The Equalizer? Crime,Vulnerability,and Gender in Pro-Gun Discourse

“Universal” Vulnerability: Victimization

When asked about their reasons for carrying a gun, interviewees respond by calling attention to their ever-present risk of victimization. Gun carriers emphasized embodied helplessness amid a broader social breakdown, and they usually did so in two ways: They referenced firsthand experiences of embodied vulnerability, or they described an embodied vulnerability to crime as an abstract, but nevertheless inherent, aspect of their everyday life by recounting imagined or secondhand stories of crime. In doing so, they articulated the inadequacy of various sources of protection, including parents, police, and even the socioeconomic privilege that undergirds “safe neighborhoods.”

Consider Sam and Michael, both of whom were directly victimized. Sam is a White man in his late 20s and a member of several pro-gun organizations, including the NRA, and he grew up in a rural area of the Detroit Metro suburbs relatively unaffected by crime. Nevertheless, when I asked him why he began carrying a firearm on a regular basis, he told me the following story of being bullied as a child.

I was kind of a small kid, and [three older kids] started harassing me [when I was on the playground]. They were in roller blades and hockey sticks. I guess the easy way to say it [is that] they beat the snot out of me with the hockey sticks. My parent who had always been my protector wasn’t there. That feeling of helplessness tends to stick with you. Even all these years later, it’s that feeling of helplessness that I remembered.

Meanwhile, Michael is a White man in his late 40s. In contrast to Sam, he grew up in the city of Detroit, and now, he teaches firearms instruction in an urban suburb. When I asked him why he turned to carrying firearms, he told me,

When I was 18, I was nearly beaten to death by a gang. I sustained really serious injuries. I was able to break the hold that somebody had on me—there was nine of them. When I got away, I called 911. A police car finally rolled up, and I told them I needed to get to that hospital. They weren’t all that concerned, but they let me in the car. [Then they left me at] a bus stop, and when the bus came, I staggered on to it and said to the driver, “I have to get to a hospital somehow, I can’t see, I don’t know where I am.” And he took me to another intersection and gave me a transfer so I could take another bus and eventually end up at the hospital. I had a couple of surgeries, a couple months of rehab. About six months later, I was able to return to work, and it cost me thousands of dollars.

Sam and Michael did not simply fear crime; they situated themselves as vulnerable to crime by emphasizing their experience of victimization in terms of total, embodied helplessness (Pantazis, 2000). For both of them, their usual sources of protection proved to be inadequate; for Sam, his mother was nowhere to be found as he was beaten by three older kids, while for Michael, the police failed to help him reach a hospital. As such, they discussed their experiences in terms of extreme bodily vulnerability.

An acknowledgment of vulnerability—that is, an acknowledgment of both embodied helplessness and faltering social protections—consistently marked the first- and secondhand stories of victimization that gun carriers told me. Connor, a White salesman in an urban suburb of Detroit, used to think he lived in a “safe” neighborhood. As he said, “like 99% of other people in the world, I thought nothing’s gonna happen to me, I’ll be okay.” However, when a random kidnapping occurred at a fast food joint he frequented, Connor realized that he, too, could be the target of crime and decided to purchase a handgun. Corey, a White cashier in Flint, simply stated that “crime’s up, cop’s are low” to explain his decision to purchase a gun, explaining that the recent economic downturn had left him believing that he, too, could fall victim to crime and thus had to rely on only himself (i.e., “cop’s are low”) for protection.

