middle class women agree with the sentiment about firearms making homes safer. Additionally, a Nexis search detailed that ABC News has yet to report this poll, and, with the exception of the Fix blog online, the Post's print edition avoided the “guns make a home safer” findings.
So, will there a correction to Jill Filipovic, Amanda Marcotte, and Co. for trying to smear the NRA as the “domestic abuse lobby? The article by New York Times’ Michael Luo that set off this meretricious commentary on guns looks like to have been a smear too far. After all, it wasn’t “intense pressure” the gun lobby that killed Obama’s anti-gun agenda. It was white middle-class women, who liked their Second Amendment rights to be left untouched by big government.
Concerning the feminist left, last month Jill Filipovic, a liberal feminist, wrote for Al-Jazeera that:
The latest group to have their gun ownership rights championed by the NRA? Domestic abusers.
Forty percent of women who are murdered in the US are killed by intimate partners. Guns are the cause of more than two-thirds of those domestic violence homicides, killing more victims than all other weapons combined. When an abuser has access to firearms, his victim is eight times more likely to be killed by him. The simple presence of a gun in the home makes any woman 2.7 times more likely to be murdered. And an abuse victim having access to a gun does not make her any less to be killed by her partner.
Additionally, Amanda Marcotte wrote on March 19 that:
[T]his article from [Michael Luo of] the New York Times about the NRA’s dogged protection of the gun “rights” of wife beaters is absolutely nauseating. Over and over again, anti-domestic violence activists and legislators try to make it harder for men who have a hankering to kill their wives from arming themselves to do so, and over and over again, the NRA throws a fit and makes sure the sacred right of a man to control a woman through violence is protected. Considering how many wife beaters kill themselves after shooting their wives, it doesn’t even seem like a good use of NRA resources, as those men are dead now and can no longer continue to buy guns and line the NRA’s pockets. But we are talking about the same organization that’s decided to get into the fight over whether or not it’s rape if it’s not a stranger in the bushes, so perhaps being hateful to women is its own reward.
[…]
This is what happens when the gun industry exerts so much control over legislation. As a society, we should all agree that keeping women safe from violence is more important than keeping the profits of gun manufacturers high, and yet here we are.
Ms. Filipovic and Ms. Marcotte seemed to have missed the New York Times piece that ironically reported how more women are embracing gun ownership. In fact, ABC News reported that they’re the fastest growing demographic amongst firearm owners. Evidently, threats of assault from strangers has women seeking a means to defend themselves – and that’s a good thing. The fact that 51% of white middle class women support the notion that guns makes homes safer is a direct contradiction to the helpless victim narrative Filipovic and Marcotte articulated to push for more gun regulations.
What’s more, even Luo himself admitted that not all the murders committed by domestic abusers can be “laid at the feet of the NRA,” but took the classic liberal approach that stricter gun laws would’ve saved lives.
Yet, as Instapundit noted yesterday “from reader Stephen Cobbs: ‘even more crucial than the topline 51% support for guns is that the support from white women is 51%. As an influential legal mind has pointed out, nothing that middle-class white women do can ever be illegal.” With more women joining the ranks of firearm owners, will the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the feminist left embrace the notion that women are smart, independent, and like their guns for defensive purposes? A huge wedge issue has been stripped from the liberal media concerning the gun debate. Let’s see how they react.
