A mother of three decided she wanted to be able to defend her children from intruders, just as her own mother had when she was a child. That’s why she bought a gun, as she explained in an op-ed essay Monday in The New York Times.
In the opinion column, “I Wanted to Be a Good Mom. So I Got a Gun,” Bethany Mandel wrote about how an incident when she was a child left her with the need to always be able to protect and defend herself.
When Mandel was a child, she wrote, an intruder tried to enter her bedroom through a window. The young Mandel screamed, and her mother grabbed her gun, loaded it, and said something to the effect of “Bethany, come over here. I don’t want you to get his brain matter on your face,” she wrote.
The would-be intruder backed down and fled the scene.
That moment had a lasting impact on Mandel’s life and has now come full circle.
“While it may seem counterintuitive to those who didn’t grow up around guns,” Mandel wrote, guns are “tools of protection” for empowered women.
“Our side insists that people are the problem, not guns,” she wrote.
“The fact that there were people crawling through fire escapes in our neighborhood when I was pregnant, it was kind of like a repeat of my experience when I was a kid,” Mandel, a writer and editor, said on the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” morning show Tuesday, but this time, in New York, “I can’t have a gun.”
So she decided to move to New Jersey, where she said it was “easier” to get a gun.
“After my first child, a daughter, was born, I must have printed the paperwork required to obtain a gun permit in New Jersey a dozen times. Despite what many may think, the process is not simple, nor is it quick,” Mandel wrote.
With the threat of intruders on her own fire escape and death threats online stemming from her opinion column writing, she decided to “finally go through the process of asking friends for letters attesting to my character, obtaining fingerprints and submitting to background checks.”
Mandel said those on the left don’t understand guns and “when those advocating bans don’t even understand the mechanics and basic terminology of guns, it doesn’t inspire confidence.”
“For many, support for gun rights is motivated precisely by our devotion to protecting our kids,” she concluded.
