Guns Have More Rights than Women in the United States

That’s not hyperbole.

Let’s start with a couple of stories:

Despite a cautiously protective upbringing, your twelve-year-old daughter develops a confluence of problems, and you don’t know why. 

Defiant, distant, and melancholy, she has morphed from the beautiful, joyful, obedient good girl you thought you had into this: a stranger.

Instead of trying to figure out what exactly has transformed your daughter from her sweet, church-going angel into someone so dark and unfamiliar, you discipline her. You tell her to try harder. You tell her to cheer up. You remind her of how “good” her life is; of all of the many blessings in her life. 

This intervention has the opposite effect, forcing her deeper into herself and into a crowd you have deemed unsavory. 

She is lost. 

Your daughter has a secret that she cannot tell you. Based on your flippant comments over her young years about “whores” and “sluts,” she knows you will judge her.

She does not comprehend that the forces that betrayed her, that young man who took advantage of her good-girl nature and naivety, are fully to blame for her abuse. Not her. 

But now she’s trapped. Her little body, newly inducted into the curses of womanhood, is now housing the spawn of her rapist. She can barely understand what is happening. 

She feels sick all the time, tired, and in physical and emotional pain, and she has no one to turn to for help. 

But you begin to notice the changes to her slight frame. Is that a tiny bump in her belly?

Things begin to click, and you start to feel sick yourself.

How could I have missed the signs? You wonder. 

You finally confront her, and she tells you. Through sobbing waves of tears, she explains the story. She’s almost inconsolable at this point, hyperventilating as she tries to articulate her predicament. 

That nice boy from church? The one all the parents like? The one who was so interested in helping out with the youth group? He’s a predator. 

Of course, he was super nice at first. He handed out compliments like candy. He even brought her little gifts. Frappuccinos from Starbucks. A new Taylor Swift shirt. A pretty bookmark for her Bible. 

But then weird things started happening.

He asked her to go for a ride to the Starbucks with him. He had her alone with him at last. And then the touching began.

She was so confused. He was one of her teachers, right? Why is he touching me… there?

Part of her kind of enjoyed it, which was super confusing. It awakened something inside her that she didn’t know existed. But she also felt guilty. And gross.

Naturally, he pointed out the pleasures of it all. How nice and good he was to her. And then the warning came. Don’t tell anyone, especially your parents, or you will get in trouble.

She knew she was already in pretty deep at that point, but she believed him. She thought she brought this on herself. After all, she gave in to his persistent niceness. She thought she was special.

And then that one night came. The terrible, awful thing happened. As she becomes completely engulfed by her deluge of tears, barely able to breathe, she attempts to explain how he held her down, her hands pinned by her ears, him letting go briefly to unbuckle his pants and rip off her underwear under her dress, and the pain. She froze. 

Because she “let it happen,” she thought it was her fault. After all, he explained, she brought this on herself. She led him on. She acted like she liked it.  

And now, just as she started having monthly cycles, they stopped. 

What is happening? She asks. 

You already know. She is pregnant. 

You live in a state where strict anti-abortion laws have been passed. Laws you fully agreed to. Until now. Now, it’s your daughter. It’s your world. And it’s a hot mess. 

Your daughter has no rights to her body. You know this. Her rapist knows this. And now she will bear the brunt of this burden. Her little 12-year-old body, still emotionally stuck between playing with dolls and wearing makeup, will have to grow up fast.

___________

“GUNS GUNS GUNS!”

The scrappy vinyl sign advertises, attracting hundreds to the local gun show. You know the ones. Held in that worn-down convention hall in that bad part of town. 

Inside, booths featuring firearms abound. 

A young man wanders in, overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. With his palms clammy, he nervously approaches a booth. 

“What can I do for you today, son?” the man queried.

“Um… I need a gun. I’m not sure what kind I need.”

“Well, what’cha lookin’ to do with it? Go huntin’? Or keep the nutsos off your property?”

“I guess more for protection.”

He shows the young man his recommendations. 

Despite this kid’s squirrely nature and the weirdness he exudes, the man sells him a gun. No background checks are necessary in this scenario. 

Had there been, maybe his purchase would have been prevented. This young adult has a record. And now he has an instrument of death in the palm of his hands. 

_________

You are at work when a news alert sounds on your phone.

There has been another mass shooting, and the suspect has not yet been apprehended. You almost yawn at this news, as these events are about as American as apple pie, at this point. They happen nearly every day. 

This one catches your eye, though. It is at a local high school. Stories are already emerging about multiple dead and wounded, with students jumping out of windows to escape the deluge of bullets. 