More than positioning themselves as hypothetical victims of crime, gun carriers saw themselves as inherently vulnerable to an ever-present threat of crime: Crime could happen anytime, anywhere. Take Danny, a White writer and part-time firearms instructor, Rachel, a White secretary and part-time firearms instructor, and Gerald, an African American who runs a foster care facility in Detroit:

I disagree with the premise that it’s very unlikely that you’re going to be attacked on the street. I don’t have a statistic to back this up, this is just from the reading I’ve done. You probably have a 50/50 chance in your lifetime of being criminally victimized . . . I had a student who had been abducted from a supermarket parking lot. She said she was abducted, put in a trunk of a car, taken someplace else, raped, beaten, and left for dead. She survived, and she now carries two guns at all times. A supermarket parking lot! Who would think? (Danny)

This [gun] is for my own safety. I go out for walks all the time, and these guys come out from nowhere, and if they’ve got guns or not, they’re big boys! (Rachel)

People just wig out, just for the fact that that’s how they feel that day! (Gerald)

Danny explicitly acknowledges that although statistics may suggest otherwise, crime is a real, ever-present threat (“I don’t have a statistic to back this up”). Even so, he estimates that a person is just as likely to be victimized by crime over the course of his or her lifetime as not, and it could happen in the least expected places (“A supermarket parking lot! Who would think?”) Meanwhile, Gerald emphasizes crime as unpredictable, saying that “people just wig out just for the fact that that’s how they feel that day.” Likewise, Rachel emphasizes that “these guys come out of nowhere,” as if the threat of crime literally materializes out of thin air. Their conviction that crime can happen anytime, anywhere is not based on expert knowledge (i.e., statistics) as much as lay knowledge (Lupton & Tulloch, 1999): Danny purposively reads about self-defense, teaches self-defense courses, and knows several crime victims, and Rachel told me that most of her knowledge about crime comes from stories and firsthand accounts from other instructors and her students. Meanwhile, Gerald told me that his knowledge of crime comes from his firsthand experiences of victimization and secondhand experiences he hears about from friends and acquaintances.

Sociologists have highlighted that modern society is characterized by concerns about risk and fear (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991; Lupton, 1999), particularly crime (Garland, 2002; Simon, 2007). Gun carriers’ understanding of crime as an ever-present threat is in line with these broader social concerns about risk. By emphasizing the ever-present risk of crime, gun carriers are able to present their cause as a universal one, glossing over the ways in which race and gender structure who is most vulnerable to crime. Further downplaying the significance of gender and race, I now show how they imagine guns as the great equalizer that neutralizes differences of gender and race and allows every law-abiding citizen to equally protect him or herself from the ever-present threat of crime.

“Universal” Solutions: The Great Equalizer

A popular adage within gun circles is that “God created man and woman [or simply, man], but Samuel Colt [a firearms manufacturer] made them equal.” During my interviews, gun carriers told me that guns leveled differences among men and between men and women and allowed women to defend themselves against crime as much as men. This emphasis on guns as an “equalizer” echoes Stroud’s (2012) finding that men carry guns in part to address the aging, and weakening, male body. Extending this finding that guns equalize differences among men, I found that gun carriers view guns as “equalizers” across lines of gender and racial difference. The promotion of guns beyond White men complicates the typical caricature of gun advocates as bigoted “toothless, butt-scratching bubbas” (Massey, 2004, p. 577); rather than dismiss their professed inclusivity as window-dressing, I interrogate this professed inclusivity seriously because it shows how the social construction of crime, rather than overt racism or sexism, reproduces privilege along the lines of gender and race.

Some accounts of gun owners and carriers suggest that pro-gun men view women as “gun grabbers” who take away their guns and gun rights (Burbick, 2006). As Burbick’s (2006) analysis suggests, this term has been used by gun proponents to describe wives, mothers and girlfriends who pressure them to sell their guns or discourage them from participating in gun culture. While the gun carriers I interviewed did use that term to describe anti-gun politicians (such as U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, U.S. House Representative Nancy Pelosi, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg), they generally articulated a different relationship between women and guns than that captured by the phrase “gun grabber.” Consider Paul, a White firefighter from Flint, Nancy, a White secretary from the Detroit suburbs, and Ron, an African American instructor in his 50s:

If Hulk Hogan breaks into my house, my wife is going to stand in the hallway and blaze away until he falls. It doesn’t matter that he could physically dominate her at any moment, she has an equalizer. (Paul)

