Leaving The Combat Zone Analysis

Leaving the Combat Zone Picture a standing army fifty times the size of the present U.S. military. Rather than an invading apocalyptic force that would spell the end of civilization, Leslie Marmon Silko sees this as the solution to domestic violence against women in the United States. Her solution is simple and one that has been brought up before. Simply arm the millions of women in the U.S. with firearms in order to ward off any potential predators or abusers. In her essay, “In the Combat Zone”, she advocates that women should carry weapons. An idea that is based on her own personal experiences and examples of past successes for gun owners. An idea that has flaws and fails to be supported by statistics.
Every person, regardless of gender, …show more content…
She was able to escape back to her house where she grabbed her gun and called for the police. This story again has the fallacy that owning a gun helped her out in any way. She was only able to grab the gun after the fact and it played no rule in preventing or stopping the incident that had happened.
The common thread in both of her stories were that she was threatened by men and in both cases she felt safer because she had a gun. What we must look at is whether or not her owning a gun helped to fix the problem in any way and whether or not this justifies more women owning a gun. In both stories the gun failed to prevent the incidents, nor was it able to directly do anything to stop what was happening. This makes it hard to justify gun ownership when you consider the negative consequences associated with gun ownership that the author fails to bring up.
One such inescapable truth is that with guns come the deaths of those who are wholly innocent from any crime other than simply having access to guns. Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States and it is the second leading cause of death for those ages 10 to 34. Nearly half of all suicides are done by means of firearm, something that can easily be prevented by decreasing the number of guns in our …show more content…
Every year 62 children under the age of 14 will be shot and killed in the U.S. because loaded weapons will be placed in easily accessible places. There are stories of one tragedy after another that are entirely avoidable. A two year old who found the pistol in his mother’s purse and shot himself in the head or the three year old who managed to shoot another three year old with a rifle. Can we accept the risk of an event like this happening with our own children, because that is a risk that comes with owning a gun. Now the author would argue that with proper gun training and good safety measures in place situations like these can be avoided. But they cannot be eliminated, it only takes one time to forget to put the weapon away to cause a tragic and avoidable