For safer streets, give women guns
By Jeff Jacoby
A PICTURE on the front of The Boston Globe’s City & Region section last week
showed a group of women waiting to apply for firearm identification cards
… They were in a line … that stretched the length of two corridors. …
some of them had been standing in that line for more than two hours. … It
isn’t hard to understand why so many women are lining up for permission to
carry guns. Except that they aren’t. The hundreds of women applying for
firearm ID cards aren’t planning on getting guns. They merely want to arm
themselves with mace or pepper spray, and under Massachusetts law even that
requires a gun permit. … But what if some of those women did want to
protect themselves with guns? If they walked into a police station and
applied for a license to carry a firearm for their personal protection, what
would happen? ”They would not be allowed to,” says Mariellen Burns, the
Boston police spokeswoman. What if they lived in the North End and two of
their friends had been raped and they were terrified they might be next?
Tough luck, says Burns. ”Living in a high-crime area is just not enough of
a reason to get an unrestricted license to carry.” … Under Massachusetts
law, ordinary citizens have no right to carry a firearm for self-protection.
It is left to the discretion of local chiefs of police to grant or deny
applications for gun permits, and in places like Boston and Brookline, that
discretion is driven by the liberal phobia about guns in private hands.
Phobias are by definition irrational, and there is nothing rational about
keeping guns out of women’s hands – not when reams of evidence confirm that
violent crime falls as private gun ownership climbs. … Time and again,
states adopting concealed carry laws have experienced lower rates of murder,
rape, and assault. Criminals are less likely to attack a victim who may be
armed; those who do attack are more likely to be scared off if their
intended victim pulls a gun. In much of America, this is increasingly
understood as straightforward common sense. But that attitude is alien to
”progressive” venues like Boston, where rapists roam the streets and the
women are unarmed. When you come to think about it, what’s so progressive about that?

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/234/oped/For_safer_streets_give_women_guns+.shtml