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

More on Girls 'n' Guns

My friend Corey Owens takes me to school for last week's gender-based generalizations . . . . 

Guest post follows:

Not to stand between you and your spitball-straw, but "...if women ever ran the country"...?!? Come on. The not-so-subtle suggestion that a) women do/would care more about that fact that "kids keep dying" and b) men somehow care less is both ill-informed and dangerous. The importance of the fact that many (albeit not all) of the politicians who would defend the right to carry assault rifles into elementary schools happen to be men should be mitigated by the downright foolishness of so many men AND women on both sides of the gun control debate. "...if women ever ran the country..." is a pretty good way to keep the debates about both guns and gender stuck deep in the mudholes of old.

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.