It’s quite a notion that Dana Loesch lies out when she says, as she did Wednesday during CNN’s Town Hall, that guns help stop women from being raped.

It’s a pity that it is not true.

During the Town Hall, Loesch, a spokesperson for the NRA, remarked that she thinks of “a young woman named Kim Corban, who was a college student who was brutally raped in her dorm… And one of the things that she speaks out about loudly now is how she wished she would have had the ability to have some sort—a shotgun, whatever it was, to be able to defend herself.”

It is a bit odd to see the right simultaneously say men are so virtuous that calling them out for bad sexual behavior is a witch hunt, but also so bad that every woman should have a gun to shoot them if she needs to.

Women are 100 times more likely to be shot by a man with a gun than use one for self defense



That said, I feel for Corban. To be raped is a terrible violation. And often, societally, when women have been raped we wonder if there was something we could have done to prevent it. It’s easy to let our thoughts drift to, “If only I had a gun (or a knife, or something) maybe I could have stopped them.”

But that’s not the way it generally works.

Christy Martin, a professional boxer and gun owner, explains how she attempted to use her gun on her attacker unsuccessfully. She says, “I was shot with my own gun. Just putting a weapon in the woman’s hand is not going to reduce the number of fatalities or gunshot victims that we have.”

And bear in mind, Martin was a professional athlete who was probably stronger and more capable of fighting off her abuser than many women might be.

Martin has gone on to state that, “Too many times, [a woman's] male counterpart or spouse will be able to overpower them and take that gun away.”

And that is if the gun was immediately available. Providing that someone is following sensible, NRA-recommended protocol regarding having a gun in their residence, most rapists do not give you time to unlock the safe where the gun is kept and then load it.

The notion that guns are going to protect you from an attacker whether used by a man or woman for self defense is a bit overblown. Experts from a Harvard study found that, when faced with an attacker, the likelihood of injury was approximately the same (10.9 percent) when the victim tried to use a gun in self defense versus when they did nothing (11 percent). Those experts went on to remark to The Washington Post: “Running away and calling the police were associated with a reduced likelihood of injury after taking action; self-defense gun use was not.”

That’s not to say that no woman has ever fended off her attacked with a handgun. Some have. But it’s ludicrous to say that guns are a net gain for women.

Rape is most likely to occur in states that have the most relaxed gun laws



Women are 100 times more likely to be fatally shot by a man with a gun than use one for self defense. Women who are suffering from domestic violence are five times more likely to be killed if there is a gun in their home, regardless of who the gun technically belongs to. A 1997 study found that, even in cases where there is no domestic violence, a woman’s risk factors for a violent death in the home increase threefold if a gun is present in that home. It’s important to remember, of course, there are the women who are shot accidentally, like the pregnant woman who was shot by her father this January.

However, since rape seems to be Dana Loesch’s main concern, we can focus more on that. When it comes to rape, well, it is most likely to occur in states that have the most relaxed gun laws. For every woman who could, theoretically, fend a man off with a gun, there is a man who could intimidate a woman into having sex with a gun. One woman, during debates about whether or not guns should be allowed on college campuses, claimed, "If my rapist had a gun at school, I have no doubt I would be dead.”

Even if the manufacturers make them a cute shade of pink, guns are not tools that are helpful to women. They kill far more women than they save. But Dana Loesch is right about one thing—the world can be a dangerous place for women. Rape is horrible. And one way to help make the world safer for women is to make weapons like guns harder for dangerous people to get.

Jennifer Wright Jennifer Wright is BAZAAR.com's Political Editor at Large.

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