I was getting my hair done yesterday at a local salon and was treated to a slew of women’s magazines. “Crap,” I thought, “I don’t have my own book and I’m bored.” Self magazine often focuses on fitness so I picked it up. Big mistake. It was the November issue of 2012 that probably came out in October prior to the election. The first thing I learned as I flipped through the pages was that if I voted for Romney, my health and very life was in jeopardy. No partisan hackery (is that a word?) there.
The next article, written by Jenny Deam was entitled, “Would you buy a gun?” The article is soft propaganda aimed at discouraging women from buying guns by having “experts” such as doctors talk about how women are not safe with a gun around:
Doctors, however, insist guns are life-threatening, not life-protecting. Last year, an analysis of decades of studies published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine reiterated the message: Having a gun generally makes women and their families less safe. Living in a home with a gun doubles your risk both of being murdered and of committing suicide. Living in one of the states with the highest rates of household gun ownership makes you and your kids seven times more likely to die in a gun accident.
Gun violence is one of the biggest health risks that young women and their families face today, says David Hemenway, Ph.D., director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of the 2011 research analysis. “This is not a constitutional issue. This is not about politics. The danger that guns pose to women is a public health issue,” he says. ”
Wintemute urges potential gun buyers spooked by recent events to take the long view: “That gun you buy is going to be part of your life. The question is not, Can you stop the next Aurora? It is, What will the impact of this gun be on the rest of my life? In most cases, my risk for homicide will increase. My risk for suicide will increase. Is that what I want?”
The article gives examples of women who accidentally (?) shoot husbands or have a mishap with a gun. The article points out that few women protect themselves with a gun. Really?
Why the soft propaganda?
“Why the soft propaganda? You’ve got to be kidding. I enjoyed your article, but your question is nutz! Even so, I’ll answer it for you: It’s because they want our guns, all of them. It’s because they want to chip away at our freedoms. It’s because they want to destroy American values. It’s because they want total control. The exploitation of women on this issue is just another way through their door and into the abyss.
My question was meant to be facetious. Sorry if it didn’t come across that way!
No, it came across fine. My 89 year old mother who has carried since her 20s would find it amusing* that women are unsafe with guns. Especially as she was a better shot than her husband, sons or grandsons for most of her life.
* maybe sickening
Apropos of nothing, I’m always happy when I see one of the principals on this site respond in the comments. It gives the feeling of a dialogue not a series of unconnected monologues.
And truly, if you don’t believe what is written above you better pray they don’t succeed while your back is turned.
The purpose of TSA is to teach Americans the difference between free citizens of a Republic and subjects of an Empire.
And under Feinstein’s bill, those twits get to own scary “assault weapons” (which are restricted even more than full-auto) while we don’t.
That really summed it up succinctly, Pam… Well done
“It’s because they hate the people that have guns… Hate the people.” Aaron Sorkin
I know what line you are referring to, it’s from the West Wing (written by Sorkin), but you’re taking that line out of context…
Few women actually put out a kitchen fire with a fire extinguisher but I am certainly for everyone, (women & men) having an extinguisher in their kitchen.
My risk for suicide will increase. Is that what I want?”
This “fact” always made me wonder. Any logical person knows causality does not equal causation, but here we see it again: gun = greater chance you will become suicidal. That is entirely not true. The two values are independent! Having a gun only means you will likely be more successful in suicide, but if you are truly suicidal (and not just attention seeking) you will find a way to kill yourself.
Exactly. Japan is a great example of that fact. Few guns, high suicide rate. There, they jump off cliffs or in front of trains.
There is also a forest on the slopes of Mt. Fuji where many Japanese go to commit suicide, though not with guns.
I had a severely mentally ill cousin. His manic depression (still not sure if he was properly diagnosed) was basically out of control. He either had to take drugs that turned him into a zombi- or have manic episodes so bad he’d run naked in the streets.
He used to own guns but gave them up when his illness presented himself. A few years later we discovered he had more guns- black powder- which are easier to purchase for the mentally ill. We took those away as well.
A few weeks later he hung himself. Maybe taking his guns away gave him a few more months/weeks to get healthy- but he was so miserable he really wanted to die.
While your cousin is an extreme case of someone with mental problems that lead to suicide, it’s also representative of something that has always bothered me about including suicides in “gun deaths”: if we’re concerned about suicide, we should be trying to help the depressed, and keep 24-hour watch, and keep everything that could possibly be used to commit suicide–not just guns–for those who are depressed.
Even then, I don’t know if there was much that could have been done for your cousin. There’s only so much you can do; even caretakers have to sleep; even children find a way to sneak off and get killed (by accident, not by suicide), sometimes at the oddest hours of the day. We do the best we can, and even then, people are going to die.
