THE MS. AND THE GUN, REDUX

A little while ago in this blog, I wrote about an anti-gun lady who did a strange and incredibly stupid thing for the MS magazine blog. You can find it here: http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/06/17/false-flags-false-premises/#comments

Someone walking around carrying a gun she admitted she didn’t know how to use was so scary a concept that I still consider it both a false premise and a false flag. The lady in question did so because she is an avowed anti-gunner, and wanted to show the world how dangerous guns are.

Well, in hands like hers, they are.

Go to the links to her MS magazine blog, found in the link above, and also to the comments on both that site, and the above-linked entry in this Backwoods Home blog.  You’ll see that in each, many people warned her of the danger she was presenting to herself and others.

Apparently, MS Magazine agreed: they have stopped her insane experiment, at least under their aegis, but it appears that the madness will continue in the Huffington Post.

Kudos to MS magazine for dumping it. I’d be very much interested in hearing the real story from those folks why they wisely aborted this obviously dangerous and doomed mission.  I would particularly like to hear from Gloria Steinem on that.

There aren’t a whole lot of anti-gun people I can say I admire, but Gloria Steinem is one. Hers is the name most associated with MS magazine, and I well remember when she burst on the American scene. Her writing was one of the reasons I became an early and unlikely feminist. (Yes, I was in my early twenties then, and yes, she was “hawt” as they say today. She’s 79 now, but hell, I’m going on 65, so she’s still in my dating range.)  But that’s not important: the important thing to me is that Gloria Steinem embodied an ethos that has served me well for my entire life: the realization that strong, capable, confident women are the most interesting and valuable women. (Funny thing: that works across both genders, doesn’t it?)

And, I strongly suspect, Gloria Steinem and her true heirs understand how embarrassing it is to everything they stand for when “a clueless woman with a gun” becomes a grotesque stereotype of hysterical incompetence. That is nothing less than anathema to everything they have spent their lives fighting for.

Ms. Steinem was a pioneer in what was called then the Women’s Liberation Movement. She was and is an avatar of female empowerment. At about the time she co-founded MS magazine in 1972, women were already past baby steps and taking long strides to penetrate previously male-oriented job markets.  In the construction industry, they didn’t do it as manual laborers and hod carriers, they did it at the hydraulically-operated controls of Caterpillar tractors; in law-enforcement, they didn’t do it with fists but instead with guns and expertly-wielded batons. As one of the first police PR-24 baton instructors, I was able to point other cops to female officers like Missy O’Linn, who later became a great police defense lawyer, and petite Florida cop Pamela Miller because they could make that baton absolutely sing: pound for pound, a woman with more limber upper limbs and 30 degrees more flexibility in the pelvic axis could get more power into a properly-executed PR-24 strike than her brother the same height and weight.

FORCE MULTIPLIER was the operative term.

And it still is.  Check out this video of a young mom being savagely beaten by a home invader – in front of her three year old child – recently caught on a “nanny-cam.”  http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/watch_home_invader_savagely_pummels_hxiWhv2uYrbF0uIPD680BL .

Excuse me all to hell, but I would like to believe that any woman I loved would have been better off with a gun in that situation, explaining to her child how the big man’s white tee-shirt suddenly turned all red and he fell down and stopped trying to hurt decent people, and honey, it’s going to be all right now.  It’s easier to explain than the horror the mom in the video will have to explain to her little one.

And, you know, I would like to believe that Gloria Steinem and the other pioneers of women’s empowerment can recognize that

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