It’s both. When people say the world would be better if it was run by women i always bring up Thatcher. Guns are a tool. But they are designed to introduce a piece of metal into the target to create trauma. To project force. That’s what they’ve been designed to do. Is that sometimes necessary? In a ‘just’ war against despotism? Yes. Even Chomsky agrees with that. But I’d prefer if kids were interested in Bob The Builder TBH.
I'm with you there. If I were raising children, I would teach them how to handle firearms safely, including how to shoot, for the same reason I would teach them how to drive, how to administer first
aid, how to cook a meal, how to sew, how to use a saw and a screwdriver and a soldering iron, etc etc etc. We would strip down and re-assemble an internal combustion engine, plant and raise some
of our own food, learn the constellations, make a zinc-dust-and-sulphur rocket. All this regardless of their sex.
The entry of women into formerly all-male occupations -- and the change in their social status that accompanied this -- is one of the great advances of the 20th Century, even more important than the anti-colonial revolution, because it nearly doubles the pool from which scientists, mathematicians and engineers -- the people who really pull our sorry species forward -- can be drawn.
I was delighted when the Fields Medal (the mathematicians' equivalent of the Nobel Prize) was awarded a few years ago to an Iranian woman at Stanford -- a pleasure I shared with the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who sent her a congratulatory telegram.
Of course I think Mrs Thatcher (PBUH) is not an exception to the advantages the emancipation of women has brought, but yet another example of it.
But as you disagree, I'll give you a poem, borrowed from Rudyard Kipling, which confirms your misguided prejudice in her case.
When the Himalayan peasant meets the
he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster,
who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends
the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more
deadly than the male.
When Nag the basking cobra hears the
careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and
avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where
she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more
deadly than the male.
When the early Jesuit fathers preached
to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the
vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors,
turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more
deadly than the male.
Man's timid heart is bursting with the
things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him
isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husband,
each confirms the other's tale -
The female of the species is more
deadly than the male.
Man, a bear in most relations -
worm and savage otherwise, -
Man propounds negotiations,
Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.
Fear, or foolishness, impels him,
ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even
to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger -
Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue -
to the scandal of The Sex!
But the Woman that God gave him,
every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue,
armed and engined for the same,
And to serve that single issue,
lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be
deadlier than the male.
She who faces Death by torture
for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity -
must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions -
not in these her honour dwells.
She the Other Law we live by,
is that Law and nothing else.
She can bring no more to living than
the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the
Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and
she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron),
her equipment is the same.
She is wedded to convictions -
in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children,
Heaven help him who denies! -
He will meet no suave discussion,
but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring
as for spouse and child.
Unprovoked and awful charges -
even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons -
even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish -
like the Jesuit with the squaw!
So it comes that Man, the coward,
when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council,
dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience,
he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice -
which no woman understands.
And Man knows it! Knows, moreover,
that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern -
shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him,
and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more
deadly than the Male.