And do you know what? In the end, “Rope Death” is just as tragic to the family and friends of the victim, as “Gun Death” is. Death is always tragic!
My cousin took that route. The guy that found him stayed drunk for a week.
If it wasn’t that I discourage suicide as a way to get away from your problems I would start a website that would encourage suicides that at least get rid of the body afterwards, not leave it for some poor man (or woman) to find.
Shotguns are the worst.
My wife was on the psych ward, under 24 hour suicide watch for a while. I sat there while visiting, and just counted the ways I could’ve demised myself with things that were readily available and which would have drawn no particular attention. Of course, I’m an engineer, and she was not, but it could have been accomplished easily. A gun is just one tool among many that is well suited for that job, but if you want to do the job, you won’t be restrained by the lack of that one particular tool. This serves merely as a distraction from the fact that this tool is particularly well suited for other tasks.
Odd how a women’s magazine would be so concerned about gun suicides when women who attempt suicide usually choose less violent means such as drug overdose or running the car in a closed garage. I’ve always heard that more women attempt suicide, but men are more successful because of the means they choose.
I worked with a fellow many years ago that got caught with his hand in the till.
There were fears that he might have been suicidal, so they took away all his guns.
He used a knife.
When Canada passed its restrictive gun law some years ago the gun suicide rate went down almost immediately. The suicide rate remained unchanged. The suicide by jumping off a bridge rate went up a lot. I don’t see that as any improvement but apparently some people think it is.
Indeed.
Violence is not caused by inanimate tools, but by sin.
Liberals, however, have convinced themselves that right is wrong, and wrong is right. For them, the only “sin” is to attempt to adhere to any real standards at all.
I always want to ask people that think fewer gun suicides are the ideal (not fewer suicides, period), is somebody less dead because they killed themselves by jumping off a bridge rather than shooting themselves?
Liberal hypocrisy amazes. On the one hand, libs cite suicide as a cause to restrict or ban guns. On the other hand, they also advocate laws to allow assisted suicide for those who are “suffering”—even if the suffering is caused by, say, depression, as opposed to terminal cancer.
So suicide by the despondent who use a gun to kill themselves is bad, bad, a reason to ban firearms; but suicide by doctor or other means under other circumstances is a right and must be allowed, even encouraged. This contradiction must make sense on some other planet. It doesn’t here on Earth.
Bianchi, I’ve investigated dozens of suicides involving women and have not had a single one of them occur by gunfire. Women generally do not like to make a mess of themselves when they take their own lives, so they most often do it with pills, strangulation, or wrist slashing. I question this dudes statistics and his study.
Bianchi, I’ve investigated dozens of suicides involving women and not a single one of them was by gunshot. Women do not generally like to make a mess of themselves when taking their own lives. They will generally slash their wrists, take pills, or hang themselves. They do not violate their chests, or their faces. This dude’s study sounds very flawed and I wouldn’t put any stock in it whatever, just considering how wrong he is about female suicides.
Women’s magazines have long been vapid left/liberal propaganda for the most part of ‘em… divide and conquer, make socially destructive things “sex-positive” and celebratedly “female” and they’ll fight for socialism at the expense of men and families! (Convince ‘em that Sex and the City is real life and their due, and they’ll happily trample everything else for that “empowerment”… of course, this leads to a lot of men, women and children ending up hurt, alone and unable to trust or get along with anyone. Thanks, liberals!)
P.S. Just look at Cosmo and Complete Woman: sex-is-everying break-up magazines. Now it’s time to put guns in there… guns are un-female and oppressive, get rid of the icky things!
I’ve wasted a foolish amount of time unsuccessfully trying to find a quote from No Ordinary Times, a book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. It describes “women’s’ magazine” articles published at the end of WWII regarding how to manage women’s times.
Women faced mass layoffs at the end of WWII when the men returned; and although many wanted to keep their jobs they were let go.
The magazines of the time did not provide instructions on how to remain employed, but rather elaborate takes all day to prepare recipes. Do this and not that.
The word tool comes to mind.
Not just women’s magazines; nearly all of the magazines with some history have been co-opted in this manner. Take GQ for example (please!).
Esquire, etc. Rolling Stone, of course, is just blatant about it.
Real-life women and girls who attempt to emulate the “Sex and the City” lifestyle end up like THIS.
And THIS is the type of “man” who takes advantage of their ignorance.
In completely unrelated news – 1 in 4 women in Sweden will be raped.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/1-in-4-swedish-women-will-be-raped-as-sexual-assaults-increase-500/
ska du bli våldtagen.
(according to Google Translate lol)
1 in 4 Swedish women will be raped…by a Muslim.
They always forget to tell you that.
