susan-b-sorenson-courtesy

The Trace is peddling a new report claiming that 4.5 million women “alive today” were terrorized by men brandishing firearms. The Trace is using the [dubious] stat to tell a sad story: guns enable evil men to exert their will over innocent victims. The “natural” response: make these women safe by removing the firearms. Not so fast . . .

Nonfatal Gun Use in Intimate Partner Violence: A Systematic Review of the Literature is based on “10 original research articles that reported the prevalence of the nonfatal use of firearms against an intimate partner.” The authors admit that “there is relatively little research on the subject of intimate partners’ nonfatal gun use against women.” Their 4.5m gun brandishing victims estimate is based on 20-year-old data.

Lead author Dr. Susan Sorenson (above, Professor of Health & Societies at the University of Pennsylvania) justifies her focus on firearms in abusive relationship because “guns can be lethal quickly and with relatively little effort.”

While firearms are the most controversial weapon available in the American homes, all households are filled with quickly obtained and deployed deadly weapons, from kitchen knives to baseball bats to hammers. As for the amount of effort required to do so, it’s hard to see how a firearm has any special advantage.

Not to mention the fact that many, if not most abusers don’t need any weapons to victimize their partners and/or children. Fists and feet are the weapons of choice. In fact, hundreds of women are beaten to death each year. (As they were before firearms were invented.)

Even if every firearm were eliminated from the United States, people would still be able to terrorize and abuse partners. In fact, eliminating civilian access to firearms would deny women a chance to wield the most effective self-defense tool against a larger, stronger attacker.

As for The Trace’s implied argument — fewer guns in society -> fewer guns in abusers’ hands -> less domestic violence — that depends on two assumptions. First, domestic abusers couldn’t get their hands on firearms illegally. Second, offensive gun uses by abusers outnumber defensive gun uses by actual or potential victims.

It’s impossible to collect and then analyze reliable data on either variable. However, we know that federal law prohibits anyone convicted of any felony or domestic abuse from possessing a firearm. And yet, somehow, they do.

We also know that Americans have a natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. Which they can use to defend themselves against the threat of grievous bodily harm or death. Which they do.

Bottom line: no matter how many women have been threatened with a gun, focusing on limiting firearms availability for domestic abusers is like trying to reduce the availability of gasoline to stop arsonists. Only worse.

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71 COMMENTS

  1. Yeah… and I bet 1:4 women will be raped in their lifetimes. More liberal tripe.

    Fun fact, statistically, men are far more likely to be raped than women. Why? Because all the “studies” of rape victimization ignore the prison population.

        • @Ad, the video shows 2 things, women themselves are very capable of committing assault, and 2nd it shows how dangerously ignorant serge is as he has previously stated that average people are too stupid to make their own medical decisions and that MDs should have the right to control as make decisions for the public.

        • pg2, have you ever studied sentence construction, at all? And couldn’t you find a more nonsense place to push your dumbass fanaticism, which has nothing at all to do with this thread? Hell, maybe with help from Google, you might even find someone who gives a shit!

        • @Larry, I often use my phone and typing can be difficult, but more importantly, a “more nonsense place”? Glad you think so highly of this forum. BTW, weren’t you the guy going off on the CDC and the medical profession a week or 2 ago on this ‘nonsense place’? The duplicity and hypocrisy is strong in you.

      • #notanargument

        Vaccines have eradicated thousands of diseases world wide. If you want to live on your own little island and not put others in danger, you can skip whatever shots you want. If you want to walk around my town, I have a right to make sure that you’re not spreading a highly virulent disease because you decided to be a luddite retard.

        • Serge, thousands of diseases? Your posts are as funny as they are false. You ever stop and think about what you’re writing?

        • Bro, you’re really not that bright, are you? Even the hardcore trolls and outright dupes don’t credit vaccines with plague eradication.

        • You do know that “the plague” also refers to little things like smallpox? Right? It’s a generic term used by ancient to medieval historians to refer to any number of pandemics.

          But let’s pick a couple examples…

          Small Pox
          Polio

          When was the last time a person in the developed world died from either of those diseases?
          Notice how it still happens in regions where vaccination programs have not eradicated these diseases?

        • serge, again, not sure why you insist on trolling a subject you know very little on, maybe having doctors in the family really does give you a false sense of knowledge? The wheels are falling off your vaccine-statist wagon, luckily we have people that are a little brighter than yourself in this country and more and more are doing some research instead of repeating mass media sound bites.

      • A perfect two-fer for the liberal feminist readers. They get to hate on men AND guns. BTW – I wonder how many men would brandish a firearm on a woman who was armed with a firearm?

    • Figures can lie and liars can figure.

      You have to love the way they choose their numbers to make things sound bad or conversely, believable.

      The female population of the US is about 157 million, or 50.8% of the population.

