There’s something very off about Everytown for Gun Safety’s latest advertisement.
The ad features a woman on the phone with a 911 operator as her child sits nearby. The woman’s ex, whom she apparently has a restraining order against, kicks in the door and struggles with the woman briefly before pulling out a Glock and shooting her. The police never arrive.
I must admit, I’m a bit confused as to where they were going with this.
Was this commercial supposed to highlight why women should have a force equalizing device that can help them stop attackers in their tracks because the police aren’t omnipresent and attackers have zero regard for the law? If so, the folks at Everytown did a great job.
Or is this ad just a blatantly sexist assertion that American women are incapable of standing up for themselves? Can single mothers not fulfill the basic, biologically hardwired task of defending their children and themselves from those that would do them harm without the help of the police? Do they need big strong police officers to deal with the big strong abusive ex who kicked in the door?
If the folks at Everytown weren’t the kind of people who don’t leave suburbia without their armed guards, they might find that the average American woman isn’t a helpless, delicate flower just waiting to be a victim. If they took a minute to look up non-manufactured statistics, they would know that women make up the quickest growing demographic of firearm purchasers.
Firearms are a great equalizer. Who knows, maybe the woman in the ad wasn’t able to properly defend herself because of a mandatory waiting period.
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