It will surprise no one to learn that Vice isn’t exactly pro-gun. However, they recently released a video delving into the gun debate, one that wasn’t as awful as I expected it to be. The Canadian reporter makes it clear that her experience with guns is minimal and that in her own country, guns aren’t tools of self-defense.

However, the report also had pro-gun women speaking plainly about why they’re pro-gun and, well, not be made to look like idiots.

But in the report, there was a statistic that women are 100 times more likely to be shot than to use a gun in self-defense. While the reporter asked the pro-gun women about it, these women probably weren’t overly familiar with the statistic.

The statistic was meant to show that women simply aren’t defending themselves against armed attackers for whatever reason, that expanded gun rights do nothing to benefit women.

That’s bull and for a number of reasons.

First, let’s keep in mind that while women are the fastest growing group of gun owners in the nation, they still haven’t achieved parity with men in firearm ownership. In fact, only 22 percent of all women own a gun, according to a 2017 Pew poll. In other words, there are fewer armed women to meet potential threats, which will skew the results of the data cited all on its own.

But there’s more.

You see, the anti-gun forces similar to those interviewed in the Vice report do a fantastic job of gaslighting women, particularly those who might be interested in carrying a gun. “Someone is more likely to take your gun away from you and use it on you,” one of the women said (paraphrased). The reporter asked one woman, a survivor of a violent attack, about paranoia. Every effort tries to paint women who want to defend themselves as somehow being sick or disturbed. They routinely make it out like it simply can’t be a rational decision for a woman.

The idea is to make armed women question their own sanity, their own rationality. This is the epitome of what it means to gaslight someone.

Because of that, a lot of women who own guns don’t carry them. Now, in fairness, that’s true of both genders. As Pew reported, “However, among those who own handguns, equal shares of men and women (26% each) say they carry their gun outside their home all or most of the time.”

The problem is, there are fewer women who own guns, in part because the gaslighting by the anti-gun activists has been so pronounced. Because of that, there are relatively few women on the streets armed to potentially meet those attackers.

Additionally, women who are unarmed tend to look at the world very differently. For whatever reason, women tend to be less likely to walk around in a ready state, observing their surroundings, signaling to potential predators that they’re a bad choice of target. Women in sketchy neighborhoods will avoid eye contact, walk with their gaze focused downward, as well as other things that might accidentally mark them as prey.

Don’t get me wrong, men do that too. But women are more likely to engage in that kind of behavior, which raises the risk of them being the victim of a crime, which in turn raises the risk for them to be shot in such crimes.

Yet Vice didn’t delve into any of that. Why would they? Frankly, I don’t think many other people did either. They looked at the data, decided it said what they wanted it to say, then moved on with life.

But the reality is that while the statistic might be valid data–in other words, a simple fact that’s being reported–it’s an outcome not based so much on gender-based biology or psychology, but on something else.

The truth is, armed women are in a much better position to respond to an attack than an unarmed woman. Anyone who refuses to see that has to go out of their way to maintain their ignorance of reality.

Frankly, the Vice report had a lot of that from anti-gunners. From the school kid who believes that if we all just ignored the reality we see and worked with her and her allies then the world would be a “better” place, to the activist who really thinks armed women are more likely to be shot than unarmed women, we see plenty of anti-gunners who shield themselves from the harsh reality that the bad guys don’t care about their laws.