Women are buying guns at record rates. They’re also winning elections, passing state laws, and organizing against gun violence like never before. Where we go next is unclear, but one thing is certain—it will be shaped by women on both sides of the fight.
BY LAURA BASSETT
The Long Game
Legislation alone won’t solve the crisis. Nina Vinik, founder of Project Unloaded and an architect of the gun violence prevention movement, says half the battle of the next decade is undoing a single, powerful message: that you need a gun to be safe. The NRA ramped up its online and social media campaign aimed at women over the last decade with ads that carry a message of safety and empowerment: One Instagram ad from 2018 read, “I carry because you can’t put a cop in your purse”; another featured a blonde woman smiling in her sleep with the caption, “How I sleep knowing there’s a gun in my nightstand.”
“In every focus group I’ve seen over two decades, whether it’s a bipartisan group, women, people of color, people from the South or people from cities…whatever their politics, the people in the focus group can recite the talking points of the gun lobby,” Vinik says. “They’ve internalized those messages. But when you ask them to make a counter argument that we should restrict access to guns, they don’t have the words to make that argument.”
Read more: https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/the-future-of-women-and-guns/