Oh, and then the fembots will blame Swedish men because liberals can’t point the finger of guilt at minorities. Minorities never do anything bad.
Did you know women are a minority? 52% of the planet’s population is female, but women are smaller than men so they are a minority.
/vodka
“1 in 4 Swedish women will be raped… by a Muslim.
They always forget to tell you that.”
Not poltically-correct… but it’s good to use to bash men, otherwise. (Selective editing at its finest.)
Eliminate the welfare state and arm the Swedes (especially the women) and the Muslims would go home in a hurry.
That’s a lie. It’s not a very creative lie. It’s an old, shop-worn lie. It’s been retold and re-re-re-re-retold for years. It’s so-called “supported” by “studies” that were discredited a long time ago. It flies squarely in the face of a large number of legitimate studies. It’s one of several lies Congress specifically prohibited the Center for Disease Control from squandering additional “research” tax dollars on, which the Democratic [sic] party is currently trying to restore. It’s a classic example of fear-mongering for the sake of advancing a statist political agenda. Ultimately, it’s a drab old lie that skilled professional propagandists ought to have retired long ago and replaced with a more credible-seeming lie.
I’ve wondered once or twice whether leftist extremists put too much faith in the power of oft-told lies, or are simply too lazy to concoct new lies from time to time.
Well, it seems unlikely that Self Magazine will be out front advocating for women in the infantry. Its advocacy provides powerful reasons why women should not be armed, much less serve in combat.
Here’s a big box of verbal ammo. Pass it along to every woman you know:
Mike Huckabee interviews firearms expert Larry Correia
Larry Correia refutes the gun controllers, once and for all
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
If the vast right wing conspiracy were smart, Dr. Helen, they’d buy us a magazine to counter this non-stop soft propaganda aimed at women.
It impacts energy policy,abortion views, education, the food and diet views, and now guns–in fact, every key issue women voters can impact and the chances of every candidate for national office,
I once researched this, thinking it might make a decent article but the end is they write this stuff because they can dramatize the news and emotive sells.
Do you think the Left wouldn’t be able to handle such a thing? They already have a process for dealing with inconveniently articulate dissenters and independent voices in general; they “cocoon” (or to be more technically accurate with my metaphors, they “abcess”) them, isolating them by means of a steady rain of half-truths etc. designed to slowly attach a stigma or “rep” to the target as “biased”, “right wing” etc. that is designed to steer low-information people away from them as untrustworthy.
They do it with “Faux” News, they’d do it with any such magazine. Moreover, there just doesn’t seem to be the kind of marketing mindpower on the Right to match those on the Left who understand how to subtly steer the flow of ideas in a culture. Theirs remain the best frog-boilers around.
We can beat them, but not by playing their game dollar for dollar. We have to be more guerilla than that.
“Abcess”-I love this whole comment, it is perfect!
When I really want to scare myself I just think how they have been at it for about 100 years already. What parts of my brain are forever ruined from soaking in such a thing since birth? Sometimes I catch myself auto-responding to a subject how they want and marvel at their hideous genius.
I’m totally cool with a woman owning a gun and wish more would. But then again, I’m a knuckle-dragging Conservative.
The Left claims that conservatives are afraid of strong, independent women. Yet, how can that be reconciled with the fact that we’re in favor of women (and men) being able to arm themselves? For the vast majority of women, their only hope of defending themselves against a man is to have a weapon that negates the man’s strength advantage. The best weapon for that is a gun. The truth of the matter is that the Left prefers women to be weak and helpless against attack while conservatives want to empower women to be able to defend themselves. So, who exactly is waging this so-called “war on women?”
Empirically: which women are more likely to own firearms, liberals or conservatives?
Now, who was it that was afraid of strong, independent women again?
When my wife and I were married almost 30 years ago, she told me in no uncertain terms what she’d do to me if I had an affair. It went way beyond the yet to be coined term, “full Bobbitt” and I had no doubt she’d do it. For our first Christmas together, I gave her a set of kitchen knives. While we needed the knives, it was also a way for me to show that I’d never cheat on her. I was giving her the very thing she’d use against me if I did cheat.
When our youngest son got married, we told his bride the “story of the knives” and gave her a set of kitchen knives. “Jim, you’ve been warned. Heidi, you’ve been armed.” We were telling our daughter-in-law that we wouldn’t automatically take our son’s side should he do her wrong.
Giving a woman a gun (along with the proper instruction) is giving her a tool for her own defense. “God made all men but Colonel Colt made them equal.” The same applies to women. What other chance would she have against a grown man with ill intent? To deny her a gun is to keep her weak and vulnerable to the bad elements of society. I’d rather my wife be strong.
Larry, with all due respect that’s a creepy story, even if meant as a joke. And to imply that you gave your daughter-in-law knives to castrate your son should he misbehave is even creepier.