You know, a grandma can pull the trigger. It has nothing to do with [the gender of] who’s carrying it. He’s [pointing to her husband] no more dangerous than I am. We can both pull the trigger. It’s just that simple. (Nancy)

The criminals really don’t have an idea as to who’s carrying and who’s not. All it takes is for a few bad guys to get shot and word will get out: Hey, people are carrying guns now! Especially women [carriers]! (Ron)

Here, self-defense through guns is seen as an “equalizer” against the backdrop of inherent inequality across gender. Paul suggests that any differences in physical strength implied by gender—he contrasts his wife to Hulk Hogan—disappear once his wife is armed, while Nancy reduces self-defense to a simple, physically easy action that is independent of one’s gender: “pulling the trigger.” Similarly, Ron described concealed guns as a “threat” to criminals, regardless of the carrier’s gender; criminals will presumably be less likely to target people—“especially women”—if only they know that “people are carrying guns now.”

Echoing this belief that guns are gender “equalizers,” male gun carriers often told stories about how they encouraged women in their lives to carry guns or how they were disappointed that these women chose not to carry. Some men emphasized their own roles as protectors as they encouraged women to be armed. The gun carried by Paul’s wife serves as a way for Paul to fulfill his role as protector in absentia. As he described,

I would hate to think that right now, while I’m sitting here at work, my wife is absolutely defenseless at home . . . The only thing that is going to protect my wife and my children from whatever he has in mind is a gun that she keeps next to the bed.

Likewise, Richard, a White retired engineer, imagined a “woman to be in her own bedroom unarmed alone” as he encouraged that his wife, and women more generally, be armed:

She [my wife] has a pistol that she keeps to the side of the bed, which is good. If she wants to get rid of me, it’ll be handy [laughs]! But I don’t want any woman to be in her own bedroom unarmed alone. I’m sorry. I don’t think any woman should be on the highway alone without being armed.

As with Paul, the gun that Richard’s wife has at her bedside seems to stand in for a missing (male?) protector: Any woman who finds herself “alone” therefore “should” have a gun. Other gun carriers described women’s guns as supplementing, rather than supplanting, men’s monopoly on the means of self-protection (McCaughey, 1997). After emphasizing that women should be armed, Justin, a father and husband, told me that he encourages his wife to carry in his presence: “if we were together, I would definitely make sure she had it.” However, his reasoning behind this encouragement revealed that her gun hardly acted as a means of gender equality: “you have it with you, and then I can use it, you know.” Likewise, Jamal, an African American gun carrier, told me that he thought it was “cute” that women carried, but that should “something go down,” he assumes that he’ll “take control.”

But intertwined with, and alongside, these more patriarchal co-optations of gender inclusivity were statements that departed from male protectionism (Stiehm, 1982). Casey, a 29-year-old White gun carrier, told me that he has taught each of his ex-girlfriends how to shoot a gun and encouraged them to carry as well; during our interview, he referenced Angelina Jolie’s character in Mr. and Mrs. Smith to describe his ideal mate: “A girl who not only do I love and I want to be with, but she’s got my back, too!” Opening the possibility that he might need a woman, and her gun, to defend him against threat, Casey explicitly breaks from the patriarchal formulation that men have an exclusive privilege to protect. Meanwhile, Dylan, a White technician from suburban Detroit, weaves together these two formulations—the more patriarchal version that centers on the absent masculine protector and the more egalitarian version that emphasizes women’s equal participation in the protection of self and others:

The divorce rate is at 50%, and with the single family being so prevalent, I think a woman has to take on her own protection as a responsibility. And I’ll tell you what—the guy is not infallible! Why not have two people that can protect themselves rather than one?

