Women often targeted by gun-happy misogynists
Is it any wonder that the most unstable among us, like the man who lay in ambush of a Tacoma special-education teacher [“Slain teacher had been stalked by gunman,” Seattletimes.com, Feb. 26], feel they can use their awesome firepower on another human being who spurns them?
The same situation applied to an Orlando woman who formerly worked as a waitress at Hooters — in order to make ends meet. Like the special-ed teacher, she tried to get a restraining order on a man who had become dangerously obsessed with her. She wound up being shot nine times in a parking lot.
In a recent article in The New York Times called “The Women’s Crusade,” authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn point out that the brutality inflicted on many women and girls may be the central issue facing the 21st century — just as slavery was to the 19th and totalitarianism was to the 20th.
Those who own a hideous variety of military-style weapons throughout the United States are overwhelmingly male and are far too obsessed with the “stopping power” of their little arsenals. While most of them are law-abiding, those who become desperate — usually after women or life disappoint them — become far too much of a threat to society as a whole.
— Ron Charach, Toronto, Ont.