Is Mise,

There's no accounting for societal stupidity - as I write this, some loon is busy shooting innocent people in Colorado Springs. The country with 290 million guns among its population endures around 11,000 gun homicides a year and tens of thousands more gun inflicted injuries.

Here we go:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/having-a-gun-in-the-house-doesnt-make-a-woman-safer/284022/

"Having a Gun in the House Doesn't Make a Woman Safer

Firearms have been touted as a great equalizer between the sexes. But in cases where self-defense matters most, women tend to find their own weapons turned against them."

"Christie Salters Martin is a professional boxer and the owner of a concealed carry permit. But when she attempted to leave her husband, she was shot with her own gun. Today, she cautions other women against making the same mistake. “Just putting a weapon in the woman’s hand is not going to reduce the number of fatalities or gunshot victims that we have. Too many times, their male counterpart or spouse will be able to overpower them and take that gun away.”"

"A recent meta-analysis concluded what many people already knew: the availability of firearms is a strong risk factor for both homicide and suicide. But the study came to another conclusion that is rarely mentioned in the gun control debate: females are uniquely impacted by the availability of a firearm. Indeed, the study found that women with access to firearms become homicide victims at significantly higher rates than men."

"It has long been recognized that higher rates of gun availability correlate with higher rates of female homicide. Women in the United States account for 84 percent of all female firearm victims in the developed world, even though they make up only a third of the developed world’s female population. And within American borders, women die at higher rates from suicide, homicide, and accidental firearm deaths in states where guns are more widely available. This is true even after controlling for factors such as urbanization, alcohol use, education, poverty, and divorce rates."

Cont'd

Cont'd

"What’s more surprising is how many of these deaths occur in the home, at the hands of a male partner. In a study in the Journal of Trauma, A.L. Kellermann, director of the RAND Institute of health, and his coauthor J.A. Mercy concluded: “More than twice as many women are killed with a gun used by their husbands or intimate acquaintances than are murdered by strangers using guns, knives, or any other means.”

"In another study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers interviewed 417 women across 67 battered women’s shelters. Nearly a third of these women had lived in a household with a firearm. In two-thirds of the homes, their intimate partners had used the gun against them, usually threatening to kill (71.4%) them. A very small percentage of these women (7%) had used a gun successfully in self-defense, and primarily just to scare the attacking male partner away. Indeed, gun threats in the home against women by their intimate partners appear to be more common across the United States than self-defense uses of guns by women."

"Another large case control study compared women who were murdered by their intimate partner with a control group of battered women. Only 16 percent of the women who had been abused, but not murdered, had guns in their homes, whereas 51 percent of the murder victims did. In fact, not a single study to date has shown that the risk of any crime including burglary, robbery, home invasion, or spousal abuse against a female is decreased through gun ownership. Though there are examples of women using a gun to defend themselves, they are few and far between, and not statistically significant."

"....A 2005 study examining mortality data from 1998-2000 found that when a female was shot by her intimate partner, the perpetrator subsequently killed himself in two thirds of the cases. This statistic not only shows necessity of getting mental help for at-risk men. It also further suggests that owning a firearm may make a household more vulnerable than ever."

Plenty of studies there....all reaching a similar conclusion.

Suseonline, "Let me just state for the record...I am fully in agreement that all victims of both domestic and all other forms of violence, including all men, children and women of all colours, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and disability should receive equal rights and access to legal, safety, and medical needs after they suffer said forms of violence by any perpetrator...My statement above in no way negates the undeniable fact that with intimate partner domestic violence there is absolutely no doubt that women are more severely injured and killed in larger numbers by male perpetrators than men are'"

Yes, fair enough and thanks for it.

I despair of any of our current crop of Party career politicians ever being anything but knee-jerk populist on this, or most things.

I would like to see some recognition of the different categories of offender. After a search I cam up with this paper as being close to my thinking on the lack of homogeneity of offenders,
https://www.griffith.edu.au/professional-page/anna-stewart

Now Prof. Anna Stewart,
https://www.griffith.edu.au/professional-page/anna-stewart

General Comment
I will not be entering into the firearms debate.

However outside of NSW*, while one is said to have the 'right' to self-defence, all need to be aware that offenders do have more rights.

If an offender is even slightly injured by their victim (or by the homeowner's poodle), the luckless victim will find herself in the watchhouse being treated as a criminal, then before a court where the REVERSED ONUS OF PROOF(!) will require her to prove that her or pooch's use of force was finely measured and reasonable.

The Crown Prosecutor is NOT your friend and in the comfort of a court will NOT be easily convinced that your options, eg waiting optimistically for the police, were ever extinguished. The offender can and may sue you too.

*NSW, where self defence has some necessary protection at law
http://www.armstronglegal.com.au/criminal-law/defences/self-defense

Sorry, I duplicated a link. That paper I wanted to link to is here,

http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/3851/16496_1.pdf?sequence=1

Apart from that, there is some very useful and relevant research being done at Griffith University.

Is Mise, it isn't any so-called PC crowd that are preventing female DV victims from arming themselves with guns and just shooting their abusers dead on the spot. There is no evidence at all to suggest the guns would help.

That would make these women judge, jury and executioners, and as much as I think many of these violent men need shooting, they should still have the right to a fair trial.
It seems they would also be judged as committing murder as well, given they would probably be charged with using unreasonable force.

As Poirot suggests, I would imagine that if there was any chance that these women could effectively stop the violence against them by using a gun for protection, then there would be a higher level of male deaths by their female partners in a place like the US.

This event and report could easily have been in Australia, where government has been far more concerned about the rights of criminals than about victims,

<Knife hero Myleene ticked off by police
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/2801350/Myleene-Klass-scares-yobs-from-garden-by-waving-knife-through-window.html

TELLY beauty Myleene Klass was told off by cops for waving a knife through her WINDOW to scare off yobs skulking in her garden at night.

The mum of one was alone in her kitchen as toddler Ava, two, slept upstairs when she saw the trespassers trying to break into her garden shed and peering through her windows.

Desperate to protect her daughter and her home, brave Myleene, 31 — whose fiance Graham Quinn was away on business — grabbed a kitchen knife and waved it, shouting: “I’m calling the police.”

But when cops arrived they told her she could have got into trouble with the law — even though she was in her own HOME and the yobs were outside.

An insider said: “She could see two teenagers trying to break into her shed and pressing their faces up against her windows to see inside.

“It wasn’t just high jinx — she was genuinely frightened. She was alone with her baby and scared out of her wits.

“Acting completely on instinct, she grabbed a knife and started banging on the windows, making as much noise as she could and shouting that she was going to call the police.”

Her tactics worked and the yobs ran off. But the Marks & Spencer model was horrified when cops told her carrying an “offensive weapon” is illegal — even in her own home.

An insider said: “She never even stepped out of her door — and anyway she was a frightened mum trying to defend her baby and her property. It’s absolutely insane.”

The insider added: “The officers were very kind and one of them actually said, ‘Off the record, I’d probably have done the same as you’..>