These data suggest that gun carriers are not a homogeneous group with respect to whether they promote guns to women on patriarchal or more egalitarian terms (Stiehm, 1982; Young, 2003). Regardless, though, they do so using an inclusive discourse by situating guns as a gender-equalizing tool. But what about other lines of difference, such as race? Although less frequently, gun carry was discussed by interviewees as not only a gender equalizer but also a race equalizer. Brandon, for example, paints guns as “equalizers” in broad strokes: “[Armed] self-defense is a uniting point for men, women, across the political spectrum, across races. It is an equalizer.”

The articulation of guns as “equalizers” provided gun carriers with a rhetorical device to embrace guns as a “universal” solution to the problem of crime, allowing them to distance themselves from beliefs, attitudes, and logics that have become stigmatized as explicitly racist (a move that tends to result in “colorblind racism” rather than the elimination of racism; see Bonilla-Silva, 2010). Explicitly taking on the stereotype of gun advocates as racist, Timothy, a White construction contractor in his late 20s from a rural area in Southeast Michigan, told me that: “by and large a responsible firearms owner will stand back-to-back with another man, woman or child of any race, nation or creed to help them defend their own life.” Likewise, Gerald, an African American gun carrier, emphasized that the use of guns for self-defense is “universal” and cuts across social boundaries: “I think its universal, no matter what race you are. You’d be surprised. I’ve talked to preachers, to Mormons. To people that you’d never, ever think would be into it.” During my interviews, a few White gun carriers rather explicitly encouraged law-abiding African Americans to arm themselves; Sam exclaimed later that “People in Detroit—for the love of god, carry something! Anything! It’s the only way that the predators in society are going to learn,” while Dylan, the White technician, told me, “If I was Black, I would have my gun, I would have my concealed pistol license. And most of my friends that are down there [in Detroit] do.”

Overall, gun carriers encouraged “honest people”—in the words of Richard—to own and carry guns. This promotion of guns as equalizers reflected their contention that crime is an ever-present threat, and it also allowed them to distance themselves from the overtly sexist and racist connotations often associated with gun politics and gun culture.

Narrow Construction of the Social Problem: Violent Street Crime

The articulation of guns as the “great equalizer” stands in tension with the particularistic understanding of crime that gun carriers assume. While gun carriers imagine vulnerability as an inherent aspect of human life, they narrowly imagine crime in warlike terms as a fast, violent, and sudden threat that is perpetrated by hyperaggressive, oftentimes Black, male strangers. By focusing on this rendition of violent street crime, gun carriers are able to justify their use of guns as the “logical” solution—in the words of one gun carrier—to the problem of crime.

Consider how Leonard, a Hispanic mechanic in his 40s, Ben, a White retired engineer, and Patrick, a White firearms instructor, hypothetically discuss crime:

More and more people are going to run in packs. Do you think everything is going to be perfect, and you’re all going to face one assailant and only need 10 rounds of ammunition? [Criminals] don’t go down with one bullet. They bleed out. The only thing that shocks the body is kinetic energy. The more kinetic energy in the body cavity, the quicker it’s going to work. One bullet, they don’t go down from. People have been known to not go down from 20 bullets. (Leonard)

It’s you or them. A guy flashes a knife. You are going to get stabbed. The fight’s started. Do you want to continue to take it? Do you want to save your life? Not to mention—your daughters or your infant son—that’s how serious it is! This isn’t a game! (Ben)

You are trying to save your life from someone who is determined, predetermined that they are going to kill you . . . Your job now is to quote—stop that threat. How do stop that threat? By shooting them multiple times. Repeatedly as accurately as possible so that you are effectively killing them before they kill you . . . The reality is that you need to stop them before they stop you. (Patrick)

