The NRA's 'Woman Problem'

The US' National Rifle Association is a lobbying group on behalf of gun manufacturers, those people who derive their profits from the sale of weapons which increase the mortality rate of domestic violence by 500%, translating into 46 women a month who are shot to death by current or former partners in the US. Unsurprisingly, the NRA also has a 'women problem': not only do women consistently favour gun control, but one of the most formidable forces to rise up against the NRA in recent years has been Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, who have recently joined forces with Michael Bloomberg's multimillion dollar organisation, Mayors against Illegal Guns, to form Everytown for Gun Safety. Meanwhile former congressperson Gabby Giffords, survivor of gun violence herself, has recently launched a 9 state 'Protect All Women tour', targeting the 'lethal mix' of guns and domestic violence.

Yet there is something uncomfortable about these initiatives from a feminist perspective, and not only the fact that Gabby Giffords has actually framed gun violence against women as a reputational liability for 'responsible gun owners', which is reductive to say the least. The rhetoric of 'protecting women' can also, all too easily, be appropriated by self-proclaimed 'responsible gun owners', gun owners and promoters whose respect for women is to be questioned, as witness the misogynistic vitriol spouted by NRA funnyman Kurt Schlichter about the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, casting her as a castrating wife for wanting to interfere with the male, husbandly imperative to 'defend his self [sic], his family, and his community'. The NRA has previously also targeted her as a fraud, passing herself of as a 'stay at home mom' when she is, in fact, a successful businessperson. Whilst stopping short of explicitly saying that women should be stay at home mothers, it does not take much reading between the lines to see that the NRA nonetheless thinks this particular woman has overstepped her rightful place in the home her husband should be protecting.

Yet we must ask why the women of Moms Defend Action for Gun Sense felt the need to present themselves as stay at home mothers: is this the only way Americans can conceive of women as deserving of safety – or safety for their children – and must this safety, if such is the case, always be in the form of another's protection – the protection of either a husband or the masculinised state?

Ironically, the NRA has in the past pushed an at-first-glance much more progressive line on women's safety, though one sadly lacking of a basis in reality. Last year, a new NRA news commenter, Natalie Foster, wrote an article on Firearms and Feminism: Women for Guns and Guns for Women, touting the line that women need guns in order to defend themselves from the ubiquitous threat of rape and other forms of male violence of which they are at risk, even whilst also making the argument that those 'individuals' who commit violent crime – under which rubric gun crime certainly falls and as even Foster cannot deny -- are a deranged minority and completely ignoring the fact that women's own guns are frequently turned against women themselves

The idea that there could be a world without this ubiquitous but apparently completely individualised threat to women, of course, finds no room in an NRA scheme, which must create a 'need' for the product of its paymasters and in the process naturalises the idea that women will always need protection from somewhere, be it their own or their husband's gun. Women thus become collateral damage in the name of those paymasters' bottom line, as they are put at risk of a violence which sadly is all too routine but exacerbated by the presence of guns – particularly their own or their husbands' – and also live with the violence that being made to live in fear of violence constitutes in the first place.

Until the NRA and its paymasters' interest in perpetuating that violence is exposed, there is limited hope of breaking the circle of violence, but a place to begin might be in shifting rhetoric away from how to protect 'womenandchildren' from its existence and towards how to prevent its instillation in men and boys, for it is men and boys who overwhelmingly commit it. Targeted campaigning against the masculinist glamorisation of violence, particularly gun violence, towards this end would also, of itself, expose the NRA's true lack of interest in womenandchildren's safety, for it would hardly be the kind of campaigning we could expect them not to try and undermine. Appealing to the image of vulnerable women cowering in their homes, on the other hand, is unlikely to do women any favours – indeed, we should ask why this image holds such appeal, and the answer would probably be 'misogyny'. It can also be far too easily appropriated for the ends of those who profit from this situation.