"Nirbheek" is small, light and can just about "fit into a
lady's purse"; it's also India's first gun for women. Named
after the 23-year-old victim of the highly
publicized Delhi gang-rape case in December 2012, the 500 gram light-weight
.32 caliber revolver produced by the state-owned India Ordinance Factory is being
marketed as the latest solution to the wide-spread problem of sexual violence
and rape in the subcontinent.
One wonders if India has been
learning from the US firearms industry, which has long excelled in creating a
niche market for female gun-owners by producing small, light – and often pink –
guns for women. With names like Chic Lady, Pink Lady, Lavender Lady and Pink
Lady Off-Duty (courtesy of the Connecticut-based
Charter Arms), US manufacturers like Taurus,
Smith
and Wesson and Remington
have perfected the art of "shrinking-it-and-pinking-it" with a range
of pink revolvers, handguns and rifles, just for women.
The Pew Research Center reported
in May 2013 that 41% of Americans live in a home with a gun. While men are
three times more likely than women to own a gun, 14% of women had one of their
own. The growing
number of female gun-owners in the US perhaps explains why the firearms
industry has been eager to produce specific products "for women",
like pink guns and a range of seemingly superfluous feminine accessories like bra holsters.Shooting
ranges and ranches have also been rebranding themselves as fun destinations for
a girl's night out. A ranch in Texas even went so far as offering an inventive
package for gun-loving females: "Botox
and bullets" is a weekend getaway that provides a "hands-on
introduction to hand-guns" while offering Botox treatments and other
cosmetic and recreational services for women to enjoy while sipping cocktails
with their girl-friends.
In comparison, India's
Nirbheek looks
relatively understated, but its concession to women besides its size and weight
is that it's presented in a maroon jewellry case. According to a BBC interview with the
General Manager of the Indian Ordinance Factory, "Indian women like their
ornaments."
As feminists have wryly
noted, you have to bother to at least turn an ordinary object pink and
preface it with a feminine moniker like "Lady" before you can sell it
to women in the US, but the Indian firearms industry has been far more shrewd
in its marketing strategy. While guns like Nirbheek are undoubtedly designed to
appeal to women's "feminine" sensibilities, they're also selling women
an argument about self-defense: that guns are somehow "empowering"
and perhaps more damagingly, that women alone are responsible for keeping their
aggressors away.
Do guns make women safer? The
National Rifle Association in the US, capitalizing on gun-violence tragedies
like Newtown,
has repeatedly made the fallacious argument that the only way to stop bad guys
with guns is by arming
the good guys … and, apparently, also the good women. In March last year,
Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, argued
that "the one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with
a gun." And LaPierre wasn't alone in making the argument that armed women
can defend themselves better against marauding males. Gayle Trotter of the
right-wing Independent Women's Forum told
the Senate Judiciary Committee that gun control could negatively affect women
because an assault weapon "in the hands of a young woman defending her
babies in her home becomes a defense weapon".
But research on gun violence
by organizations like the Harvard Injury Control Research Center has proved
otherwise. Its studies have shown that more
guns always equals more firearm-related homicides and that guns are rarely
used in self-defense. Instead, guns in the home especially tend to be used
to "intimidate
intimates rather than thwart crime;" they also go off in accidents,
and can lead to other types of violence. It should be unsurprising then, that
guns have also been found to pose particular dangers for women: more guns have
also been linked to an increase
in violent female deaths. Other
studies have also shown that women with guns in the home are more likely to
be murdered than if there were no guns, and that where domestic violence is
already ongoing, the risk of female homicide is 20
times higher.
India certainly isn't the US,
but it's comparable in some respects: the subcontinent has the second
highest number of privately-owned guns, which means that the arguments for
gun-control in the US are ones India should pay attention to. There is enough
evidence to suggest that the argument for guns as self-defense, and
particularly the defense of women, is not only an invalid but also a dangerous
one. In the US, better gun-control and regulation would lead to less violence
all around; and in India, a country where a rape happens every 22
minutes, do we really need yet another weapon that can be turned against
women?
The past few years have been
hailed as a victory for Indian women fighting back – mass mobilization of men
and women across the country have made the issue of violence, harassment and
rape in India not only an urgent matter of public discussion, but also a priority
policy issue – India's new rape law (flawed though it may be) is a direct
consequence of the widespread anger following the Nirbhaya case. Fighting
back against rape has meant talking about it loudly and publicly, questioning
the attitudes and the culture that sanctions and silences it, and most
importantly, working to reform the institutions that have so far failed to
prevent or punish it.
But arming women makes the
significantly collective and democratic sense of fighting back and fighting for
equality the responsibility of the individual, and that too only individuals
who can afford to buy
guns like Nirbheek.
Arming women cynically conflates the myth of guns as the great equalizer with female self-defense, and tries to capitalize on the frustration, fear and anger that the issue of rape inspires in women across India. The idea of a gun for women also aims to profit from our desire to grasp at the deceptive image of the armed woman as symbolizing female empowerment. As women's rights advocates in India and elsewhere well know, guns aren't the solution to the deep-rooted sexism and misogyny that fuel violence against women. As Binalakshmi Nepram, founder of the Women Gun Survivors Network, recently put it, the marketing of guns to women as a solution to rape and sexual violence is nothing more than an "admission of failure" of a system that is bound to uphold equality. And buying into the myth only means that the market wins.