That is Hannibal Lecter ghastly. If that is how the men in your family relate to the women, you don’t appear to have much to lose.
Lighten up. It’s a long running family joke. The point of the joke is that the wife is enpowered. In 30 years of marriage, I’ve never been tempted to cheat on her. Not because of the knives but because I gave her my word that I would forsake all others. We needed the knives anyway.
I have never understood how some men think they can get away with abusing their wives. You have to sleep sometime and when you do, you’re vulnerable. My wife told me that when she was growing up, wife beating was very uncommon in her country. It was understood that if a man beat his wife, all of her male relatives (and they tended to have large extended families) would go beat the crap out of the husband. In their culture, even the husband’s family seldom objected because they figured if the beat his wife, he had it coming. Personally, I find that very civilized.
Larry, I thought your story was hilarious and that sometimes a lesson can be learned with a bit of humor meant to impress someone indelibly. Hope it has worked as well for your son as it did for you.
My wife is a gun owner. We went out target practicing day before yesterday and I’m confident that anyone wishing to take her on will experience a lot of pain if they try. I feel strongly, that any woman who wishes to do so, should be armed (and trained) with whatever they wish; gun, knife, pepper spray, whatever they feel comfortable with. Point is, we are living in dangerous times and they seem to be getting worse by the month. Women unite….get armed and ready to defend yourself if necessary.
I’ve wondered once or twice whether leftist extremists put too much faith in the power of oft-told lies, or are simply too lazy to concoct new lies from time to time.
We would do well to not underestimate the left’s abilities regarding the effectiveness of their propaganda. They seem to be doing very well so far.
Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth…especially when the population as a whole is more interested in Iron Chef/Football/Baseball etc…
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” –Joseph Goebbels
Of course, notice whom the left/liberal crowd is obeying and envying.
Also,working in favor of the Big Lie is the fact that hardly any of us will EVER tell a big lie, AND we assume that NOBODY ELSE will. So when we hear a big lie,the reaction tends to be “WHAT??!!! That CAN’T be true!!! But,then, why would anyone tell such a big LIE? It may BE true.” Checking to find out if it IS a lie would take some time and effort that most people would be unwilling to expend, so we accept the lie as truth “because I don’t KNOW whether or not it’s true, and he knows more about it than I do,anyway”, and if the liar is a powerful or popular person, that can have a chilling effect on attempts to prove that he is lying,he might prove troublesome.
SIGH.
For a moment I thought that Wintermute was saying things. An AI on the loose? Perish forbid!
Dr. Helen,
I always enjoy your input re: the ongoing gun rights debate. Your piece threw out the nmae “Wintemute” without setting up his credentials…I assume you’re referring to the infamous antigun Garen Wintemute?
You could easily have included, in the next paragraph, Arthur Kellerman and his fallacious and thoroughly discredited “43 times more likely to be harmed with a gun in your own home” argument. Wait, that’s such ancient history…kind of like the shameful Mr. Bellesiles who has been missing for years now…you must certainly remember him? The hoplophobes have such a rogues gallery…
Oh, now THERE’S a blast from the past! I had forgotten Mr. “Carefully examined non-existent inheritance records from the San Francisco Courthouse that was destroyed in the 1906 Quake”!
Hmmm. He’s rather the exception, isn’t he? He was so thoroughly exposed that he’s dropped out of sight and his “work” isn’t trotted out as fact anymore.
Odd.
I’ve had problems with this magazine before. It is an ill-named magazine as they are not self-reliant, but turn to the government for everything. Unfortunately this seems to be the norm for all women’s magazines.
Howdy Lola
Perhaps one reason so many women’s magazines seem fond of government interventions and aid is that so many of the magazines and readers have marginalized the married-couple family.
When the family lacks a responsible breadwinner and protector, of course it’s more likely to turn to other agencies for help. Turning to the government for “entitlements” may be less embarrassing for some than turning to private charities for temporary aid. And I think very few private charities will sign someone up for life.
The breadwinner and protector role can be shared, often is shared, when there’s a pair of adults. It’s even more likely to be shared, I think, if the couple are married and the parents of the children in the household. But when the family never formed, or when it falls apart, the responsible role is a heavy burden for one — and sometimes that one doesn’t take it on anyway.
And the sad part is that,when they become reliant on government handouts, they call themselves “independent mothers”, just because they are not asking their SO, family or friends to help out. But they’re DEPENDENT…on MILLIONS of people who FUND the federal government,likely INCLUDING their friends and some,if not all,family members,along with millions of STRANGERS. Too bad we can’t declare them “dependents” on our tax returns.
I agree. Years ago I nicknamed it “Selfish”.
