Student Op-Ed from California Hits Nail on the Head About Women and Gun Rights

The right to keep and bear arms is a human right. Even if most other nations ignore it, having the means to defend yourself is an essential right, even if you elect not to do so. It’s like free speech. It’s a human right, even if you don’t care to speak out about things.

But all too often, it’s treated like nothing of the sort, even here in the United States. People want to attach things to it that boil down to it becoming a privilege you have to look to the government to grant after a sincere, “Mother, may I?”

The truth, though, is that for some people, that right matters more than for others.

If you’re a UFC champion,  you can handle yourself in a brawl just fine, I’m sure. If someone tries to choke you out so they can kidnap you, you can handle it.

For most women, though, well…that’s not how it works, and at least one California college student understands that.

Writing that gun rights are women’s rights, which they are, Grace Rutherford started talking about Suzanna Gratia Hupp, who was famously disarmed by Texas law when the Luby’s Cafeteria shooting in Killeen, Texas, happened. She was there, but her gun was in her vehicle, so she was powerless to do anything except watch people die.

Then Rutherford notes:

While anyone may need a gun to protect themselves after undergraduate life, women are especially in need of such protection because of our physical weakness when compared to men. Men are, on average, physically stronger than women. Biological differences in muscle mass, bone density and testosterone levels consistently result in greater strength among men. Research shows that even untrained men are stronger than athletically trained women. As a wrestler and judoka, I’ve had a lot of experience with these differences. While I’ve had wrestling wins against boys, almost every male in my same weight class has been stronger than me. 

Competing against men in wrestling and judo is difficult, but the stakes are much higher in the real world, where there aren’t any rules to the game.

Women need access to guns to even the playing field when faced with physically stronger assailants. Consider the 57-year-old woman living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who was raped by Ronnie Preyer in October 2008. When this registered sex offender came back five days later to assault her a second time, she used a 12-gauge shotgun to kill him in self-defense. Take Melinda Herman, a Georgian wife and mother who protected her nine-year-old twins while her husband was at work, when Paul Slater, a thirty-two-year-old with an extensive criminal history, broke into her house with a crowbar. She shot him, saving her life and the lives of her children. Similarly, in Richmond, California, eighty-four-year-old Gustava Harvey fired a .38 caliber revolver when an intruder kicked down her door; the gunfire alone caused him to flee.

A gun neutralizes physical strength differences — what matters is not size, but the ability to act. There are numerous accounts of women of all ages protecting themselves, their children and their homes through the use of guns. Without a gun, these stories could have ended very differently. Without a weapon, women are forced to rely on physical strength they do not have; with a gun, they gain the immediate and equal capacity to defend themselves.

While the left has now engaged in a gaslighting effort to convince us that there really aren’t any physical differences in athletic performance between men and women as a way to justify transwomen in women’s sports, the harsh reality is that those differences do, in fact, exist. Just look at the gold medalists for both sexes in the Olympic 100m sprint, as well as the gold medal totals for each in weightlifting, comparing similar weight classes.

Those exercises should make it clear that if the top end between the sexes is that different, then the claims about the averages should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

As a result, the idea that a woman can perfectly take care of herself simply because she’s studied a little BJJ is ridiculous. That’s not how it works.

Because of that, gun rights are even more important for women, most of whom aren’t going to dedicate their lives to achieving peak athletic performance, all so they might be stronger and faster than a merely average man. It’s just not realistic, nor something most women have an interest in doing–kind of like how most men don’t do that, either.

Guns are equalizers. As the old saying goes, God created all men. Sam Colt made them equal. That goes for women, too, naturally.

This surprised me as the Claremont Colleges aren’t exactly known for gun rights educational values, but it does restore at least a bit of my faith that, despite going to college, the kids might actually still turn out alright.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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