04Oct05

American Women as Defensive Shooting Students, from one of our Instructors:

"When I ask our female students if they have ever thought seriously about employing gunfire to abruptly end the life of a criminal attacker, a common

response is to dodge the question with something like, 'I don=80 t want to hurt anyone.' Conversely, male students usually go right to the heart of the matter with an answer like, 'No problem.'

Of course, we can build weapons skills in our female students to the point where they and I both know they have the ability to cause bullets to land exactly where they want them to, but the deeper issue of the willingness to

commit a homicide, when necessary, in order to preserve their own lives is something we often neglect to address adequately. In fact, we often just d ance around the subject!

As Dave Grossman points out, it goes against a built-in, genetic, human vector to kill other humans, but what I'm talking about here is spec ific to American women. Many women are still averse to claiming their own magnific ence and have thus failed to assess the inherent value of their own lives. This

trait particularly manifests itself in women who:

1) are involved in an abusive relationship.

2) imagine they live in the 'traditional' female role

Even today, there are many women who have been told (first by their parents , then by their spouse) that they are valueless. Not being a mental-health professional, I'm not sure how helpful I can be with women in this category, but I do know, from much experience, that the notion of taking decisive, violent action to protect themselves is as foreign to them as running for president! This philosophical issue may not even rear its ugly head until the second or third trip to the range. Shooting metal plates may be looked upon as pu re and irrelevant recreation, but, when you start talking about VCAs and violent resistance, she may suddenly lose all interest and just want to go home.

Until the start of last century, a proper woman's 'career ' in this civilization was to get married, have children, and manage her husband =99s household. Her husband was expected to provide for and defend her. Those traditional roles have changed a great deal in intervening decades! Women now drive, vo te, go to college, hold public office, serve on juries, own businesses, et al.

They move out of their parent's house at an early age, without bein g married. Educators have addressed every conceivable aspect of this expanded female role, except personal protection. In fact, effective personal protection i s contemptuously ignored or trivialized by most educators and even the =9CWomen's Movement' itself.

That is why confused and frustrated women ultimately come to us! We are th e ones who have to explain to her that she is worth defending, even when it means that a VCA gets to die violently as a result, and that she dare not depend upon anyone but herself. She needs to accept and understand that sh e cannot be helpful to anyone when she is dead! It may take a while to sink in, but sink in it must, lest everything else we say sound like a distant and irrelevant whisper."

Comment: We are either going to be effective with our female students, or w e are going to lose them as allies in preserving our rights! We need to enthusiastically welcome them into our fraternity, as commensurate colleagu es. They need us, and we need them!

/John