The equalizer, why a firearm matters most to the smallest person in the room

Everyone in the gun debate says they are thinking of the women. The campaigns say it, the legislators say it, the commentators on every side say it. It is worth asking what the women would say if the people debating on their behalf stopped talking long enough to listen, an event as rare in a legislative hearing as a short speech.

I want to make an argument about who benefits most from the right to keep and bear arms. I think it is the person who would lose a fistfight. That includes the smaller, the older, the disabled and the outnumbered. The old line, of uncertain origin, calls the revolver an equalizer, and the word is better than it first sounds. It is the whole case in one noun.

The terms and the claim

Equalizer, as I use it here, means a tool that reduces the difference in physical power between an attacker and a defender. The vulnerable means anyone whose strength, size, age, health or numbers put them at a disadvantage against a determined assailant. The right to arms means the right the Second Amendment protects, as the Supreme Court read it in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008).

My claim is that a firearm is the one common tool of self-defense that does not depend on the defender's strength, and that this is why the right to arms is, in practice, a right of women and of the vulnerable. I will build it in numbered premises, then take up the best objection.

The numbered argument

One. Violence is not distributed evenly, and neither is strength. On average, adult men are larger and stronger than adult women, and young adults are stronger than the elderly. That is not an insult to anyone. It is a plain description of averages, and every self-defense instructor knows it. A violent assailant chooses a target. He does not choose the person most able to fight back. A tool that works for the person least able to win a physical contest is therefore worth more to that person than to a strong one.

Two. The police cannot be everywhere, and the law says they need not be. People are often told to call the police and wait. Consider what the law actually provides. In DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989), the Supreme Court held that the government has no constitutional duty to protect a private person from violence by another private person. In Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), the Court held that a woman who had obtained a restraining order against her estranged husband had no constitutionally protected entitlement to its enforcement by the police. Her three daughters were killed by the man the order was meant to restrain. I raise the case with care, because it is a tragedy and not a talking point. The legal point is narrow and well established: protection by the state is something a person may hope for, not something she may demand. The right to defend herself is the one protection no government can say she lacks.

Three. A firearm is a force multiplier that does not require strength. A person of any size can operate a handgun. A person who cannot overpower a stronger attacker in a struggle can still press a trigger. That is the equalizing effect. A knife requires proximity, which is where the stronger person wins. Pepper spray, a legitimate and useful tool, requires the attacker to be within a short range, can be blown back and has no effect on some assailants. A baseball bat requires strength and room to swing. A firearm acts at a distance and its effect does not depend on the shooter's muscles. I do not say it is the right tool in every circumstance, and I do not say that it is always effective. I say it is the tool that changes the odds the most for the person most at risk.

Four. The choice of weapon belongs to the defender. Here Heller spoke directly. The Court said the handgun is the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and that a ban on it removes an entire class of arms that Americans overwhelmingly choose for that lawful purpose. In its explanation of why the choice makes sense, the majority gave reasons that read like a list of the needs of a smaller or weaker person: a handgun is easy to keep in a place that is quick to reach in an emergency, it is harder for an attacker to take away than a long gun, it can be used by those who lack the upper-body strength to lift and aim a rifle or shotgun, and it can be held in one hand while the other dials the police. Those are the words of the majority in substance, and I would encourage you to read the passage in the opinion itself. The point is that the Court recognized who the handgun serves.

Five. Therefore the right to arms is, in practice, a right of the vulnerable. If the first four premises hold, a restriction on the right falls hardest on the person who has the least ability to do without it. A strong man in good health may live with fewer tools. A woman living alone, an elderly widower, a single mother working nights or a person with a disability has a smaller margin. I do not claim this is the only reason the right matters. The Founders thought of it as a check on tyranny, as I discuss in Madison's Federalist 46 and the advantage of being armed that tyrants fear. But it is the reason that is most easily seen at the kitchen table.

A case from the Supreme Court: Caetano

The Court touched this ground squarely in Caetano v. Massachusetts, a short per curiam opinion of March 21, 2016. Jaime Caetano had been abused by a former boyfriend. A friend gave her a stun gun for protection. When the man confronted her, she displayed it and he left. She was prosecuted for possessing the stun gun, which Massachusetts law banned, and convicted. The state's highest court upheld the conviction on reasoning that, among other things, stun guns were not in common use at the founding and were not readily adaptable to military use.

The Supreme Court vacated the decision. It held that the state court's reasons flouted Heller: the Second Amendment extends to arms that did not exist at the founding, and the military-use test had been mistaken. I tell the whole story in Caetano v. Massachusetts and the stun gun that defended a mother's rights. For our purposes the point is that the right was invoked in a case about a woman defending herself against an abuser, and the state's position was that she should have gone without.

The strongest objection, fairly stated

I should not skip the argument on the other side, because it is serious and it is about women.

Studies in public health journals have found that a gun kept in the home is associated with a higher risk of homicide in the home. A frequently cited 1993 study by Arthur Kellermann and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine reached that conclusion, and later research on domestic violence has found that access to a firearm by an abuser increases the risk that an abusive relationship ends in a death. The women the gun is supposed to protect are more likely to be killed by a man they know than by a stranger. A gun in the home may be turned against them.

