by Philip Rucker, The Washington Post – In the increasingly confrontational debate over the nation’s gun laws, two female archetypes have emerged.
Mothers marching for gun control in NY,
courtesy of www.loopny.com
There’s the grieving mother whose child was killed in a shooting and whose pleas for stricter regulation seem unassailable. And there’s the flinty mother who wants maximum firepower to take matters into her own hands to protect her brood.
As Congress weighs President Obama’s agenda to toughen gun legislation, powerful lobbies on both sides of the issue are turning to women as leading spokespeople and symbols. In television advertisements and op-ed articles, speeches at rallies and testimonials before legislators, both types are stoking emotion and fear in an attempt to sway public opinion.
In Newtown, Conn., one mother after another testified last week about losing her child in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre or about the guilt that haunts her because her child survived. The military-style AR-15 rifle the shooter used, one mother told a legislative panel, was “a death machine.”
On the same day in Washington, another woman, Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women’s Forum, testified just the opposite. She said an assault rifle in the hands of a mother defending her children and her home against violent intruders offers “peace of mind.” The AR-15, Trotter told a Senate panel, is “a defense weapon.”
Advocates for stricter firearm restrictions are employing mothers of shooting victims in their public relations push, calculating that when they speak out against gun violence they are hard to dismiss. Hundreds of thousands of moms who began organizing on Facebook after December’s Newtown shootings are staging rallies nationwide and lobbying lawmakers to pass President Obama’s gun-control proposals. READ MORE HERE.