Ben, Leonard, and Patrick articulate a number of consistencies that I found across other interviews. First, all imagined scenarios are extremely violent. Second, Ben and Leonard’s scenarios involve a clearly identifiable threat: For Ben, a stranger menacingly flashes a weapon with the intention to kill, and for Leonard, it is “people” who “run in packs” like animals. Meanwhile, Patrick assumes that this threat has already been identified; his concerns are focused on “repeatedly” and “accurately” stopping the threat. Finally, the scenarios described by Ben and Leonard are set up to allow only one appropriate response: For Ben, a stranger menacingly flashes a weapon with the intention to kill necessitates the use of a gun for self-defense, and for Leonard, sheer “kinetics” require as many as “20 bullets.” For Patrick, he logically deduces that there is no option but to “shoot . . . so that you are effectively killing them before they kill you.” Ben, Leonard, and Patrick are focused on one particular kind of violent encounter: one that suddenly erupts and leads to a warlike scenario in which menacing strangers are pitted against law-abiding citizens, who must then fight for their lives and their children’s lives.

Gun carriers’ understanding of criminals confirmed this caricature of crime as an all-out, warlike struggle between strangers. Oftentimes, criminals were imagined as physically dominating males; as Brandon, a White gun instructor and pastor from rural Michigan, described how his students talks about criminals, he said “It’s always it’s a guy.” I rarely heard of scenarios in which gun carriers—men or women—imagined women as the perpetrator—if anything, criminal women were laughed off as jokes (recall that Richard laughed as he told me “She [my wife] has a pistol that she keeps to the side of the bed, which is good. If she wants to get rid of me, it’ll be handy!”). And often, though not exclusively, gun carriers drew on racialized depictions of crime (Tonry, 2011) by alluding to “roving bands of criminals” coming from Detroit, who they described as “thugs,” “fellows perhaps of a darker skin with britches down to their knees” and “gangbangers” who wore “hoodies.” Ben, the White retired engineer, told me that

We still have reason to be concerned about the city of Detroit and its residents . . . I mean, years ago, it was White flight! Then it became good Black flight. And now it’s just the bad of the bad left over.

In stipulating Black men as particularly aggressive, gun carriers echoed popular tropes that link hypermasculinity, aggression and Blackness and obscuring the socioeconomic factors that structure the relationship between race and criminality (Tonry, 2011). ⁶ Gun carriers’ understanding of crime as an ever-present, violent threat requiring a decisive, lethal response perpetuated by (Black) men helped to justify their decision to carry guns. The “logical” response—to use Sam’s words—is to meet force with force and, therefore, don guns.

Misrecognition of Vulnerability: Domestic Violence

This articulation of crime privileges, however, men’s perspective. On one hand, among homicide victims, men are more likely to face multiple assailants, more likely to be killed by a gun, and more likely to be killed by an acquaintance or a stranger. Men are overall more likely to be murdered than women, and from 1980 to 2008, men comprised the vast majority of victims of drug- and gang-related murders (90.5% and 94.6%, respectively; Cooper & Smith, 2011). Among victims of nonfatal violent crime, men (57.4%) are almost twice as likely to be victimized by strangers as compared with women (33.4%; Catalano, 2007).

On the other hand, women are both less likely to commit crime and more likely to be victimized by intimate partners. According to the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), roughly one in three women, as compared with one in four men, report being raped, assaulted, or stalked by an intimate partner in their lifetimes (Black et al., 2011), while FBI crime statistics show that women are the victims in 85% incidents of intimate violence reported to the police, a statistic that has remained relatively stable since 1994 (Catalano, 2012). Among victims of both nonfatal violent crime and fatal violence, women (21.5%) are almost 6 times more likely to be victimized by intimates as compared with men (3.6%; Catalano, 2007; Cooper & Smith, 2011; see also Catalano, 2012). In addition, women are 3 times more likely than men to report that violence by intimate partners has had negative impacts on their lives more broadly, such a decline in their overall physical and/or mental health or their ability to work or attend school (Black et al., 2011). According to the 2010 NISVS, women are more likely than men to report experiencing the most severe forms of intimate partner violence: among victims, women (1 in 4) as compared with men (1 in 7) are almost twice as likely to experience severe physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner (Black et al., 2011). According to the National Organization for Women, there are “4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year,” which disproportionately affect poor women of color. ⁷ Between 2001 and 2005, one in three murdered women was killed by an intimate partner; this figure is 1 in 20 for men (Catalano, 2007). From 1980 to 2008, women were the majority of victims in intimate partner killings (63.7%; Cooper & Smith, 2011).

