Roxane Gay has written extensively about everything from Black feminism to office culture – and now she tackles a new topic: gun ownership. The author and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times joins host Krys Boyd to discuss her surprise at the thrill of shooting, why owning a gun is a political act for a Black American and what “stand your ground” laws mean to her. She writes about this in “Stand Your Ground,” an ebook/audiobook original essay found on the subscription service Everand.
Should feminists own guns?
By Sophia Anderson, Think Intern
The Black community experiences the highest and fastest-growing rate of gun violence of any racial demographic in the U.S.1 Black women are also the fastest growing group of gun owners.
Roxanne Gay recently wrote an essay titled “Stand Your Ground,” and joined Krys Boyd to talk about gun violence from the perspective of a Black, gay woman.
Gay went most of her life without owning a gun, and even says she “hated” guns growing up. But she’s recently received an onslaught of credible threats against her and her wife that prompted her to buy a gun for self-defense.
Gay pointed out that feminist thought on guns varies. Some view guns as a means to empowerment, while others believe the only path forward must be non-violent. Even for women who view guns as a reliable means to defend themselves, there is still the issue of what they are defending themselves from.
“You’re only so powerful when you are constantly being framed as a victim and waiting,” Gay said. “Where you’re being told that if you don’t own a gun, you can’t protect yourself and that violence against you is inevitable. It’s not.”
Gay argued that for men, guns are a “physical manifestation of the power they believe is their due.” For women, this is rarely the case. Sellers unnecessarily feminize firearms by coating them in pink paint and rhinestones, therefore othering female gun owners and reducing them to a stereotype.
The rhetoric around female gun ownership is drastically different from how many discuss male gun ownership. Men don’t need the justification of “self-defense” for them owning a gun to be socially acceptable. Male gun owners can own guns for a plethora of reasons: hunting, collecting, or just a simple love of firearms. Women often have to rely on their subordinate position in society to explain their need to buy a gun.
Gay added that violence against women is not the only type of recurring gun violence. The sharp increase in mass shootings prompted her to wonder why institutions developed technologies like bulletproof backpacks and whiteboards before addressing the root of the issue: access to assault weapons.
A study by the National Institue of Justice found that of 172 mass shootings between 1966 and 2019, that 97.7% of the shooters were male. 2 While men are often the victims of gun violence, women are uniquely targeted because of their sex, and more often by people they know. An average of 57 women are killed by an intimate partner every month.3
There is undeniably reason for women to want to own guns for self-defense, or for a variety of other reasons, but Gay is unsure if owning a gun actually makes her any safer.
“I think that for most people, it’s that I feel safer,” Gay said. “I don’t know that I am. I think that if something bad is going to happen to you, it’s going to happen to you no matter what you do.”