      4.5 million women sounds bad, very bad. Indeed it is bad and the numbers should be much lower (if it’s true). But notice how they don’t bother to tell you that even if this number is true it’s only 2.8% of the female population. 4.5 million sounds like an “epidemic of violence”. 2.8% sounds like this is actually pretty damn rare. Statistically speaking a woman has a better chance of being born a lesbian than being domestically abused with a gun.

      Also, with rape…. If 1/4 women are raped that sounds somewhat plausible if you don’t know much about basic math. When put in actual numbers we’re talking ~39,250,000 currently living victims of rape in the US alone. That’s simply not possible.

      https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls

      The FBI makes makes a few different claims on this. First they claim that a woman is raped every “6.2” minutes (6:12). That would be 232.25/day or 84,774/year. At that rate, to reach 39,250,000 it would take 462.99 years. That’s far in excess of a human life span. The actual reported offenses for 2010 total 84,767 so I’ll just give them their “6.2” minutes. Still, this, makes the 1 in 4 claim impossible.

      Now rape has been dropping but if we go back to 1991 we find that the back then rate can’t make up the difference. In 1991 the FBI reports 106,593 rapes. Even if that level remained static (which it has obviously not) it would still take 368 years to rape 1/4 of the current female population. Now the CDC says that in 2014 there were 3,988,076 live births, of which about 50% are female that’s 1,994,038 more women per year which means for rape to = 1/4 of women there would have to be 498,509.5 rapes per year just to keep up with population growth.

      Therefore, mathematically speaking, the rate of rape would have to outpace the growth rate for the female population by more than 400% in order for this to be remotely plausible.

      • strych9, you just don’t understand the progressive feminist definition of rape.

        Scene at a frat party:
        Him: “Hey, baby, want to go back to my place and get naked and sweaty?”
        Her: “No.” (She was just raped.)

        Another scenario:
        Wife: “Not tonight, honey. I’m tired.”
        Husband: “Please. I’ll do all the work.”
        Wife: “OK.” (Wife was raped.)

        You see how it goes.

      • I think you missed the fact that the “2.8%” you came up with is *not* “annually”. It is across some period of decades which is not even made clear, especially when the data are apparently from 20 years ago. I suspect the period would be something more like 50 years, but say it is “only” 20. That makes an annual rate .014%, let’s all try not to panic. Ridiculous.

    • No. Stupid question.

      Female characters in Ayn Rand’s book would have nothing to do with this sort of “I’m just a victim and can’t defend myself” meme. In the end of “Atlas Shrugged” Dagny goes along on an armed raid to rescue John Galt and does in fact shoot one of the guards.

  3. I propose a law against murder, that will stop the evil domestic abusers of the world in their tracks.

  4. They’re actually heavily underestimating it. About 3.8 billion women are terrorized by men with firearms every year (so are nearly as many men)

    • Add those two numbers you cite together and you get a reasonable approximation of the current world population. So I think your numbers are probably unsustainable since I do not think that 100% of the world population is terrorized with firearms each year. If that is the case, who is doing the terrorizing? Ain’t me!

      • “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun” – Chairman Mao

        Also, following the Ayn Rand theme above, she made the point in “Atlas Shrugged” and many essays afterwords that government controls the people by the fact that they have the supreme legal right to the use of force (guns). Once again, see the last third of “Atlas Shrugged” for this, also her book “The Virtue of Selfishness”.

  6. “…that depends on two assumptions.”

    Actually it rests on a third assumption as well: that domestic abusers wouldn’t domestically abuse their partner if they didn’t have access to a firearm.

    Since people generally don’t home carry I would surmise that if you’re mad enough to go procure an object that could be used as a weapon and menace someone with it then what that object is probably doesn’t matter. You’re going to pick something that’s 1) easily accessible and 2) effective at menacing.

    Since guys tend to be larger, faster and stronger than females whether or not that weapon is a gun, ax or a meat cleaver generally doesn’t really matter because the woman isn’t going to be able to effectively fight back against any of them unless she has a gun.

    • I think it reasonable to surmise that most abused women are simply beaten. They are not killed until they try to run. The same with physically abused children. I have also read that sharp knives are more terrorizing than guns in such situations.

      • It would seem reasonable that an abused woman would be more apt to believe her abuser would cut her than shoot her. Once she’s shot, he’s the one who is screwed. A cut here and there can be covered up and not necessarily lethal, though effective in control.

      • Most police blotters would suggest that you’re right about the beatings.

        As for knives, my personal experience suggests that knives are indeed more “terrifying”. There’s a certain visceral reaction to a knife that isn’t present with a gun.

