Dear NRA and members
I want to talk about your new advertising campaign that tells campus women they should own a gun to protect themselves in the event of an attempted rape. I have been familiar with guns since I was a child. My grandfather taught me and a cousin to shoot. My cousin was the best marksman, eventually working his way up to the Olympics, but we had the same teacher, and learned with the same riffle. I may not be the marksman he is, but I can hold my own.
In college, I lived off campus and had a revolver at my apartment when I was raped. The gun was loaded, but no bullet chambered as my weapon does not have a safety feature. It was out of sight, but easily accessible. I did not have a trigger lock or safe (no children were ever in my college residence and my roommates also knew what I had and how to handle it). The gun was secure without adding anything to slow me down should I need to use it. I did not shoot my attacker.
Hopefully, you have all been trained to imagine any number of situations where firing a gun may be necessary, in order to prepare yourself for the nightmare that always accompanies the need to defend oneself with a firearm. Safety courses teach you to follow pre-set protocols for a number of situations. We make it so familiar that thought isn’t required when the time comes, and for good reason. When X happens, we take Y action. There is no time to panic. There is no time to hesitate. There is no time to think. There is only time to act.
If you fail to follow your pre-defined protocols, your weapon may be taken from you and used against you. We learn what to do if you’re attacked from behind. If someone jumps in your car. If you are grabbed while walking to your car. If someone breaks in the house. We know what to do if we’re involved in a stickup. Most of us have even thought about trajectories in our homes that both protect us behind a wall and avoid firing into neighboring residences or rooms with sleeping children. Most of us know which objects our ammunition will pass through, what the chances are of a significant change in trajectory. How far each bullet will travel and how much it will drop in the process. We’ve been trained for that. We’ve been educated. We’ve been empowered with that knowledge.
Where is the training course for acquaintance rape scenarios – the most common type of campus rape? Have you thought through that scenario? Please, tell me, at what specific point does one determine that a gun should be drawn and a bullet chambered, and discharged? Is it when a friend knocks on the door and says he’s too drunk to drive home? When he asks if he can hang out at your place long enough to sober up? When he sits on the couch and flips through channels while you brew coffee? When he says “Thanks” when you hand him a cup?
What are the protocols for this situation? Let’s say your friend is sitting across from you on the couch, holding your favorite coffee cup, talking about the party he just left, then calmly sits down the cup and suddenly throws his full weight on top of you, pinning you to the couch. The wrestling moves your brothers taught you fail to remove him. The couch doesn’t give you the support for the leg press you need to complete. You struggle as he removes your shorts. Because of the couch cushions, you can’t get the right leverage to throw a good punch. Your legs are forced apart and pinned beneath him, and you can’t kick him where it hurts. His hand is around your throat, and you can’t bite him. You scream, but he chokes you harder. The revolver your dad gave you specifically for this situation sits, unhelpfully, in the bedside table in the next room.
When he’s finished and finally removes his weight from you, you’re too busy trying to catch your breath after he choked you to jump up and grab the gun. Besides, at that point, do I even have the right to shoot him? I mean, the rape has already taken place, so I’m not protecting myself anymore. You might want to shoot him when he says he just couldn’t help himself (those smurf pj’s my mom bought me must have been so tantalizing) but it wouldn’t be legal, and it wouldn’t help prevent what already happened.
Until you can answer these questions, until you can tell me how to reach my firearm from another room with a 240lb man pinning me to a sofa, until you can say with a straight face that I should have been carrying a harness while wearing pj’s and having coffee with someone I thought was a friend please stop suggesting women protect themselves from rape with a gun. Please stop saying that women with guns won’t get raped, because we still do. Please stop the ad campaigns that imply we could have stopped it, if we’d just fought harder. If we’d been willing to stop it. If we’d been on your side from the beginning. If we bought into your agenda.
I am a woman with a gun. I know how to use my weapon. I am still a rape survivor.
I am not your pawn. I am not your example. I am not your talking point. You don’t speak for me.
