Even those relatively few women who are violent, he says, are most often violent in response to men’s violence. Indeed, this is the single most effective argument I know for why it doesn’t make sense to arm women with guns to protect them against men with guns: because arming a woman with a gun is asking her to behave like a man, to embody the somatic and psychological and cultural experience of a man while simultaneously quelling all that women have been taught. It says to women, if you want to protect yourself from violent men, you need to become violent yourself.
