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Gun Advocate Gayle Trotter: “Guns Make Women Safer”

Posted: January 30, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , |32 Comments

Listening to the pro-gun testimony at the Senate Judiciary Hearing today has been a bizarre experience. The three people testifying against limits on gun ownership are Crazy Wayne LaPierre of the NRA; David Koppel, adjunct professor at the University Denver; and Conservative Attorney Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women’s Forum, who is totally stealing the show.

From TPM:

“Guns make women safer,” she said. “Over 90 percent of violent crimes occur without a firearm, which makes guns the great equalizer for women. The vast majority of violent criminals use their size and their physical strength to prey on women, who are at a severe disadvantage. In a violent confrontation, guns reverse the balance of power.”

Some background on Gayle Trotter from HuffPo:

Guns haven’t always been Trotter’s specialty. A tax lawyer by trade, Trotter appears to have published her first op-ed about gun control issues this past fall, when she urged voters to “cling to your guns” in a piece published on the conservative website The Daily Caller.

Two months before the gun-control piece came out, Trotter argued that President Obama “has the idea of government completely wrong” in an op-ed on Fox News Channel’s website. Obama, Trotter wrote, “is a card-carrying member of the jet-setting liberal class that wants to bargain with the American people to win their votes.”

Trotter’s presence at the Senate hearing appears to be tied to her status as a Senior Fellow at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, a nonprofit whose mission is to “to expand the conservative coalition” by pitching conservative ideas with a specifically feminine focus. According to its website, IWF’s mission is two-fold: “increasing the number of women who understand and value the benefits of limited government, personal liberty, and free markets,” and “countering those who seek to ever-expand government.”

Since April of 2012, Trotter has produced a few dozen op-eds and media appearances for the group, on topics ranging from Obamacare to Trotter’s opposition to the Violence Against Women Act. Before becoming a senior fellow, Trotter was the group’s lawyer. In March of 2012, before she started posting on IWF as a senior fellow, Trotter identified herself as general counsel for the group in a blog post about Obamacare, published by The Huffington Post.

If you’re not watching this hearing, you’re missing a show that’s funnier than Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show.   Of course Crazy Wayne has been entertaining too and the adjunct professor from the University of Denver–supposedly a constitutional expert–has made quite a few jaw-droppingly bizarre remarks also.

Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, who looks and sounds as if he’s at death’s door, got Crazy Wayne to admit that the NRA is opposed to requiring background checks for people who purchase weapons at gun shows.  That was quite a coup, achieved after powerful efforts by Crazy Wayne to dodge the question.

Watch the hearing at the C-Span website.

The Washington Post is publishing a running transcript of the hearing.  Read it here.

This is an open thread.

32 Comments on “Gun Advocate Gayle Trotter: “Guns Make Women Safer””

  1. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    January 30, 2013 at 12:17 pm

    Reposting story Ralph put up on the morning thread: ‘Walking angel’: Girl who performed at Obama’s inauguration shot dead in Chicago

    A 15-year-old girl who performed at President Obama’s inauguration last week was shot dead Tuesday while hanging out with friends in bullet-scarred Chicago.

    Hadiya Pendleton — described by a relative as a “walking angel” — was standing under a canopy in Vivian Gordon Harsh Park when a gunman ran down an alley, opened fire at the group and fled in a white car, police said.

    Pendleton was shot in the back but managed to run about a block before she collapsed, officer Laura Kubiak said. She died at the hospital.

    A 16-year-old boy was wounded in the 2:20 p.m. incident. Police said Pendleton, who had no criminal record, was probably not the intended target.

    • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
      January 30, 2013 at 12:19 pm

      I wish someone would ask Gayle trotter how a gun would have made this girl safer.

      • ANonOMouse's avatar ANonOMouse says:
        January 30, 2013 at 1:04 pm

        The most glaring problem with Gayle’s testimony is that it assumes that the government wants to restrict her ability to defend herself, it doesn’t.

        Nothing Gayle said impressed me as a good argument for owning or needing high capacity magazines, or for not having to pass a federal background check, or for not creating laws aimed at stopping the proliferation of weapons through straw purchases, or for all handgun purchases being subjected to the same scrutiny threshold that a Federal Firearms Dealer must pass. Gayle likely has another agenda.

        As a woman who owns and knows how to use firearms, I can say with absolutely certainty that if a man/men break into Gayle’s home (the story she used to demonstrate her need) and she can’t bring him/them down with 6-14 rounds, nothing else will help her.

        My problem with the NRA’s argument is that it propagates the myth that only a well-armed society is free. A society where we must spend our every waking moment armed to the hilt. A society where armed guards carrying semi-automatic and automatic weapons at every public venue are on full public display. A society where everyone over the age of 21 is packing a semi-automatic firearm. They talk freedom, yet they propose a society where freedom is predicated on how well armed you are? What sort of world would that be? Fuck the NRA.

      • Fannie's avatar Fannie says:
        January 30, 2013 at 5:24 pm

        Yeah, Gayle,it is about the 2nd amendment…..so send me up one of those big ass MIA1/2 Abrams tank……………so I can feel it………

      • Fannie's avatar Fannie says:
        January 30, 2013 at 10:24 pm

        As part of the Independent Women’s Forum’s………it was started by women who felt like Clarence Thomas could better make them feel safe, yup Judge Thomas be the man that the IWF was founded upon…………….I couldn’t help but cheer on Lawrence O Donnell, he put her back in lala land.

    • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
      January 30, 2013 at 12:22 pm

      And what about the 6-year-old Alabama boy who was grabbed off his school bus after a total stranger shot and killed the bus driver? The poor child is being held hostage in a bunker.

      • minkoffminx's avatar JJ Lopez Minkoff says:
        January 30, 2013 at 1:03 pm

        Just woke up, and while I was drinking coffee my parents were talking about shootings and hostage situations and I realized they were talking about two separate “incidents.”

        We got the nut in Alabama, another nut in Phoenix…am I missing any?

  2. ANonOMouse's avatar ANonOMouse says:
    January 30, 2013 at 12:29 pm

    After this hearing is over LaPierre needs instructions on how to properly pronounce the word bureaucracy. He keeps calling it a Booracracy. He’s such a dip.

  3. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    January 30, 2013 at 12:31 pm

    75-year-old man shoots his doctor during appointment.

  4. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    January 30, 2013 at 12:32 pm

    Georgia man shoots a man who accidentally pulled into his driveway and was backing out.

  5. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    January 30, 2013 at 12:34 pm

    Schizophrenic Texas man shoots and kills office co-worker.

  6. OSG's avatar OSG says:
    January 30, 2013 at 12:50 pm

    Watching closely and I’m here to say that as a single female I am HORRIFIED that this twit is “representing” women and there’s no reasonable, female opposition to her extreme idiocy.

  7. ecocatwoman's avatar ecocatwoman says:
    January 30, 2013 at 1:07 pm

    Fascinating hearing. I’d like to think that Trotter didn’t get asked many questions was because she’s an idiot, but it’s more likely because she was “just a woman.” Obviously, I’m prejudiced but the Dem Senators asked great questions, made terrific points. Whitehouse & Franken were so good. I loved it when some challenged the fantasy facts presented by LaPierre in particular.

  8. minkoffminx's avatar JJ Lopez Minkoff says:
    January 30, 2013 at 1:24 pm

    Wow, this is powerful: Gabby Giffords’s Handwritten Notes for Her Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee – Megan Garber – The Atlantic

    Giffords’s speech was striking not just for its words. It was striking as well for how painstakingly — and in some sense how painfully — the former congresswoman sounded each sentence, each syllable. Giffords survived her gun-inflicted brain injury against all odds, but her survival has compromised her ability to articulate her thoughts.

    That is made even more clear by an image posted to the Facebook page of Americans for Responsible Solutions, the organization Giffords and Kelly founded to help reduce gun violence: the text of Giffords’s speech, handwritten by Giffords herself. The pen-scrawled words, like the versions of them delivered to Congress this morning, seem deliberate. They seem diligent. They are written on a surface all too familiar to schoolchildren: binder paper.

  9. janicen's avatar janicen says:
    January 30, 2013 at 1:34 pm

    I’m not watching the hearing because I had to run out to buy food that won’t require cooking in the event we lose power during the high winds that are expected later but I am in shock over what Trotter said. Is she really advocating that women arm themselves and open fire on their unarmed male attackers? Sure Gayle, because that always results in a positive outcome for women. Like that woman in Florida who got twenty years for firing a warning shot at her husband. The only time a firearm is helpful for self defense is if your attacker, armed or unarmed, announces his intentions and gives you time to get out your weapon in order to shoot him. And that assumes you hit him before he charges and grabs your weapon. Oh, it also works really well on TV shows.

    • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
      January 30, 2013 at 1:42 pm

      I hope you keep your power, Janicen.

    • ANonOMouse's avatar ANonOMouse says:
      January 30, 2013 at 1:48 pm

      Spot on Janicen. Many women have gone to prison for using their “great equalizer” on an unarmed abusive spouse or boyfriend. I was sexually assaulted as a young woman and knew quite a few gay women and men who were assaulted for the hell of it. It was the personal assault that first led me to gun ownership, but I’m not naive enough to believe that if I use a weapon on another person, male or female, that there won’t be a consequence. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t use it if I thought I or my partner were in danger, but I’d do so knowing that there would be a reckoning.

  10. RalphB's avatar RalphB says:
    January 30, 2013 at 9:55 pm

    Just thought I’d post TBogg’s thoughts on Ms Trotter.

    Crazy Mama

    Here is entirely reasonable mother of six, Gayle Trotter explaining the daily grind of taking care of her kids, washing and cleaning, making dinner, and blowing away hordes of ruffians and scalawags intent upon breaching the sanctity of her home is order to steal her Ethan Allen sideboard and matching china closet.

    So Trotter has six kids and yet keeps an available loaded AR-15 at the ready at all times because, you know, blahs…

    This will not end well.

    (ADDED) Wow. Trotter is an opponent of the Violence Against Women Act. So she’s not just a terrible mother, she’s a horrible fucking human being.

  11. Helen Donovan's avatar Helen Donovan says:
    January 31, 2013 at 10:35 pm

    UVA’s law school is hanging it’s head in shame. How a person can graduate from such a quality school and then spew such a line of emotional, unsubstantiated drivel is truly amazing.

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