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Liz Michael for United States Senate

Hell to Pay : The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton
by Barbara Olson


Hell to Pay is yet another book on Hillary Rodham Clinton, this time from a conservative lawyer who served as the Republican chief counsel for the congressional committee investigating the Clintons' involvement in "Travelgate" and "Filegate." Barbara Olson traces the now familiar biographies of the president and first lady, contending that Mrs. Clinton is someone with dangerously liberal, even radical, political beliefs who "now seeks to foment revolutionary changes from the uniform of a pink suit."

There are some interesting new tidbits scattered throughout the book, like the fact that after law school Hillary Rodham tried to become a Marine Corps officer but was turned down; or that she told her high school paper her ambition after high school was "to marry a senator and settle down in Georgetown." Olson, attempting to dissect the mystery of the Clinton partnership, writes, "Most self-respecting women would have left" after Clinton's repeated infidelities. "Hillary chose to stay. She behaves as both a desperate lover, and like a frantic campaign manager protecting a flawed candidate.... Hillary, it seems, long ago accepted Bill Clinton as someone who could advance her goals, as a necessary complement to her intellectual cold-blooded pursuit of power."

As the Clinton presidency draws to a close, that pursuit has taken her beyond the White House toward a bid for her own U.S. Senate seat. Olson predicts the Senate won't be enough, just the next step toward becoming the first woman president: "Hillary Clinton seeks nothing less than an office that will give her a platform from which to exercise real power and real world leadership."

Gun Controllers Hate Women

by Emily "X"

Gun controllers hate women. They know that personal firearms have the reputation as "the great equalizer," enabling women to defend themselves in life-threatening situations against assailants that are undoubtedly bigger and stronger than they are.

It appears that at least a few have found a way around having to deal with this contradiction to their agenda: labeling any woman who wants effective self-defense as "sick" and "paranoid" and engaging in "the fantasy of killing a bad-guy, antisocial, murderous, rapist intruder."

Welcome to the modern version of the old misogynistic rape advice, "just lay back and enjoy it" that is now being promoted by the anti-self-defense advocates. In an attempt to promote their agenda, they resort to minimizing the threat to women, telling us that "it's all in your imagination."

Just how imaginary is it?

According to crime statistics, about 1 in 4 women will be raped during her lifetime. Some small percentage of them will be murdered in the course of the rape. A larger percentage will experience attempted murder.

Women on the average are about 30 pounds lighter than men. They have about 60% of the muscle mass, which means that not only are they smaller, but they have considerably less muscle mass per pound. Women have a serious strength disadvantage when dealing with just a single male assailant.

So what can a gun controller offer to offset this disparity?

Martial arts? Ignoring for a moment that it's not appropriate for young girls, disabled women, and many older women, it takes years of practice to become proficient enough to defend oneself against a single large attacker.

The victim disarmers who suggest this alternative want women to spend hours every week practicing martial arts rather than spend the time building their careers or spending time with their families or having a social life like normal people do.

Stun guns? Pepper spray? Both of these require accurate use and have little or no effect on some people. Worse yet, a woman has to be close to the assailant to use them. By the time she discovers that they don't work, there's often no alternate defense left.

Baseball bats? Knives? These depend on raw physical strength.

The gun controller might as well just come out and tell women to "just to lay back and enjoy it."

The statistical reality is that "shall issue" states, those that issue a concealed carry permit to any law-abiding citizen who asks for one, show a lower rape incidence than states where concealed carry permits are difficult or impossible to obtain. The victim disarmers claim that it's just because those states would have had a lower rate anyway. This claim has been proven false: those states which convert to "shall issue" status show a concomitant decrease in the rape rate. Places which take a proactive stance to promote gun ownership among women show a much greater decrease in the rape rate. A dramatic decrease occurred when the Orlando, Florida police, very concerned about the city's skyrocketing rape rates, instituted a program to train tens of thousands of women in the safe use of handguns. The rape rate decreased 88%.

The problem with using statistics in proving how effective firearms are in women's self-defense is that those statistics don't have a face. Those who want women to be defenseless don't have to acknowledge the terrible consequences hiding behind each number.

Few women come forward and ever admit that they've been raped. But they are everywhere. They are mothers, sisters, friends, coworkers, neighbors. They are the human face to the rape epidemic that the gun controllers condone. And they are the ones who survived.

I understand what it means to be defenseless and on the receiving end of criminal violence. I am among those 1 in 4 women. When I was attacked, I fought back by hitting the rapist and kneeing him in the crotch. Enraged by my resistance, he tried to strangle me and almost succeeded.

Like most women, I had poor chances against a man who outweighed me by 60 pounds and who was in very good physical condition. Had I possessed adequate means of self-defense, there would have been much less chance that I would have spent a week in the hospital recovering from the physical injuries and years recovering from the psychological trauma.

I had done what some of the victim-disarmers propose: I took a self-defense class only a few months before this occurred. It obviously wasn't enough. And no police or other cavalry came riding in over the horizon to stop it either.

The rapist was never caught. Since rape has the highest recidivism rate of any violent crime, this criminal has probably gone on to rape and perhaps murder other women. He certainly demonstrated that he was capable of murder, and the normal pattern for rapists is to increase the brutality of their attacks with each succeeding rape.

I don't engage in idle fantasies about "killing bad-guy, antisocial, murderous, rapist intruders." I don't have to. I've lived the real-life horror of having a rapist try to kill me, and I well understand that sometimes it's necessary to kill an attacker to save one's own life.

Statistically, the great majority of the time it isn't necessary since the mere display of a firearm is enough to stop an attacker, which puts the lie to the victim-disarmer's accusations. But when it is necessary, whose life is more valuable? My life, or that of a rapist/murderer?

The women who die as a result of rapists' attacks usually don't count to the gun controllers, since they're usually beaten to death, or strangled, or knifed. But the few cases of rape fatalities that do count to the gun controllers are those where a woman shoots an attacker, because all deaths by "gun violence" matter. By counting the deaths of those engaged in criminal activity and using them to disarm potential victims, the gun controllers morally condone the rape and murder of women. They write off the tens of millions of women who spend years traumatized, whose lives are forever negatively altered, who have a hard time establishing normal relationships with anyone else in the human race just to promote their agenda.

And that's one of the dirty little secrets that the gun control advocates never own up to: that gun control inevitably disarms those who need good self-defense the most. Women are being systematically and disproportionately deprived of the means of self-defense through the imposition of ever-higher barriers and requirements and regulations. This is the proven outcome of such policies. And that makes gun control advocates aiders and abettors to those who prey on women.

It's way past time that the victim disarmers are forced to recognize the terrible consequences of their proposals and their regulations. It is abhorrent that they are proposing that thousands of women "invisibly" die because they should be denied access to effective self-defense. It is abhorrent that they are proposing that dozens of women's lives are worth one rapist's life. It is abhorrent that they are proposing that a huge class of people accept systematic victimization just because of their size disadvantage. Anyone making such proposals should never be in any position of power in a civilized society.