The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Girls 'n' Guns

In just over a week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the most important gun rights case of our lifetimes. And two days ago, the student body president for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was shot to death in a residential neighborhood. Yet again the two events will go unconnected in the media, where we treat gun killings the same way we do car accidents—the sad but inevitable price to pay for living in a dangerous world.

Slate’s Tim Noah observed last year, right after the Virginia Tech gun massacre, that the only thing more deafening than the silence of our elected leaders on the issue of gun control is our own silence in the wake of these gun tragedies. Just spit-balling here, but I’d wager that if women ever ran the country, we might indeed create a world in which “nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox," but we might still manage to give a shit that kids keep dying for the holy blessed right to bear arms.