re: #86 A Mom Anon

All she’s saying is that guns aren’t a magical cure for rape.

And this is the story wingnuts love to exploit to prove they are:

Rape Survivor: A Call Box Above My Head While I Was Being Brutally Raped Wouldn’t Have Helped (yeah, it’s townhall…sorry I can’t find a different link):

“If I had been carrying that night, two other rapes would have been prevented and a young life would have been saved,” Collins said. “All of these are just sentiments that give a false sense of security. In my experience I know that the university that I attended, the University of Nevada-Reno, they didn’t didn’t have any call boxes the night I was attacked. They afterwards installed them but I can tell you that a call box above my head while I was straddled on the parking garage floor being brutally raped wouldn’t have helped me one bit. The safe zone? I was in a safe zone and my attacker didn’t care,” Collins said. “It’s known that I could see the police cruisers less than 50 feet away from me, from where I was being attacked but the moment I saw those cruisers, I knew at the same time that no one was coming for me….they were all off duty. The offices had closed. They weren’t in their cruisers, there was no one there. A whistle wouldn’t have gotten anybody’s attention. It was isolated, it was late at night. It’s really frustrating that I’m supposed to hand over my own protection to a man but they’re not able to guarantee our protection and the comments that this representative made about women not knowing if they’re going to be raped or accidentally shooting the wrong person was extremely offensive because he specifically targeted female students. So, is he saying that all women are unable to make sound decisions in the midst of that, that we should go against our God given gut instinct that something was wrong? I knew something was wrong the moment I was grabbed from behind.”

She was attacked by this evil creep, and it’s entirely understandable why she’d feel the way she does - “if I only I’d had a gun, I could have saved myself and others”. If you parse her statement above, however, I’m sure you can see several other factors, like lousy campus security, that contributed to her assault. Plus, the rapist always has the element of surprise on their side, and he grabbed her from behind - this goes to something else that’s been bothering me - how is a gun supposed to effectively protect you in a “close combat” scenario? Unless the other person is completely still and you already have it at their head, you need space to be able to grab, wield and aim it effectively. If grabbed from behind and restrained, you can’t even get to the gun in the first place (unless the NRA is expecting you to walk around with it in hand, ready to fire at a moment’s notice)