‘Bad Girls’ Fires Off Bad Message

Are women powerless victims unless they own a gun? First the gun lobby and now Hollywood would have us think so. Women Against Gun Violence (WAGV), a coalition of 90 Los Angeles organizations representing thousands of women, was formed last year in response to the gun lobby’s campaign targeting women afraid of crime. “Refuse to be a victim,” women were told in the ads, buy a gun.

How unfortunate that Hollywood also seems to be hawking the gun lobby’s message to women. A movie released last month, “Bad Girls,” is running advertisements of four beautiful young actresses with rifles and handguns.

Yes, it’s set in the Old West, but the message is the same: Women can shoot too. And it’s a message that’s likely to grow louder as we enter “Hollywood’s new tough-gal era” (“Go Ahead, Make Her Day,” Business, April 26.)

Faced with this prodding toward violence, I want to make sure that Hollywood’s target audience--young women--realize the consequences of using guns for protection.

The Los Angeles Police Department reports that the gun is the No. 1 weapon used against women in the roughly 40,000 domestic violence cases reported in Los Angeles each year. At our January Education for Action Conference, Asst. Police Chief Bernard Parks pointed out that women are often victimized twice by guns--first by being so frightened that they make the mistake of buying a gun, and second by being injured or killed by that gun.

The fact is that the self-protection industry in California and this country is a growth industry and it is working hard to create the fear that prompts the purchase of their products.

If statistics leave you cold, talk to Lorna Hawkins and members of Drive-By Agony--women who have lost children to gun violence. Ask them if they could have prevented their child’s death by owning a gun. Ask them if guns are glamorous or just deadly.

These kids were not shot by armed intruders. They were killed in drive-by shootings--often just caught in the cross-fire--or shot in an argument with friends. Sometimes they were shot by a family member. In one tragic instance recently, a 6-year-old shot his mother while playing with a gun.

No less tragically, thousands of teen-agers each year commit suicide with guns. Gun violence is now a leading cause of death for teen-agers. And who could forget the recent story of the 10-year-old student fatally shooting himself on the steps of his grade school?

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Three years ago, Drive-By Agony started a march to bring community attention to the fact that the American obsession with guns is claiming younger victims each year. The third annual march on April 16, co-sponsored with the Violence Prevention Coalition and Women Against Gun Violence, attracted an estimated 1,000 marchers who showed up to hear the chilling stories and learn how they could take action against guns.

Unfortunately, just a few weeks later, thousands of young women were exposed to ads that tell them visually that guns are great. “Bad Girls” sounds like the gun lobby’s promotional dream. Guns, the ads seem to say, are a symbol of assertiveness and power. A lot of us who have fought for women’s rights for the last 30 years would argue that we are already powerful. And we won that power by speaking up and demanding the legislation that would empower us.

The solution to gun violence is not to glamorize women gunslingers. It’s to use our power once again to support the kind of policies and legislation that will take guns off the street and address the underlying causes of violence. That’s real power.