Instead, they should be focusing on violence against women, the devastated families left behind, including children who are left orphaned, and the violent athletes who are many times high on God-knows-what or are suffering from brain trauma / mental illness caused by too many blows to their noggins.
The gun didn't chase Jovan Belcher's girlfriend down and shoot her down in cold blood. The gun didn't take the easy way out and kill itself. Jovan Belcher did that.
Here's a good article my Dad just sent me from chron.com. Agree or disagree..whatever...it is what it is.
From chron.com:
TexasSparkle
A blog about politics and issues with Kathleen McKinley. (Editor's note: The author is responsible for this blog, which is not edited by the Chronicle.)
Guns, Women, and How We Protect Ourselves From Violence
Monday, December 3, 2012
As you probably know by now, Kansas City Chiefs player Jovan Belcher used a gun to kill his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins and himself, leaving behind a 3 month old daughter. Anti gun advocates are always quick to jump on these kind of tragedies to make their case against gun ownership. Bob Costa took time at the halftime of the Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys game last night to pontificate using the same boring nonsensical arguments, the most ridiculous being that if guns were just restricted, and if Jovan had not had a gun that morning, he and his girlfriend would still be alive. A completely absurd notion. People who want to kill other people rarely obey gun laws. See the city of Washington D.C. or the city of Chicago. Strict gun laws only keep guns from law abiding citizens.
I think what makes me frustrated by the discussion that is happening now is that we are ignoring what was probably escalating domestic violence and/or mental illness. Instead people like Costa are focusing on the weapon Jovan used to kill his girlfriend. It could have easily been his fists, or a knife (Ask O.J. Simpson about that). A gun is not necessary to kill. But many many times a gun is necessary to save one’s life. Especially when you are woman being attacked by a much stronger man.
Let me take you on a journey. As many of you know, I used to be a Democrat. I was raised in a political home of Democrats. I was fairly liberal when I was young. My father and brothers hunted, and my Dad took me on a couple of hunts, but I hated them. I was (and still am) an animal lover. I had no desire to kill animals. So, my Dad took me out to the country to shoot cans off fences, so I could learn to shoot. But as soon as I left home to go to college, I never saw another gun. I disliked the idea of guns. Fast forward many years and I am a young mother. One of the biggest fights my husband and I ever had was when he brought to our house his hunting guns from his childhood home. He had hidden them in the back of a closet, and I found them. I had a fit. I didn’t want guns in the house. We had small children. We compromised with him buying a gun safe. But I still wasn’t happy.
By now I was a conservative Republican, but I still believed in gun control. One day I was watching a crime program where they reenact a crime that occurred. This show wasn’t about guns or gun control. It just told the story of a young woman who was being stalked by her ex boyfriend. She had put a restraining order on him. At one point her boyfriend’s house is set on fire. They know it was her ex boyfriend, but there was no proof. Her boyfriend gets a gun, but she refuses to. She doesn’t like guns. Instead she moves to a smaller town nearby under a different name hoping to get away from the ex boyfriend for good.
The ex boyfriend finds her though. He busts through her front door in the apartment complex where she lives. She manages to run out the back and to a neighbor’s apartment. She is screaming and pounding on the door. The neighbor opens it and she screams at her, “Do you have a gun?!!!” The woman didn’t. They slam & lock the door and run upstairs to the closet. The ex boyfriend bust through this door, goes upstairs, finds the girlfriend in the closet and says, “I got you,” and shoots her dead. He let the neighbor go, and I’m thinking that neighbor has a gun now.
That episode really stuck with me. I kept imagining if she had had a gun, or if her neighbor had, then they could have protected themselves.
A few years after that I went to California to visit my college roommate, who taught a self defense course for women. It’s that serious course where the man (playing a predator) dresses in foam and protection so the women can really fight and hit as they would in a real case scenario. The man says things that are threatening, and he really grabs the woman. They make it as realistic as possible so a woman will understand how her adrenaline will be flowing, and how to use that. It is very disturbing to watch. The men play their part well, and it gives you a real sense of how terrifying it is to be a potential victim.
I had invited my cousin, whom I adore, to come with me to watch the demonstration. Toward the end I could tell she was visibly shaken. She told me she had to leave. I followed her out and asked her what was wrong. We sat down and she told me that when she was in her early twenties a man has broken into her apartment and raped her. I was devastated for her. As I was hugging her and she was crying, I was overwhelmed with anger toward this evil disgusting person who had done this to her. He was never caught. I wondered how many other women he had raped.
I knew then that what my cousin should have had, which I have now, was a gun beside her bed.
People like Costa think guns are the problem? No. Men like Jovan Belcher are the problem. He was an enormous athletic man. He could have easily killed her with his hands, as so many predators do. You can’t always anticipate or know if someone like Belcher will attack, but you can make sure you are protected. With women especially, a gun is the great equalizer.
All this changed my way of thinking with guns. But the great tipping point had to be the testimony before Congress of Suzanna Gratia Hupp in the 90′s. In 1991 a mad man drove his truck into a Luby’s in Killeen Texans and went on a shooting rampage killing 23 people and wounding 20. Suzanna and her parents were there in Luby’s that day. Her parents were two of the 23 people killed. When the shooting first began, Suzanna reached into her purse for her gun, but then remembered that she had left it in the car because Texas law said that bringing a gun into a public area was a felony. Suzanna spoke before Congress about this because she knew that restrictive gun laws had kept her from protecting her parents, and had kept her from stopping this lunatic from killing other innocents. The video is a MUST SEE as Hupp explains perfectly what our 2nd Amendment rights really protect us from. (Warning. There is a cuss word at the end of this video as libertarian Penn Jillette explains the 2nd amendment in a way all of us can understand)
Liberals will use this tragedy, as they do any tragedy involving guns, to promote gun control. Perhaps instead of trying to violate our 2nd amendment rights, we can focus on the root of the problems, which to me are clearly mental illness and/or domestic violence. Especially against women.
To me, this should be the feminist issue of our time. If someone violent and intending harm on you and your children, which woman below would you rather be?
Yeah, I thought so.
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