Houston Woman Shoots, Wounds Ex Over 'Harassment'

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

I’m an advocate of any woman being armed unless she’s legally prevented from doing so for some reason. I also support lifting most, if not all, potential restrictions on them being armed.

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The reason is simple. Women are, by and large, smaller and weaker than the men who are most likely to attack them. Guns equalize the field, allowing them to be more than a sufficient match for the bigger, more aggressive men that might threaten them.

However, it doesn’t mean a woman should be permitted to shoot a guy for any reason. Obviously.

Yet that’s kind of what it looks like happened in Texas recently.

A woman is accused of shooting her ex-husband in north Houston.

She told authorities that the man was reportedly harassing her in the middle of an argument while he was dropping off their two kids.

She shot him once in his abdomen out of self-defense.

I’m sorry, but based on this admittedly limited information, that’s not self-defense. If he was “harassing her in the middle of an argument,” then it suggests he was going down a road in that argument she didn’t want to go down. That doesn’t meet any legal definition of harassment I can think of.

The woman is currently being investigated by police, which suggests they’re not entirely sure the harassment was harassment either.

If it turns out the “harassment” was something threatening, then obviously that changes things. Threats are different and depending on the man’s size, his demeanor, and his capabilities, she may well have had reason to fear for her life if he threatened her.

But it’s not harassment.

What worries me is that this seems to fit with misandrist talking points about how all men are evil, violent rapists in the making. Certain radical feminists have argued that men should be rounded up and kept in camps, used only for manual labor and sexual slavery. Now, granted, this isn’t exactly mainstream feminism here, but these people exist and what is mainstream feminism today was radical feminism a couple of decades ago.

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Further, there’s a certain belief that when it comes to domestic violence, the man is always at fault.

Is that the case here? Was the woman in question fearful for her life? It doesn’t sound that way. However, again, we don’t have much information to go on. The reporting is minimal on this, so it’s entirely possible that it grossly misrepresents the truth of what happened.

Then again, that may also be the point now that I think about it.

After all, why write about a woman acting in self-defense when you can say she claimed self-defense while presenting a story that’s very different? When you want to advance an anti-gun narrative, as many in the media do, why not call the threat “harassment” and leave the rest to the imagination?

And, honestly, that’s part of the problem we have. The news can’t be trusted, people overreact all the time, and so we have stories like this which will be used to advance agendas left and right but with absolutely no information one way or the other.

What a grand time to be alive.

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