Guess who the shooter is? That weird kid from the gun show. 

___________

Although the above scenarios are fictional, they are very believable. 

As ruling attitudes keep shifting to the right, our country is not becoming great again. It’s becoming a dystopian nightmare. 

How did our lawmakers allow women to be stripped of their bodily autonomy? 

How did gun laws become so lax? 

Who decided that Jesus was Lord of America and that he loves guns, hates gays, and thinks women should be subservient to men? 

I did not work so diligently to earn a Master’s degree so that I could have a lawmaker with less education than me tell me that I don’t deserve bodily autonomy. I haven’t sent my daughters to college to become better educated just to die by pregnancy later. 

Why do I think this might happen? Only because my mother-in-law had multiple ectopic pregnancies that required termination. I have experienced two miscarriages myself. 

Women are going to jail for having miscarriages, are being forced to carry non-viable pregnancies to term (causing harm to both the mother and suffering for the fetus), and babies are being forced to have babies.

Lawmakers have made numerous egregious statements about rape and pregnancy. Statements that make it glaringly obvious that these people have no basic understanding of science. Politicians should have no say in dictating what a woman does with her uterus. 

No one is advocating for abortion to be the primary means of birth control. But we do need a healthcare system that takes care of the best interest of the existing human—the one who is a person with thoughts and feelings. 

My dad told me a story several times about their choices when it came to growing our family. There was a faith-based hospital in town, and my parents chose the other one that provided maternal services. His reasoning? If there were to be an emergency during childbirth, the faith-based facility would prioritize the life of the child. 

Do you think my fictional short stories couldn’t happen in real life? 

I’m a survivor of childhood sexual assault. I was only nine, and it played out a lot like the story above. Fortunately, my instinct was to fight, not freeze, and he wasn’t successful in raping me, although he did use the word. 

And now I’ve also been a victim of gun violence, as my next-door neighbors held target practice in their backyard, and a bullet entered my home. 

You know, you think you are prepared for the world in which you exist. And then everything changes.

I grew up in a post-Roe world. I felt assured that the battle for bodily autonomy had already been won by my grandmother’s generation. And now that rug has been snatched from under me and every other woman in this country. I have no idea how to make the current state of woefully inadequate reproductive freedom OK for my adult daughters. 

And I live in a nice neighborhood. Yes, it’s rural, but everyone generally takes care of their neighbors. Until they don’t. 

I have to resign myself to the fact that when it comes to guns, no one is safe as long as laws about where and when you can fire them and who can own them are so lax. How is it easier to own a gun than to get a driver’s license?

When I was a home health practitioner, part of my territory included the inner city of Richmond and the rougher parts of the East End. But at least I learned quickly what I was getting myself into. I could be emotionally prepared. 

When I got out of my car in the public housing areas, there were always a few guys looking out for my vehicle. I’d emerge in my scrubs and lab coat, and the boys would yell, “Hey, nurse! We got you!” That didn’t make me feel much better about seeing places on the news that evening where my travels had taken me, but at least I knew someone had my back.

I went into some crazy white people’s homes that were less safe than the projects. Why? Think about how comfortable you’d feel walking into a house where the owner has an AR-15 casually leaning into the corner by the front door. (It was loaded. I asked.) In one of these gun-crazy homes, my patient was being sex trafficked. That’s how she paid rent. (Yes, It was reported.)

I learned to expect these shocking things in my work. But I sure as hell didn’t expect a bullet to come flying into my own home. My personal space of safety and refuge. 

My point is, none of us are immune to the consequences of terrible laws. 

Do you think your family will be OK with the super strict laws emerging against abortion? Just wait until a pregnancy goes awry. Or your child is raped. 

Or that you live in a place safe from gun violence? Until your neighbors decide to hold target practice in their backyard (yes, this is generally not lawful, but it is in my county.)

Are you going to protect your family from harm? Don’t take your safety or your autonomy for granted. 

So many people cry against government overreach, yet this is what we’ve got with the rights of women. It’s like women aren’t even human anymore. And in the case of guns, we’ve let all the rules slide. Make it make sense to me. 

Why is my uterus more regulated than the gun that shot a bullet through my bedroom? 

Yes, I’m angry. I should be. We ALL should be. 

___________

Lead photo: free image from Pexels.

We have a simple question to answer in November of 2024. We can live in a theocracy ruled by white, Christian Nationalists, or we can live in a democracy. That’s the choice.

As always, I hope you all are safe and healthy.