What gun does a woman want? AR-15s are “easy for women to hold,” Gayle Trotter, of the Independent Women’s Forum, said to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in her explanation of why an assault-style weapon was just what a young mother needed. She praised their weight, handling, “and most importantly, their appearance,” since “the peace of mind knowing she has a scary-looking gun gives her more courage.” When Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island asked whether a more modest weapon might not do the trick, Trotter said, “You can not understand. You are not a woman.” The senator was “a big man,” while women were little. A woman, Trotter said, might have to fight off four or five criminals “with her children screaming in the background.” She deserved “a right to choose” a weapon with a thirty-round magazine.

Women, as much as criminals and the mentally ill, were the subject of caricaturing at the hearings Tuesday. They were the besieged victims with only an AR-15 between themselves and a chaotic world of rapists and home invaders. To hear Trotter and her fellow-witness, Wayne LaPierre of the N.R.A., tell it, a gun is the sort of thing one ought to keep near a baby, like syrup of ipecac or a box of Band-Aids. Senator Chuck Grassley asked Trotter whether “banning guns which feature designs to improve accuracy disproportionately burdens women”—women apparently being not only small but also wild shooters. She thought they would. (Neither mentioned what might be the disproportionate benefit of closing a loophole that allows people with domestic-violence records to buy guns without background checks.) There was also a digression about how women, unlike criminals, quietly obeyed laws. Senator Lindsey Graham, in arguing about limits on magazines, told a story about a woman hiding in a closet who managed to put five of the bullets in her six-shooter into the body of a criminal who nonetheless drove away: “There can be a situation where a mother runs out of bullets because of what we do here.”

And yet, as I’ve written before, a gun in the home tends to do little more than make bad situations worse. When a gun is involved in domestic disputes, the chances that a woman will end up dead are far higher. A follow-up of a survey of women who had been the victims of domestic violence found that those who’d said they had a gun in the house were six times more likely to have been murdered. A gun kept within reach of a mother at all times is also something a toddler, or an older child, can find. Nancy Lanza had a lot of guns in her house. They kept neither her nor the children of Newtown safe.

But the talk about women was, in many ways, just a more crystalline version of a general vision of society and the law. In one of the day’s stranger exchanges, Senator Graham asked James Johnson, Baltimore’s chief of police, if his budget had been cut (it had), and told him that he should expect it to happen again: “I can tell people throughout this land, because of the fiscal state of affairs we have, there will be less police officers not more over the next decade. Response times are going to be less, not more.” This, according to the logic of the G.O.P., is an argument for turning homes into arsenals, not for protecting police budgets. You’ll need a gun, Graham said, because of who is “roaming the streets.” While gun ownership is presented as an expression of liberty, it is defended with images of universal victimhood. We are a nation of damsels in distress, left to reach for an AR-15.

LaPierre, too, talked about “a dramatic collapse in gun prosecutions” and how, by closing some background-check loopholes, the government would create a “universal federal nightmare.” (Alex Koppelman has more on LaPierre’s dystopia.) On the subject of mental-health, which has become the N.R.A.’s favorite subject other than gun violence, he veered so far from the territory of rights that he appeared to be suggesting that the mentally ill shouldn’t be on the streets at all. Nowhere was the idea that the strength of a community—or of a woman—and the power to protect the most vulnerable, might be measured by something other than magazine capacity or incarceration rates.

“Scary-looking guns” was also a phrase that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas used to mock Senator Feinstein’s proposed assault-weapons ban, which he presented as more proof of susceptibility to a gun’s looks. While the theoretical young mother saw her gun and felt brave, he claimed, gun-control advocates were deceived by appearances. They were drawn to the scariest-looking guns because of “cosmetic” features, while leaving plainer, more rugged types with more firepower alone. (Chief Johnson pointed out that features like pistol grips were in no way purely cosmetic.) The world seemed to be divided into those who had a deep and courageous knowledge of guns and fearful, shallow types who only saw the surface. Where actual men and women or, for that matter, Senator Feinstein’s personal experience with gun violence—she found Harvey Milk’s body after he and George Moscone, the Mayor of San Francisco, were shot dead, in 1978—fit into that equation is not at all clear.

For most of the hearing, Gayle Trotter was the only woman at the witness table. But before anyone spoke, the former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords came in with her husband, Captain Mark Kelly, a former Navy officer and space-shuttle commander. He remained for the entire hearing, and was the day’s second-most-effective witness, using the story of the day his wife was shot and six people were killed to argue for simple, sensible changes in the law. Jared Loughner, the gunman in the Tucson shooting, had had a thirty-round magazine. The thirteenth bullet killed a nine-year-old girl named Christina-Taylor Green, and a well-meaning bystander with a gun almost killed the wrong person. Kelly also talked about his military experience, and the “chaos” of a gun battle. It is probably no accident that the two main pro-gun-control witnesses were men who had served in uniform and said that they had no intention of giving up their guns.

Giffords spoke only briefly and haltingly, but no one was more powerful. “Speaking is difficult, but I need to say something important,” she said, sounding out each syllable. “Too many children are dying. Too many children. We must do something. It will be hard, but the time is now.” It is clear that she has not yet recovered from her injuries, and also that she was very brave.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.