http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/08/BAGPDGKAG41.DTL&hw=joan%2Bryan&sn=003&sc=242
A woman, a batterer and a gun
Joan Ryan
Sunday, January 8, 2006
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Rebecca took out a life insurance policy on herself four years ago. She made her daughter the beneficiary. She was 51.
She believed that her husband was going to kill her. It was just a matter of time. She believes it still, even though she left him in 2001 and went underground through the California Confidential Address Program. She uses a phony address in Sacramento provided by the program (and is not using her real name for this column) to remain hidden.
Last summer, there were signs he had found her.
So Rebecca started carrying a gun inside a pouch in her purse.
What happened next is a sobering reminder of how the legal system is still struggling to understand the complex and vulnerable lives of battered women.
Rebecca had owned the gun since escaping from her husband. She bought it after the required 10-day waiting period and registered it in her name. She knew the police couldn’t always be around to protect her. A gun leveled the playing field against a man bigger and stronger than she was. Maybe it would save her from becoming one of the 1,300 people killed in the United States each year in domestic violence attacks.
One evening last August, Rebecca was making the long drive home from Mill Valley, where she had to drop off some papers for a client. She stopped at an Albertsons supermarket in Half Moon Bay. She paid for her groceries, picked up the shopping bag and her wallet but left her purse at the end of the checkout counter.
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More important, the conviction leaves Rebecca more vulnerable than ever to her abusive husband. For one, the district attorney’s office mistakenly included her actual street address on all its documents, which are public record. The office was scrambling on Friday to delete the information.
And two, she now has no protection. (I wonder whether San Francisco voters considered domestic violence situations when they voted in November to ban all handguns and what consequences women like Rebecca might pay.)
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Rebecca knows she made a big mistake in leaving her purse with a loaded gun at a public place. Her lapse was a potentially dangerous one; it should not be minimized. But how do we balance her mistake against the danger she faces every day from a violent man who left her crushed and fearful, whose beatings and threats drove her into hiding?
The law against carrying concealed guns makes good sense. But so many women every year are killed by their abusive boyfriends and husbands. Restraining orders, as we know, can’t stop them. The police often can’t stop them. I don’t know what the solution is. But something’s wrong when, in trying to keep herself alive, the terrorized woman becomes the criminal.
E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.
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As you can gather, I don’t agree with just about anything in this article. BUT most especially the writer’s conclusion, “The law against carrying concealed guns makes good sense.” Aside from the fact that it abridges everyone’s second amendment rights. The dead old white guys recognized that it’s a dangerous world out there. It’s probably more dangerous now. Sam Colt made men and women equal. Aren’t we learning the lesson that criminals don’t obey laws. Make all the laws you want. It doesn’t’ stop squat. If the gummamint can’t keep drugs, weapons, and guns out of its own prisons, then how do you expect it to protect you? Don’t you see the protection you get from concealed carry even if you don’t carry? The criminals now have a target rich environment of unarmed people. They can attack the weakest and everyone else just is weaponless to stop them. If even just few of the weak are packing, then it becomes a guessing game. Hmm, I try to mug the wrong old lady and I wind up dead! Bad choice. If we keep eliminating criminals like that, then pretty soon we will either be out of criminals or they will have to take up a new line of work. Either way, I trust women to make good decisions. And, if by some chance they make a bad one, (i.e., some thug scares them), then I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. There are two mottos in the gun community: (1) shoot, shovel, and shut up; and (2) better judged by 12 than buried by 6. Besides as Heinlein taught us “an armed society is a polite society”. It’s still a dangerous world out there between criminals and government. But then I repeat myself.
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Reinke Faces Life 