        This guy gets it and explains it pretty well.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0jwpwzGpGQ

        • Spot on, when I worked patrol the two things I feared the most were getting hit by a car and someone with a knife. The guy with a knife knows his limitations, he has to be sneaky and get in close, you have little to no warning of the attack.

  7. What were the 4.5 Million women brandishing? It could be self-defense. It could just be one of those techno-stand-offs that had nothing to do with sex (and that was the problem). For example, I’ve heard of a young couple getting into a gun fight because the wife’s mother was coming over and the husband wouldn’t put down the game controller.

    Not to make light of it but, if it takes a gun, they’re not partners. If it ‘includes’ a gun, it is just crazy sex related to a third party anecdotally.

    • I’m pretty sure you read that backwards. Men were brandishing firearms to intimidate and abuse their female partners.

      Actually, if we wanted to do something to reduce violence against women, we would somehow figure out a way to convince them to leave an abusive relationship. Most violence is repeat violence, because the woman just won’t leave. I know this first-hand, because my wife and I sheltered a woman and her family from her abusive husband, only to have the woman go back for more abuse.

      • No, I didn’t read backwards nothing.

        The title suggests the women were ’empty-handed’ when attacked. 4.5 Million women attacked by their partners (who had a gun) and none of them were the primary aggressor? Hmmm. 4.5 Million women just standing around yelling before they were abused by their “partner”.

  8. It seems to me that any well-regulated militia would keep tight controls upon munitions, and keep weapons out of the hands of people that cannot be trusted with them… right, TTAG?

    Are there still little brains out there that think Clinton wants to take away all the guns? It is probably the same UN-educated folks that thought Obama was going to take away all their guns. I could fill an ice chest full of all the guns taken away. Okay pin heads, for the final time, the majority of this country would like to make guns safer. Not repeal the 2nd amendment. DUH. Compare the amount of people killed by terrorist in this country to the number of people killed by guns. Not even close and yet all you scream about is terrorist are coming to kill us all. Your priorities are all screwed up. Let’s make America safer, it’s that simple.

    I defy the lunatics on this TTAG website and all of the trolls to give me the name of JUST ONE law-abiding citizen whose guns have been taken away. But they can’t do that because it hasn’t happened and it never will happen. Hillary just wants to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and mentally unstable people, and that would necessitate effective background checks for all gun sales. If you’re REALLY a law-abiding citizen, a background check shouldn’t be a problem, so why does everybody keep on screaming about their guns being taken away, I’m sick ‘n’ tired of all of this fear-mongering and lie

    “an armed society is a polite society” Eh?. Go to check some statistics and they don’t support this theory, because even in 2015, the statistics say that about 13286 gun violence related deaths occurred in USA, more than any foreign country in the world.

      • Careful with legitimate responses, you might cause AAP emotional trauma and you could be held liable for perceived damages.

      • Oh, you’ve done it now…that’ll just confirm that you are a definitely a RACIST (and a sexist) in the mind on this genius…you’ve exploited a black woman to make your evil point.

    • So you demand evidence of a law abiding citizen whose guns have been taken. Then in the next breath say Hillary just wants ti keep guns out of the hands of criminals?

      Did it ever occur to you that anybody could be declared a criminal under any law, even retroactively, and their guns could then be taken away? We’ve seen this with people who plead guilty to “domestic violence” decades ago, paid a fine, and then had their gun rights removed years later when DV became a disqualifier.

      What if tomorrow anyone who’s ever been prescribed an anti-depressant, any time in the past, gets defined as a prohibited possessor? Bye bye guns. We’ve already seen that in California with people who voluntarily committed themselves years before, but who’ve been perfectly mentally healthy ever since.

      What’s disturbing about your mindset is that it suggests you’ve done no serious thinking about this issue and the blank check authority you’d grant government. Alternately, it could be that you have done so and you know all of this. In that case you can only make your argument with lies and willful ignorance. What does it say about the nobility of your cause when it relies on sophistry to advance it?

    • If Obama and Clinton fail to confiscate guns, it’ll be because they’re prevented from doing so, not because they don’t have such a desire:
      Obama: http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/10/01/obama-praised-australias-gun-laws-after-oregon-shooting/
      Clinton: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/dem-primaries/257172-hillary-australia-style-gun-control-worth-looking-at

      Clinton has stated, as an official part of her campaign, that Heller was wrongly decided. The central finding of Heller was that there exists an individual right to keep and bear arms in the home! If the Second Amendment doesn’t even extend that far, then it’s not a right, but a privilege granted at the whim of the government.

      As for homicides and foreign countries, Brazil, a country with a gun controller’s wet dream in terms of laws, has 60,000 plus homicides a year, the vast majority of which are with guns. The US is middle of the road in terms of homicides, and the main driver of our problem with it is not guns, but gangs and the subcultures around them.
      http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/03/28/472157969/brazil-has-nearly-60-000-murders-and-it-may-relax-gun-laws

    • “I defy the lunatics on this TTAG website and all of the trolls to give me the name of JUST ONE law-abiding citizen whose guns have been taken away.”

