During the hearing for the state’s proposed college campus gun ban, rape survivor Amanda Collins bravely shared her story of survival. Democrat Senator Evie Hudak responded:

“I just want to say, statistics are not on your side, even if you had had a gun. You said that you were a martial arts student, I mean person, experience in taekwondo, and yet because this individual was so large and was able to overcome you even with your skills, and chances are that if you had had a gun, then he would have been able to get than from you na possibly use it against you …”

(h/t @PeterSinger724)

Hudak offered no statistics to back up her assertion. Before her sat a rape victim who explained how she wished she’d had a firearm to defend herself from her rapist. Said Collins:

“As I live with the memory, weighted with the question of my life: ‘What would have been different if I had been carrying the weapon I was licensed to carry that night?’ I would like to leave you with a question: ‘How does rendering me defenseless protect you against a violent crime?’”

Hudak conflated martial arts with firearm defense without realizing that one of these tactics requires close contact with an attacker, a physical deflection. Hudak’s prejudiced characterization of women and firearms is reminiscent of Colorado Rep. Joe Salazar’s sexist remark that women were simply too hysterical to own firearms.

I’ve written before how gun control is the real war on women. Some facts for Hudak:

According to the FBI, Americans use firearms in self defense 2.1 million times annually. Cases where firearms are used criminally amount to 579,000. Seventy percent of those cases are carried out by criminal repeat offenders. Barrett and Democrats would seek to punish those protecting themselves rather than the criminals. There is a war on women, and it’s coming from the left to turn women into victims. Note this (bold my emphasis): In the vast majority of those self-defense cases, the citizen will only brandish the gun or fire a warning shot.

In less than 8% of those self-defense cases will the citizen will even wound his attacker.

Over 1.9 million of those self-defense cases involve handguns .

As many as 500,000 of those self-defense cases occur away from home.

Almost 10% of those self-defense cases are women defending themselves against sexual assault or abuse.

Consider this: One in four collegiate women report rape and one in five are raped.

Hudak’s argument that a woman could be disarmed and her firearm used on her flies in the face of FBI crime statistics and presupposes that the woman won’t fire and/or is incapable of properly using a firearm. See, Amanda Collins was overpowered, disarmed, and left to be a victim. By Nevada lawmakers. Not her rapist. Just what Hudak said would happen, though not exactly.

Quite a dangerous thing to disarm women and create more rape victims based on a dangerous, baseless assumption.