Some of the starry-eyed idealists among the gun prohibitionists ask wistfully, \u201cImagine a world where no one could have a gun.\u201d We don\u2019t need to imagine it. Neanderthals versus Cro-Magnons. The Dark Ages. Worlds where the strong brutalized and tyrannized the weak, and whomever assembled the largest gang savagely extorted or exterminated those they outnumbered. It is not for nothing that the force multiplier known as the firearm came to be called an Equalizer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the laws of deadly force there is something called Disparity of Force. It means that while one\u2019s attacker may be ostensibly unarmed, his ability to kill or cripple an innocent victim with pounding fists, stomping feet, and strangling hands is so great that it becomes the equivalent of a per se <\/em>lethal weapon, and warrants the innocent victim to respond with a weapon such as a firearm in lawful self-defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve lost count of how many attorneys I\u2019ve met who got through three years of law school and passed a bar exam without learning of disparity of force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Flock has run into the same thing. I recently read her 2023 book \u201cThe Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice.\u201d Like many before her, she is appalled at how many battered women have been pilloried in court because they used a gun to save themselves from a much bigger and stronger \u201cunarmed man\u201d who had violated them or even tried to kill them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Flock writes, \u201cCaroline Light, who authored the book Stand Your Ground, <\/em>said that in the courtroom drama, female defendants in self-defense cases are often viewed in one of two frames. \u2018A woman capable of violence needs to be pathologized: Is she angry or is she crazy?\u2019 she told me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adds Flock, \u201cIn her seminal 1989 book, Justifiable Homicide, <\/em>womens\u2018 rights advocate Cynthia Gillespie argued that, as a result of its origins, self-defense law evolved based on masculine assumptions \u2013 that the fight is between people of \u2018roughly equal size, strength and fighting ability\u2019 and that it\u2019s \u2018never acceptable to kill an unarmed adversary.\u2019 Both assumptions have made it difficult for women to win self-defense cases because women and men are often different sizes and strengths, and women are more likely to defend themselves with guns or knives while men more often use hands and fists\u2026Gillespie also wrote that, of the two hundred cases she reviewed of women who killed men in self-defense, the outcomes were \u2018depressingly similar\u2019: the women were arrested, charged with murder, pled guilty to murder or manslaughter, and went to prison.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I winced when I read the following: \u201cAccording to Karla Fischer, the domestic violence expert, most women who kill their abusers take plea deals in the end (as do the majority of criminal defendants). Fischer estimated that 80 percent of the women\u2019s cases she handled ended in pleas. Overall, about half of the women whose cases she appeared for were ultimately convicted of a lesser offense, while the other half received higher charges than they\u2019d initially faced. Fischer said that in all her years appearing as an expert, she had only seen one woman acquitted at trial.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n My God. If my math is correct, that\u2019s a pathetic 0.50% acquittal rate. In the five expert witness cases I\u2019ve taken for battered women who killed or severely wounded violent men in self-defense, we had an 80% acquittal rate,<\/em>and the one who was convicted wasn\u2019t even a disparity of force case. (He had knives, she had a gun, but she changed her story on the witness stand and the jurors told her attorney \u201cWe just didn\u2019t believe your client.\u201d) Why did we win Not Guilty verdicts for all four of those women? Because we explained disparity of force to the jury!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some of the starry-eyed idealists among the gun prohibitionists ask wistfully, \u201cImagine a world where no one could have a gun.\u201d We don\u2019t need to imagine it. Neanderthals versus Cro-Magnons. The Dark Ages. Worlds where the strong brutalized and tyrannized the weak, and whomever assembled the largest gang savagely extorted or exterminated those they outnumbered. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8318","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8318"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8321,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8318\/revisions\/8321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}