I think that argument deserves an answer in the same register: numbered, on the evidence.

1. The studies measure association, not cause. Kellermann's design compared homes where a homicide occurred with similar homes where it did not. People in dangerous circumstances, those who have been threatened or live with violence, are more likely to acquire a gun. A finding that guns are more common in homes where homicides occur does not show that the gun caused the homicide. It may show that the household was already in danger. Researchers who favor gun ownership have made this criticism for thirty years, and the point is a sound one in epidemiology: you cannot read causation out of a correlation when the exposure is chosen in response to risk.
2. The research that finds the highest risk concerns the abuser's access to a gun. The domestic-violence literature is mostly about an armed abuser, not an armed victim. The relevant question for a woman is not whether guns raise risk in the abstract. It is whether she, in particular, should have access to the means of defense against a man who has already threatened her. Those are different questions, and the evidence on the second is thin.
3. The remedy for an armed abuser is to disarm the abuser, after a hearing. The law already does this in part. Federal law prohibits possession by people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, since the Lautenberg Amendment of 1996, and by people subject to certain domestic-violence protective orders. In United States v. Rahimi, decided June 21, 2024, the Supreme Court upheld the protective-order provision against a Second Amendment challenge, by a vote of eight to one. I have discussed the lone dissent in Justice Thomas stood alone in Rahimi, and his dissent deserves a careful reading. A person who has been found, by a court after notice and a hearing, to pose a credible threat to a partner has no good claim to the weapon. That is the conservative position, I would say: rights are held by the law-abiding, and the process that decides who is not law-abiding must be a fair one. The question of how fast that process should move, and what safeguards it requires, is the one I examine in conservatives disagree about red-flag laws, and both sides deserve a hearing.
4. The objection proves too much. If the risk that a weapon could be turned against its owner justified depriving women of it, the same logic would deprive them of cars, kitchen knives and the telephone, and then, in the spirit of consistency, the stairs. The Constitution leaves the decision about which risks to accept to the person at risk.

None of this means that a firearm is a cure-all, and the evidence will always include tragic cases in both directions. It means that the argument against a woman's right to defend herself has to be made on evidence, and the evidence is contested.

What responsible ownership requires

A tool that matters this much should be handled seriously. The vulnerable person gains the most from a firearm, and she or he also has the most to lose from a mistake. So the right comes with duties, and I want to set them out plainly, as a general matter and not as advice to anyone's particular situation.

Training. A firearm is not a talisman. Owning one without knowing how to use it is a hazard. A good beginner's course, offered by a certified instructor, covers the four basic rules of safe handling: treat every firearm as though it were loaded, never point the muzzle at anything you are not willing to destroy, keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you have decided to fire, and be sure of your target and what is behind it. Then comes practice, because skill decays, and a person who has fired a pistol twice cannot count on competence at three in the morning.

Storage. A gun that is accessible to its owner in an emergency and inaccessible to a child or a thief is the goal. Many owners use a quick-access safe or a lock. The right balance depends on the household, particularly where there are children, and it is a decision to make deliberately and not by default.

The law of force. Nothing in the Second Amendment makes a person immune from the consequences of using a gun. The law of self-defense varies by state. Some states have "castle doctrine" statutes that protect a person defending a home. Some have "stand your ground" rules, and some impose a duty to retreat where it can be done safely. The rules about when force, and deadly force in particular, is justified, about carrying in a vehicle, about licensing and about transporting a firearm differ across the country. The responsible course is to read your state's statutes, take a course that covers them, and consult a lawyer where you have specific questions. I cannot tell you what your state allows, and neither can a blog.

The moral weight. Faith and family traditions teach that a person may defend an innocent life, including his own, and also that taking a life is grave. A person who owns a gun for protection should have thought about that before the night he might need it. I discuss the traditions in What Jewish and Christian teaching says about defending your own life. And for a look at a famous woman who thought every woman should know how to shoot, see Annie Oakley, the Ohio sharpshooter who wanted every woman to learn to shoot.

Why this belongs under family and faith

The family is the first thing a free society protects, and the person who stands between a home and an intruder is usually a parent. A mother alone with children on a winter night has the same constitutional right as a sheriff, and in the minutes before help arrives she has the same need. Conservative thinking about the family has always held that the first duty of a parent is protection. The law should not tell the parent who is the smallest person in the house that she may protect her children only with the tools an attacker finds convenient.

The case in brief

1. A firearm is an equalizer: it narrows the strength gap between an attacker and a smaller, older or weaker victim.
2. The police have no constitutional duty to protect a particular person, under DeShaney (1989) and Castle Rock (2005), so the right of self-defense is the protection a person cannot be denied.
3. Heller recognized the handgun as the weapon Americans choose for home defense, and its reasons describe the needs of those with less strength; Caetano (2016) reaffirmed that the right reaches a woman defending herself.
4. The best objection, that a gun in the home raises a woman's risk, rests on association rather than cause, and the remedy for an armed abuser is disarming him after a fair hearing, as Rahimi (2024) allowed.
5. The right carries duties: training, safe storage, knowledge of your state's law of force, and a clear moral understanding of what you may be asked to do.

What you can do: find your state's statute on the use of force in self-defense on your legislature's website and read it, then enroll in a certified firearm safety course.