Susan Walsh/AP - Gayle Trotter, senior fellow with the Independent Women's Forum, left, sits next to National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, in Washington, on Jan. 30, as she testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence.
In the increasingly confrontational debate over the nation’s gun laws, two female archetypes have emerged.
There’s the grieving mother whose child was killed in a shooting and whose pleas for stricter regulation seem unassailable. And there’s the flinty mother who wants maximum firepower to take matters into her own hands to protect her brood.
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As Congress weighs President Obama’s agenda to toughen gun legislation, powerful lobbies on both sides of the issue are turning to women as leading spokespeople and symbols. In television advertisements and op-ed articles, speeches at rallies and testimonials before legislators, both types are stoking emotion and fear in an attempt to sway public opinion.
In Newtown, Conn., one mother after another testified last week about losing her child in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre or about the guilt that haunts her because her child survived. The military-style AR-15 rifle the shooter used, one mother told a legislative panel, was “a death machine.”
On the same day in Washington, another woman, Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women’s Forum, testified just the opposite. She said an assault rifle in the hands of a mother defending her children and her home against violent intruders offers “peace of mind.” The AR-15, Trotter told a Senate panel, is “a defense weapon.”
Advocates for stricter firearm restrictions are employing mothers of shooting victims in their public relations push, calculating that when they speak out against gun violence they are hard to dismiss. Hundreds of thousands of moms who began organizing on Facebook after December’s Newtown shootings are staging rallies nationwide and lobbying lawmakers to pass President Obama’s gun-control proposals.
“To the extent that, as the president has said, the only way we’re going to create change is if the American people demand it, the voices of women and mothers in the safety of our nation have to be among the most important voices,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
The gun lobby, meanwhile, is using women to create a gentler image of the male-dominated industry and to frame its status-quo agenda as more about family safety and self-protection than about hunting and aggression. When CNN aired a town hall forum on gun violence last week, both of the pro-gun panelists were women.
The National Rifle Association’s leaders frequently tout an increase in the number of women at gun shows and shooting ranges and weave anecdotes involving women into their speeches. Manufacturers sell product lines of feminine firearms and accessories, retrofitting weapons to better accommodate women’s bodies and marketing them in pink and other bright colors. One Web site, Girl’s Guide to Guns, describes itself as “dedicated to women who dig fashion and fire power.”
“America’s women, they are leading the way,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said in a speech at the gun group’s convention last year. “Nearly 30 million American women now own guns. And they know what all of us have known for a long time: The more women who buy and own and shoot guns, the safer and the better off we’ll all be.”
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