“Why the soft propaganda?”
Because their hard-propaganda writer was on vacation.
More to the point, because their only goal is totalism
Clearly the women writing for Self ARE that stupid.
“Acquiring a firearm will make you more likely to be murdered” is one of the clearest examples of a causation fallacy that I can imagine.
Hm. This article just seems offended at the premise and makes no attempt to debunk any of the facts put forward. I’m by no means anti-gun (I go shooting regularly on dates with my husband, we own a rifle for both target practice and self defense, and that rifle is stored securely in my home with three small children. So securely, in fact, I do doubt its efficacy in an actual emergency, but that’s another story…), but I was a little alarmed by these statistics. I’ve wondered myself what the statistical likelihood is of actually using our gun to protect ourselves, mainly because of the financial investment of gun ownership and the expenses that come with recreational shooting (is it worth it? more worth it than a more sophisticated security system? or a newer car with better safety features, etc.). Having a doubled likelihood of being killed by the gun you own seems a reasonable thing to consider if you’re thinking about gun ownership. If any of these facts are inaccurate or distorted, I’d like to know.
The first person to come to mind is John Lott, go read his website, e-mail him with your concerns. There are others but he is a good place to start. Go to the NRA website as well, they try to stay on top of these biased studies,and keep a list news articles of people using guns in self defense.
As to having assess to locked up guns in an emergency there are quick open gun safes that are secure against little kids getting at them. This is demonstrated in that “beautiful young woman defends self from break-in by would be rapest” video Instapundit referenced recently.
My first, purely speculative, reaction about the study’s conclusions is that they may have over-sampled homes with guns that have people in them who are either already thugs/crooks or abusive persons. Remember as well that the vast majority of self defense with guns, over 95%, does not involve actually shooting. The bad guy(s)see the gun and take off. That is the only thing in the video I referenced that is “off”, the attacker would not faint at the sight of the gun but much more likely would run off.
One other suggestion, go leaf through the gun magazines at WalMart or whenever they show up on racks where you shop. Many have sections on actual cases of self defense. Combat Handguns magazine is one that has a lot of this stuff plus a regular column on the legal ins and outs of self defense with firearms written by a veteran policemen who has testified in court as an expert witness, Massad Ayoob. The other gun magazines are useful as well, and they all have websites. Me I think the magazine is easier to “navigate” for the first time user. Where I live in Texas WalMart, HEB (grocery store) and the FT Hood PX are the main sources for gun magazines.
Hope this helps and addresses your concerns.
Take care, Rifle 308
Oh yes, go find a copy of Armed and Female, it was written years ago, but is still a great read on women, self defense, and guns.
Your questions are not unfounded, given the statistics that are often presented. Remember, though, that as Mark Twain said there are “lies, damn lies, and statistics”.
I have access to medical journals, so I looked up Dr Bailey’s article. By the way, it is NOT the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine article. That paper is actually written by David Hemingway, but you have to read carefully on page 2 to realize that. Dr Bailey’s article is from 1997 and was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
First, it must be noted that the paper only deals with 143 women who were killed in their home, and 143 “matched controls” (an individual of the same sex, race, and age range who lived nearby and consented to be interviewed). Of the 143 female homicide victims, only 66 were killed with a firearm. This sample size is way too small to be of any statistical value.
Next, it should be noted that the manner of death had nothing to do with the findings regarding firearms. That is, a woman could have been murdered by being stabbed, beaten, or strangled or committed suicide by taking an overdose, yet the gun in her nightstand drawer would still count towards the “increased risk’ posed by gun ownership even though it had nothing to do with her death.
Finally, it’s important to note what else the study found as risk factors for increasing the risk of a woman being killed in her home. These were the factors that had an even greater association with being murdered than owning a gun: living alone, illicit drug use by any member of the household, and prior domestic violence. For suicide, history of mental illness and living alone were greater “risk factors” than gun ownership. Somehow I doubt SELF will be running an article about why its dangerous to live alone.
This was a follow up article to the widely discredited paper published by Dr Arthur Kellerman which used the same database. I’ve seen it noted that using the methods of Drs Kellerman and Bailey that you could prove that the presence of insulin in the home leaves one at an increased risk of diabetes.
Off the top of my head, it’s been a while since I read the studies and their debunking, they don’t control for whether the homicide occurs inside the home (when Kellerman came out it was pre-concealed carry in most states) nor do they control for whether teh gun used in the homicide was the gun kept in the home or one brought by the killer. Further, they didn’t differentiate between lawful and unlawful gun ownership (no surprise if someone living with a drug dealer ends up killed by that dealer’s enemies) nor for self-selection.
For the last, people who have actual risks may be more likely to arm themselves than people in general and are certainly more likely to be killed than a randomly selected robbery or assault victim.