      Anybody got a link to the infamous NY state letter concerning owners of AR platform rifles?

    • Hillary doesn’t give a crap about guns, she is all about control, and possibly about hypnotism based on your absurd words furiously flying in strange directions from your keyboard. You speak as if you know something but your ignorance screams from your very ‘factual’ statements.
      But YOU, oh yeah, the great gun grabber has a “HUGE BRAIN” compared to us POTG. Maybe if you actually used it you’d come to a more logical conclusion. “Mentally unstable” is the human condition, it is not a reason to deny armed self-defense.

    • No one is forcing you to go acquire firearms yet here you are, advocating for more restrictions, infringements and state power. Surely the irony is not lost on you, “Americans Against Fascism.”
      How’s this for fascism: Leave me alone and mind your own business.

    • Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were forced to sell or register their semi-automatic rifles, pistols and shotguns or else become felons under the SAFE act. There was no grandfathering apart from registration. If they chose to register, those firearms could not be sold or transferred to anyone within NY state and would be confiscated and destroyed upon the death of registrant.
      So while they didn’t take our guns away immediately, we were either forced to immediately sell them out of state and actual confiscation will occur down the road for firearms we chose to keep and register.
      That good enough for you. It’s constructive confiscation.

    • “It seems to me that any well-regulated militia would keep tight controls upon munitions, and keep weapons out of the hands of people that cannot be trusted with them…”

      Absolutely! That is why I recently bought a gun safe, before that I was prepared to shoot anyone (emphasis on “anyone”) who attempted to appropriate my guns and/or ammo, and why I would never lend arms, for example, to anyone as stupid as you.

      I understand that you are not capable of understanding all the overwhelming evidence that Obama and Clinton are conspiring with like-minded demagogues to deprive the American people of a basic right without any reason, and I’m not sure you would be capable of enough analytical thinking to *ever* understand, so we can just leave it at you remaining delighted with your ignorance, and me feeling no threat from someone who will die so quickly and easily should push ever come to shove. Simple, huh? I guess you showed us!

    • I had an “Uncanny Valley” moment when I saw that picture… then I realized she was NOT a mannequin!

  10. 4.5 million? Sounds made up.

    How many of those people were inner city thugs, not allowed to own guns anyways?
    How many of those people were cops?
    How many were average Joes with no criminal record?

    Context matters, and this isn’t the fault of the gun nor my fault as a gun owner, so we should not be taking the blame.
    Firearms don’t make criminals nor abusers, so why mention it? Oh wait. Agenda.

    • It might be made up but even if it’s not 4.5(!!!) million sounds scary.

      That’s 2.87% of the current female population (~157 million). It’s 30% lower than the portion of the female population that openly identifies as homosexual (~4%). Sounds a lot less scary doesn’t it?

      When numbers are in context they’re generally a lot less scary. Especially when we’re talking about agitprop numbers. (Unless of course we’re talking current economic numbers.)

  11. Am I supposed to believe that there is a sizable class of domestic abusers that otherwise wouldn’t be abussive if not for their access to a firearm?

    What drugs are these people on?

    • The trace is looking to connect a line between domestic abusers and gun owners. If you own a gun, you are probably a domestic abuser. etc. Which is bullshit. Come on. The gun doesn’t make the person. The presence of a gun doesn’t make that person become a domestic abuser. He is a domestic abuser. The gun is independent of what he is, but they want to make the rest of us gun owners look bad every moment they can.

        • Keep telling yourself that. As soon as Hillary and friends get us finally saved by laws banning gun sales to people on the Terrorist Watch List, this manner of “study” will make it obvious to our rulers, uh, representatives, that we *ALL* must be on that list, and all firearm sales will have instantly been banned, forever.

  12. Amazing, isn’t it, how a little sh!t typing from his mommy’s basement can hijack a thread from people who should know better.

    Ya been played, people. Again.

    • And in how many of those cases was the woman reluctant to leave the man even after repeated abuse?

      We can help these women. But they also have to help themselves.

  15. Ralph for the win! Changing it’s moniker too-like gray gay today. I got NO idea how anyone could possibly prove 4.5million “brandishings” either…?

  16. Soooooooo … is the Trace suggesting that abusive boyfriends and husbands would no longer be abusive if someone confiscated their firearms???

  18. The dumb broads should have armed themselves before slutting it up with abusive “partners”…..

  19. In my limited experience with domestic violence, consisting of two female employees with abusive husbands, the ladies had to draw on the husbands. Truly in fear of their own lives and the lives of the children, although the husbands were not armed. The now ex-husbands are in jail, where they deserve to be.

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