Overall, these statistics expose significant gendered differences in crime and victimization: Men do not experience intimate violence at the same rates, nor do they experience the lasting feelings of victimization, fear of bodily injury, and impaired employment opportunities that female victims of domestic violence report (J. Brown, 1997; Browne, Salomon, & Bassuk, 1999; Tjaden & Theonnes, 2000). Reflecting the intersectional effects of class, race, and gender, low-income women of color experience the most severe forms of domestic violence (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005).

Rather than acknowledging the specificities of domestic violence as they promoted guns to women, gun carriers usually used a narrow rendition of crime as a lens through which to understand domestic violence. Gun carriers misrecognized domestic violence by treating it as a clear-cut crime that involves a fast, bloody act perpetrated by strangers that required the response of a firearm. This allowed them to situate themselves as pro-women and pro-gun, even as they glossed over women’s vulnerabilities.

Consider how Eddie, a White firearms instructor and retired police officer, discusses women’s responses to domestically abusive partners:

[To prosecute someone for domestic violence in the past], you [the police officer] had to witness it, or they [the victim] had to sign a complaint, and you still couldn’t take them to jail unless there was absolutely positive [evidence]—a broken bone, gash, knife sticking out of somebody. And then you had to say, “Are you going to press charges?” And then they could say, “Oh no, I love him! He’s my honey! He loves me too, he’s just a little disturbed and drunk!” So you just load ‘em [the victim] up in the ambulance. There’s nothing we can do.

His rendition of domestic violence is instructive. On one hand, he clearly condemns domestic violence and the poor legal structures that made it difficult to arrest abusive spouses; throughout my interview with him, he consistently emphasized his support for women who choose to arm themselves, and he even told me several times that his wife—also a former police officer—was a much more proficient shooter than him, “which is why I married her.” On the other hand, he is unable to understand why a woman would refuse to press charges against a domestic abuser. Her unwillingness to file charges is irrational ⁸ (who would refuse to file charges with a “knife sticking out”?) and emotional (“he’s my honey! He loves me too!”); acknowledging her vulnerability but reading it in terms of a violent criminal encounter with a stranger, Eddie could not understand why a woman would refuse to take action against her abusive partner.

Likewise, when I asked Robert, a White automobile mechanic from rural Michigan in his 30s, about armed women, he recounted the following story that suggested a more appropriate way for a woman to defender herself against domestic threats:

I had a Sherriff’s deputy tell me, “Oh, the most exciting thing happened the other day!” He said, “this lady she got at her ex-husband, she toasted him good!” She blew off his left nut! Shot him with a 12-gauge in the groin!” It paralyzed him. He won’t be chasing her or anybody else. He’s in a wheelchair now. He has no feeling in his leg, and he’ll be in prison for about 50 years before he’s even eligible for parole. The Sherriff’s deputy was saying, “Oh yeah! She got him good! He’ll never mess with anybody again!” He said he really likes those scenes much better than when they come in and the wife is laying in a pool of blood on the floor, bludgeoned half to death.

Again, Robert situates himself clearly on the side of the abused woman; from his retelling of the story, he much supports that she “blew off [her ex-husband’s] left nut” rather than being found “laying in a pool of blood on the floor, bludgeoned half to death.” Having decisively faced the perpetrator—her ex-husband—and punitively responded (“she . . . shot him with a 12-gauge in the groin! . . . he won’t be chasing her or anybody else”), this woman presumably treated her ex-husband like any other violent criminal imagined by gun carriers—as a violent threat to be stopped with lethal force.