There is a difference between the likelihood of harm to a man or woman who has a gun in the home for defensive use in general, and a woman (in this case) who has one because she has received actual threats from, say, a violent ex with a proven capacity for violence.
Guns aren’t magical talismans, used properly they simply give you a chance you might not have had otherwise. If you don’t control for people who are at heightened risk you can’t make a sound “apples to apples” inference to ‘normal” defensive gun owners.
An earlier PJ Media story analyzed the statistics cited by gun control advocates, and found that in many cases, high firearm densities generally led to significantly lower levels of violent crime of all sorts.
The link is here:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/gun-control-fails-say-statistics-from-gun-control-advocates/?singlepage=true
I live in a home with a floor jack, and do all my own auto maintenance. I am far more likely to have my car fall on me than one of those useless “call-the-guy” types. I take plenty of precautions, and have never had a car fall, but if you never use a jack, your chances of having a car fall on you are zero.
Does that mean floor jacks are dangerous and should be banned?
Not to mention gravity… people could fall, you know.
Talk about skew and dishonesty. Where do I begin the corrections?
“Living in a home with a gun doubles your risk both of being murdered and of committing suicide.”
Not sure about the murder. But no, living is a home with a gun may double your risk of SUCCESSFULLY committing suicide. It’s hard to screw up suicide with a gun. It’s very easy to screw up suicide with pills or hanging or electrocution or what not.
Guns don’t make you suicidal. They are simply an exceptionally effective – currently the most effective, readily-available-to-civilians, method of killing another human being. Guns don’t create murders and suicides, they facilitate them.
Want to avoid murder and suicide? Get mental health or police assistance for those individuals who are ALREADY at risk of those behaviors. Treat causes, not symptoms.
“American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine” HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
I am a firearms instructor and have given firearm training to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of women over the ten years I’ve been doing this. The overwhelming majority of them developed excellent skills in gun handling, warrior mindset, and marksmanship. Their performance on the range during immediate action drills is on a par, and sometimes above, that of the men. It is satisfying to me every time I can train a women to defend herself with a firearm and know that she will have the tools and the skills to make any potential rapist have a bad day. A gun truly is a great equalizer, and equality is something liberals claim to value. There has been recent news that rape is more common in countries where citizens are not allowed to have firearms. A woman in gun-restricted Great Britain is 3 times more likely to be raped than a woman in the gun culture of America.
Of course, left/libtards just value control more than guns in the hand of people they’d seek to control… of course, they’ll not admit that until after they seize power.
“Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA– ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State.” –Heinrich Himmler (another of those folk left/liberals seem to obey and envy for some reason)
“Acquiring a firearm will make you more likely to be murdered” is one of the clearest examples of a causation fallacy that I can imagine.
If you actually read these studies, you’ll find that it’s even worse. They studies do not find a correlation between gun ownership and being murdered. They go to the morgue, find people who have been shot, and (surprise!) it turns out they had been around guns. So not only does correlation not equal causation, they’ve not even sampling gun owners – they’re sampling dead people.
Guns cause violence, therefore we should ban them and become like England where self-defense is criminalized and they’re being taken-over by jihadists so we can all be peaceful and happy! (I think that’s their message.)
So, what Self is saying is that women are delicate creatures who need a man or the police to protect them…
I wonder what the same magazines say about women in combat?
Clearly women in combat should not be armed. It makes them more susceptible to being shot.
Helen, I have a question. If Self Magazine considers women incompetent to make decisions on how best to protect her children against violent predators, does that mean Self doesn’t think women should hold public office? After all, they’ll be making policy decisions affecting thousands or millions of Americans.
Hold public office? If women really are that incompetent, they shouldn’t be able to vote. Or drive.
What really caught my eye was the comment from Dr. James Bailey of the Univ of TN Health Science Center in Memphis. He must lead a really sheltered life in Memphis and never go to the “bad parts” of town. I heard a former Memphis cop refer to Memphis as Mogadishu on the Mississippi due to the violence.
A statistic from Tom Givens, firearms trainer in Memphis, helps put things into perspective. 56 out of his thousands of students have been in a gunfight in Memphis. 54 of the 56 were uninjured. The other two? They weren’t carrying a firearm at the time.
Howdy John
Many communities have good areas and bad areas. Billings, my own town, has violence and foolishness in all of our neighborhoods but there are clusters. Someone who lives within two blocks of me would think we were all 1950s Cleavers. Someone who lives about half a mile from me worries a lot about the neighbors. Memphis is likely the same way — I know New York and Chicago are.
If women aren’t capable of handling a gun, why do they want to open up combat positions in the Army for them? These feminist positions are hard to follow. It’s almost as though they’re just there to carry out the President’s agenda. Huh.
