Gun Rights: RKBA Advocates
Aren’t the Ones Discriminating
Against Women
“Langston Alexander Sykes, a beloved husband, father, son, and brother, passed away unexpectedly on March 4, 2025,” the obituary begins. “Now,” as famed radio notable Paul Harvey used to intone in his iconic broadcast series, “the rest of the story.”
They got the “unexpectedly” part right. According to police, Sykes, a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter known as “Blaze,” was shot and killed while violating an active injunction and trying to break into a house where his ex-wife and children lived. He had a criminal record that included a grand theft auto conviction. Per social media posts, his ex-wife was said to have moved out because of his behavior. And the shooting, which happened after Sykes reportedly forced his way into the home and rushed toward an occupant, appears to have been justified under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law.
Disparity Of Force
While the identity of the armed defender has not been disclosed at this writing, it’s not hard to speculate on the chances the ex-wife, or most of us, for that matter, would have in a physical confrontation with a trained MMA fighter. Without an “equalizer,” in this case a handgun, all the advantage belongs to a physically superior attacker. And as the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report shows, more people were killed in 2020 with “personal weapons,” defined as “hands, fists, feet, etc.” than were killed with rifles of all kinds (including semiautomatics the Democrats demonize as “assault weapons”).
If a woman is at a disadvantage against an unarmed attacker, imagine how much more she is endangered against an armed one or against multiple attackers. And that makes fair the question “Who could possibly be against evening the odds with an equalizer?”
The answer to that, of course, is the citizen disarmament lobby, politically represented by the Democrat Party, the self-proclaimed party of equity. Its official platform, which in one section decries “violence against women,” simultaneously pushes prior restraints and gun bans that enable such violence by giving predators who obey no such handicaps a government-mandated advantage.
The false message for women on guns from self-described “common sense gun safety advocates” is clear: They put them at increased risk. Hence, the calculated name “Moms Demand Action” and the emotions that evokes.
In Moral Hands
Except it’s hooey. As John Lott, economist, author and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, has demonstrated, “Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas, and even in those counties, murders are concentrated in small areas inside them …”
Extrapolating the abuse of guns in criminal homes and applying that to all homes is dishonest, which is no surprise considering who’s doing it. And it’s destructive because it ignores the protective benefits of guns in moral hands and the many more instances of defensive gun use where violence is often averted simply by presenting a gun.
That women benefit from that is borne out by reality. Enter the words “woman shoots attacker” into a search engine and see resulting headlines like “Woman, 85, shoots and kills home intruder in ‘heroic’ act of self-defense,” “DeSoto woman shoots armed intruder who followed her home,” and “CCL holder mom shoots man trying break into daughter’s bedroom.” You could do that all day. A reasonable conclusion would be that gun prohibitionists would rather have seen these women victimized than armed. And that’s been true since “gun control” became a thing.
Case in point, the January 1994 issue of Women & Guns magazine quoted (still in office!) District of Columbia U.S. House of Representatives Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, one of 25 women in Congress who sent a letter to the National Rifle Association protesting its then-new “Refuse to be a Victim” program. Her pronouncement? “Women are virgins when it comes to guns. It should stay that way.”
Can you imagine a man getting away with saying that?
Times have changed, especially with Kamala Harris in her campaign for president, feeling it was a political necessity to disclose she owned a handgun. Headlines now include offerings like “More women are becoming gun owners” and “Women and LGBTQ+ people take up guns after Trump’s win: ‘We need to protect ourselves’.” How exactly Trump and his supporters pose a threat is left unsaid. We’re the ones who have consistently insisted — for decades — that the right to keep and bear arms belongs to all peaceable people. It’s the Democrats who want them disarmed.
That brings us to the recent phenomenon of “Gun Culture 2.0,” with an emphasis on concealed carry and self-defense instead of recreational shooting and hunting. That, in turn, has led to assessments like those offered by Wake Forest University Professor of Sociology David Yamane on “Gun Owner Diversity and the Changing Face of Gun Owners Today.”
The important question now, especially in light of the blatantly leftist assumptions being promoted by anti-gun media that MAGA Republicans are a violent threat to be defended against, is, “How do these new gun owners vote?”
It’s cognitively dissonant and self-defeating for women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ citizens to buy guns and then elect the very people who want to ban them, prevent them from carrying them, and arrest and prosecute them if they don’t obey. Because the truth is, the most egalitarian power-sharing arrangement ever devised is the Second Amendment. And, as the truism says, it’s not about guns; it’s about freedom.