Eddie and Robert construct abusers and victims of domestic violence in terms that resonate more with violent street crime than with domestic violence. Regarding abusers, they both portray the abuser in hypermasculine terms: John’s criminal is an overly aggressive drunkard (“he’s just a little disturbed and drunk”), while Robert alludes to obsessive stalking (“He won’t be chasing her or anybody else.”). This rendition of hypermasculine abusers resonates with a more general understanding of violent criminals as hyperaggressive men. Regarding victims, Robert and Eddie charge the victim of domestic violence with the responsibility to end it, echoing popular portrayals of domestic violence victims as responsible for their victimization (Berns, 2004). In Robert’s story, the victim is celebrated for her choice to shoot her ex-husband, while John is confused by the victim’s refusal to charge her abusive partner. Scholars have argued that the expectation that domestic violence victims “take responsibility” to end the situation shifts the blame away from abusers and further stigmatize victims as causing or deserving the abuse (Berns, 2004; Christie, 1986; Madriz, 1997a).

Only one interviewee, Patricia, directly confronted the problems associated with assuming that guns are apt responses to domestic violence or date rape ⁹ :

For women who are raped, it’s very rarely by strangers. And in most cases, a gun isn’t going to help you. You can’t really say that out loud, that the person who is most likely to like physically assault you, you probably aren’t going to shoot. What do you say? Because yeah, you want to be able to defend yourself. And there’s perfectly valid reasons to carry a gun—there’s other things to protect yourself from.

Patricia explicitly bemoaned that guns, while generally useful for self-defense, are not a panacea for all types of violent assault. Patricia’s words take into account the complexities of violently confronting an intimate abuser, rather than a stranger criminal, and in doing so, she hints at the limits of positioning guns as the “great equalizers” against crime. Indeed, domestic violence rarely appears in the clear-cut, warlike terms that gun carriers imagine crime, and it often unfolds over long periods of time, even persisting after an abusive relationship has ended (Fleury, Sullivan, & Bybee, 2000; Tamborra, 2012). Moreover, women who experience domestic violence often lack resources to exit the abusive relationship and instead engage in long-term strategies to negotiate the coercion and control of a domestic abuser (Williamson, 2010), and women marginalized along the lines of race and class experience significantly greater psychological, cultural, and social barriers to recovering from domestic violence abuse as well as a less responsive criminal justice system (Crenshaw, 1991; Potter, 2006; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005). These difficult processes of survival and recovery stand in contrast to the comparatively simple solution of the gun espoused by gun carriers. ¹⁰

Gun carriers’ promotion of guns to women to defend themselves against domestic abusers, no doubt, breaks with social barriers to women’s ability to engage in self-defense: As Stange and Oyster (2000) note, “the woman who seeks to use forceful self-defense at home generally fails to garner the public approbation that would come her way if she had exerted the same level of resistance against a stranger” (p. 47) .Indeed, gun carriers are able to treat domestic violence as a crime worthy of armed self-defense precisely because they imagine it as an example of stranger crime. In doing so, they risk misrecognizing domestic, rendering invisible the female victim of domestic violence—especially the poor female victim of color—along with alternative tactics, strategies, and solutions that would address domestic violence. Rather than overt sexism, the social construction of crime provides a vehicle through which women’s experiences of domestic violence are marginalized. The misrecognition of domestic violence reflects a masculine, even patriarchal, view of domestic space, which has historically served a space of danger for women who, while enjoying protection from stranger men, also have been violated, abused, and harassed by intimate men within the “sanctuary” of the home, as Stange and Oyster suggest. Recognizing domestic violence would require acknowledging that the home is not simply vulnerable to external threats (recall Paul, who imagines “Hulk Hogan” entering his house to assault his wife) but also the site of internal threats perpetrated not by stranger men but by intimates. By misrecognizing domestic violence while emphasizing guns as the “great equalizer,” gun carriers privilege men’s perspectives even as they embrace gender inclusivity.