Women Can’t Solve Our Gun Violence Problem Alone

Women have long fought gun violence. They’ve fought it as mothers, as feminists. Indeed, many have said that gun violence is a feminist issue, noting that mass killers are usually abusers of women. This refrain has emerged once more in the aftermath of the grievously preventable massacre of 17 high school students and faculty members in Parkland, Florida.

This time, men are publicly insisting that women need to wage this war against arms.

But this is one hideous mess we can’t just clean up on our own.

Not because gun violence doesn’t affect us. There’s a reason women take this so personally, and it’s not just because our children are getting murdered in their classrooms. Four and a half million of us have survived threats at gunpoint from our intimate partners. Those partners kill another 50 of us each month.

And it’s not because it’s unfair that we’re asked to do this work. The losses are so tragic, enormous, so consistent, that fair doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it. We can, and must, keep fighting. But men, we need you — and you need you — to win this war.

Guns are synonymous with masculinity, and it’s men who need to organize to lay them down. There is no winning strategy in women hectoring men about what masculinity they can be afforded ― even if we’re right, which we are. That leads to deeper emasculation, which scholars have found to be at the root of so much gun ownership and violence.

Source: huffingtonpost