Self is also saying that women shouldn’t marry or be police officers….
I can’t believe that, in light of this
evidence”, the Obama administration is allowing women to participate in combat roles. It’s pretty clear they’ll mostly be shooting themselves.
Why would anyone want to own Self magazine? Reading Self doubles one’s chances to die of boredom. I mean really, why read this inconsequential garbage?
I keep reading that conservative millionaires need to buy up women’s rags and put conservative editors in charge. When is that going to happen?
Women shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads about such things as guns. Am I doing it right?
It’s positively precious that the magazine quotes Hemenway and Wintemute like they’re credible. Fifteen minutes of Googling is all you need to discover that those two clowns, along with Arthur Kellermann, have been churning out anti-gun junk science for decades. Their work — including the “keeping a gun in the home makes you more likely to be murdered or to commit suicide” crap that they’re trotting out here — been debunked so many times that, if they had any shame, they’d have long since slithered back into whatever hole they emerged from. They’re not dispassionate social-science researchers; they’re cranks with an agenda.
Aside from the malice aforethought discussed by others (which is the heart of the matter), there is another factor to consider with liberals, “moderates”, and guns.
It can be summed up in one word: PROJECTION
These people do a lot of it. They know they operate almost entirely on emotion, and they cannot conceive of people who do otherwise. They project their own deficiencies on others.
Case in point: One of my colleagues came in one morning seething with anger about a traffic incident. He stated that it was a good thing that he didn’t have a gun or he would have shot the other driver. (Probably so.)
THEN he proceeded to proclaim (at length) that every other person would have done the same, and that people who carry concealed weapons are deluding themselves to think they have the self control to refrain form such acts of violent rage.
This is VERY typical of liberals and “moderates”. They simply cannot wrap their brains around the idea of someone who doesn’t act like they know they would.
Keep in mind that the majority of the people who vote Democrat are really NOT hard-corp Marxists intent on subverting America, and that a good part of what they support is due to good motives. They make bad political choices, not out of evil intent, but out of ignorance and illogic. As Reagan said, a lot of what they “know” just isn’t so, and projection is a large part of that.
I’m 66 years old, and have been a widow for 27 years. I once had to shoot a man to save my life. You can read the story of that encounter here. http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/?page_id=846
I am an NRA certified firearms and self defense instructor. In the last 7 years, I’ve been able to start a large number of people on the road to effective self defense, but you have to know that a single class and the purchase of a gun does not make you ready to defend yourself, either safely or effectively! As with any other important skill, it requires careful training and serious ongoing practice to develop the muscle memory that will allow you to actually defend yourself in an emergency. The gun is only one of the things you need to make that actually happen.
I carry a gun every day, everywhere I go and I am more than ready to defend myself when I’m home. Practice with your gun, absolutely. But learn and practice real situational awareness and conflict avoidance as well. The best gunfight in the world is the one that never happened.
Why are you surprised?
Glamour, the sister mag of Self, same publisher, all that, had the first mention of Samantha Powers I’ve ever read. She was swooned over as this brilliant professor. She, herself, was walking along, trailed by brilliant grad students shoving position papers into her hands. She was swooning about the BRILLIANT, CHARISMATIC, GENIUS Professor- a Professor Barack Obama, senatorial candidate.
Or the line-up of nearly two dozen, maybe more, heavily pregnant women in cute jeans and white tee-shirts- the James Dean cool look since forever- and the headline wasn’t “hot jeans that fit cool pregnant chicks”- it was “not enough birth control” subtitle ” abortions getting harder to obtain.”
Or, let’s see, Margaret Mead getting an relationship advice column in the fifties- that’s a winner- intellectually dishonest, alcoholic lesbian giving GREAT advice to heterosexual, happily married conventional people.
The jeans one is the one that skeeved me out the worst.
One of the “points” in the report was “Living in one of the states with the highest rates of household gun ownership makes you and your kids seven times more likely to die in a gun accident.”
I’d like to see something that says “living in one of the states with the lowest rates of household gun ownership makes you X times more likely to be beaten, raped and murdered by an intruder.”
“Last year, an analysis of decades of studies published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine reiterated the message:”
Lol, I’m sure that’s a hard hitting journal. Is Jimmy Buffet the editor?
As a physician myself, I can say that the recommendation and advice coming out of Self magazine is probably more dangerous for you than owning a firearm.
Actually, I am cool with the idea of not arming the readership of Self, Cosmo, Glamour, and similar magazines.
And if they want to be sure to have 100% effective birth control, I like that idea, too.
Anything that takes them, and the men who boink them, out of the gene pool is a Very Good Thing ™.
