Ryan Fournier is a professional MAGA troll, though not an especially talented one. The founder of Students for Trump has a Twitter feed that is a cookie cutter replica of every tired right-wing "joke" and attempted "gotcha" we've all heard a million times. It's a testament to the mediocrity of the Donald Trump fandom that white guys can make a full-time living making the same hackneyed remarks calling trans women "biological males" and unconvincing fantasies about how to "frighten Liberals." And like every cut-rate right-winger online that could easily be replaced with a chatbot, Fournier is fond of claiming that conservatives, not feminists, are the real champions of women. "Feminism is more so about hating men than it is about empowering women," he wrote in a typically tedious tweet.
Unsurprisingly, then, this 27-year-old "youth leader" of Trumpism trotted out the same boring line about how guns do more for women than feminism, claiming that the "2nd Amendment" did more to make "women equal" than feminism ever did. I'd share the tweets here, but on Wednesday, Fournier made his Twitter account private.
The likely reason isn't hard to suss out. Fournier was arrested last week in North Carolina on allegations that he beat his girlfriend with the very weapon he championed as the great gender equalizer. According to the police record, "the defendant unlawfully and willfully did assault and strike" a woman "by grabbing her right arm and striking her in the forehead with a firearm." The arrest record goes on to describe the weapon as a "9MM Sig Sauer P229."
Not to get too dark here, but I wonder if the editorial board at the Washington Post is ready for another op-ed pressuring women to marry Trump voters.
Does anyone actually believe that guns are good for women, much less that women benefit more from guns than they do from having the right to vote, control their own bodies, or have paid employment outside of the home? It's almost certainly not true that Fournier ever believed it, and certainly not when he was allegedly using a gun to control a woman with violence.
"Guns empower women" is one of the many thought-terminating clichés that proliferate on the right. These clichés aren't meant to be persuasive, so much as to fill the air with illogical noise to shut down anything resembling critical inquiry of indefensible positions. It's why disingenuousness is one of the primary traits of modern Republicans. The simple truth is conservatives hate feminism because they don't agree that women should be equal. But rather than say so out loud, we get these tortured, trolling "arguments" about how feminists are the bad guys and the people who voted for the pussy-grabber are the good guys because, uh, guns and power and stuff. Republicans don't argue. They deflect.
One can, of course, point to the decades of evidence that show conclusively that guns make violence against women worse, while feminism makes women safer. An abuser with a gun is five times as likely to kill his partner, which is why about 70 women a month are murdered by gun in domestic violence incident. Over a million living women have been shot by an abuser, and 4.5 million have been menaced by a partner with a gun. In contrast, feminist actions like passing the Violence Against Women Act and no-fault divorce laws have dramatically reduced rates of domestic violence, as well as prevented female suicides. These are facts that right wingers try to drown out with bad faith canards about guns and feminism.
The reason these facts don't penetrate the MAGA bubble of delusion is simple: They never actually cared about women's safety. On the contrary, all the right-wing talk about "protecting women" is a fig leaf over the right-wing reality of toxic masculinity and a compulsive desire to dominate women. Statistics show guns are far more likely to be used to harm women than protect them. That doesn't bother the MAGA masses, because deep down inside, they always knew that. Underneath all the sentimental talk about "chivalry," the dark truth is the ability to control women has always been a major appeal of guns.
There's a reason that both the left and right tend to rhetorically link debates over gun safety and reproductive rights, though usually in the trivial way of each side accusing the other of hypocrisy. Liberals are irate that conservatives give more rights to a gun than they do a woman over her own body. Conversely, conservatives whine about liberals who find abortion rights in the Constitution but don't see how language about a "well-regulated militia" doesn't confer the individual right to own weapons of war.
But really what links these two issues isn't rigorously applied logic, but the way both guns and reproductive rights stand in for larger struggles over gender and power. Gun "rights" and opposition to abortion are linked in that both give men immense power over women — indeed, the power of life and death. For most feminists, the flip of this is also true: Legal abortion and gun bans are about freeing women, by limiting the tools men can use to trap and even kill us.
It's never been a surprise to me that so much of the leadership of the rising gun safety movement looks exactly like the people who have fought for so long for reproductive freedoms. In a word: Women. No doubt funding was a major reason that Moms Demand Action became the behemoth in the world of anti-gun activism. But in my experience, especially when covering Democratic campaign events where the Moms often turn out in force, it's also because a lot of activists were motivated by the framing of gun safety as a woman's issue. It resonates for the same reason that abortion rights do. Women see the way male domination links the issues together, and how women especially need both reproductive rights and gun control to feel safe and be free.
Ultimately, people like Fournier are trolling when they pretend to believe guns "empower" women. The goal is not to persuade, but to annoy. When the goal is aggravating liberals, adding a layer of dishonesty to the misogyny gets the job done. The mistake, which all too many people make, is assuming that the sadism is limited to the "lulz" generated by outraging feminists. The online misogyny takes root offline, leading again and again to real life violence against women.