What I find hilarious is the part about suicide. If my statistics serves me correctly, women are more likey to use drugs or some other form of suicide that will not be messy (not sure why), while men are more likely to use guns in a suicide. I guess fabrication in the media is the norm now adays. Stupid Liberals.
BTW, loved the article, keep it up.
Would you rule out living in a state just because you have “double” the chance of getting killed by a lightning? Of course not, because the chances of that was low to begin with.
What’s are the chances of my kids drowning to death if I lived in a house with a pool instead of one without? If I moved to Chicago from NY, am I suddenly 7 times more likely to be gunned down?
There’s no better deception than not contexutalizing stats.
Particularly ironic is that they quote “doctors” talking about how dangerous guns are!
About 200,000 people die in the US each year from preventable in-hospital medical errors alone, this from a huge study of 37 million patient records quoted in Medical News Today at http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/11856.php
Now, there are about 660,000 doctors in the US, according to the 2010 Census. That means ALMOST 1 IN 3 DOCTORS WILL KILL SOMEONE THIS YEAR!
Ok, ok, so doctors don’t necessarily *personally* do all the killing. They get help from nurses, PA’s, technicians, and other medical personnel, right? Well, since doctors are 12% or 1/8 of the medical personnel in this country, then that means that ABOUT 1 IN 25 MEDICAL PERSONNEL WILL KILL SOMEONE THIS YEAR!
(full disclosure: I am a former practicing EMT and am currently a 1st Responder/Volunteer Firefighter, so we’re talking about me and my friends here in the medical personnel)
Ok, so what about those *DANGEROUS* guns? Well, there are conservatively 300,000,000 guns in the US right now, maybe as many as 350,000,000. At least 250,000,000 of those are in private hands, not police or military. And how many deaths do they ’cause’ each year? (Let’s assume, as the news media do, that the person pulling the trigger is a hapless ‘victim’ of the gun, also, rather than the perpetrator) Well, those guns cause about 30,000 deaths per year, whether murders, self defense, suicides, police shootings, or accidents.
In that case that means ABOUT 1 in 10,000 GUNS WILL KILL SOMEONE THIS YEAR!
Oh wait, that means that medical personnel ARE 400 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO KILL SOMEONE THAN A GUN IS!
If we stick with “going to the doctor”, it turns into A DOCTOR’S OFFICE OR HOSPITAL IS OVER 3000 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO KILL SOMEONE THAN A GUN IS.
Or put it this way: a doctor holding a gun is far, far less likely to kill you than a doctor holding a stethoscope, a scalpel, or a syringe.
No wonder people are scared to go to the doctor!
Shall we follow the doctor’s advice on guns?
Regards, DH
I’m pretty sure reading women’s magazines could be proven to *literally* drop a person’s IQ. I always wonder if the women who write for these magazines are the stupidest people on earth, or so bored to death and laughing their asses off while they write these pathetic articles on purpose.
The statistics, if true, can still be VERY misleading.
For instance, if you’re suicidal and buy a gun to kill yourself, you have become part of the statistic linking a “gun in the house” to “suicide,” even though it was the suicidal bent that led you to buy the gun, the gun did not lead to the suicide as the statistics might lead you to believe. (The statistic, as cited in the article, also does not actually link the household guns to the suicides. The suicide could have used an alternate method of self-destruction, but if there was a gun in the house the incident could become part of the “gun in the home increases risk of suicide” stat. And, as mentioned earlier, which came first, the suicidal thoughts or the gun? Even if the gun came first, this statistic does not demonstrate a causal relationship between the two, nor does it require the use of the gun in the act.)
The other prominent statistic, that a gun in the house leads to an increased chance of being murdered, is also flawed. If there is an imminent threat of death (an abusive boyfriend) and you buy a gun, and your BF subsequently kills you, you’d fit into this stat, even if the gun was not used in your murder. The statistics are IMPLYING that gun ownership leads to violent death, but it may in fact be the person’s life circumstances that lead to gun ownership, and not the other way around.
A quick follow-up:
Even when a suicide uses a gun that was long in the household, this also does not create a causal link between gun ownership and suicide. Where is the evidence that the suicide would NOT have used an alternate method of self-destruction if the gun had not been present? The gun is merely a tool, to be used or abused. A gun does not cause a person to shoot themselves any more than a pencil causes misspelling or an automobile causes drunk driving.
Future article titles in “Self Magazine”:
“Foot Binding: Is It For You?”
“Chastity Belts: This Year’s Hot Fashion Accessory!”
“So What’s Wrong With Being Barefoot, Pregnant, And In The Kitchen?”
“I Was Cloistered In A Convent…And Loved It!”
“Boyfriend Give You A Black Eye? Yes, You DID Deserve It.”