The Gun Issue

Support OF NOTE’s work by ordering a Special Print Copy of The Gun Issue.

editorial director’s note
By Grace Aneiza Ali 

Gun Violence is a Women’s Issue. Yet, to read the statistics about gun violence in America is to read about a gun culture dominated by men. For women, however, the stakes are just as high—even deadlier. Now, more than ever in our country, gun violence against women and girls has reached new heights. It is undeniably a health crisis. Here’s what the data tells us:

• Women who are victims of domestic violence are 5 times more likely to be killed if their partner owns a gun.
• 80% of people shot to death by intimate partners in the United States each year are women.
• Every 16 hours, an American woman is fatally shot by a current or former intimate partner.
• 44% of mass shootings between 2008 and 2013 in the United States involved the targeting of intimate partners.
• Women are 16 times more likely to die by guns in the U.S. than in any other developed country.

Yet, because a culture of silence pervades gender-based violence, we know that these figures are likely a gross underestimation. As troubling as they are, they have not been enough to shift the dangerous normalization of guns in our culture, even when the statistics prove we have a much higher chance of being hurt by guns than being helped by them.

The 10 multidisciplinary women artists in the OF NOTE’s The Gun Issue engage the gun as an art object in their artistic practices. In doing so, they confront the infiltration of guns in our day-to-day lives—the gratuitous violence meted out by femme fatales in television, film and gaming, the marketing of real pink guns to girls, the faulty narratives equating gun possession with women’s empowerment, and the eroticization and sexualization of the gun-wielding modern woman as the epitome of desire and seduction.

These women artists-activists are mothers invested in the safety of their children. They are wives and girlfriends who survived violent relationships. They are neighbors living in communities ridden with gang violence. They are educators teaching in a time when our nation’s schools and college campuses are hunting grounds plagued by mass shootings. They are citizens living in states where the Second Amendment is the law of the land.  And, in cities where the fatigue of police-sanctioned violence on people of color has become all too unbearable.

Some of the women know intimately the pain a gun inflicts, its visible and invisible trauma, and have borne witness to how gun violence rips families apart. Some have been on the receiving end of gun violence by their own intimate partners. Not all of them have reported these experiences, turning instead to their artwork and a community of women, not the police.  Others have experienced the fear of having looked down the barrel of a gun in random acts of violence. Some are responsible gun owners. Then there are those who’ve never touched a gun, but whose stories of the befallen haunt them.

Collectively, these artists are reclaiming the gun from a weapon of destruction into a tool of resistance. To do so they engage the art of poetry, theater, photography, sculpture, performance, and painting, among other mediums. Their artwork strips the gun bare of its power, repurposes it, and in some cases their artmaking involves its literal dismantling and destruction. Their work forces us to confront the unpretty—the damage done to a woman’s body after a gunshot wound. It also generously offers women platforms to share their narratives of survival. In the process, these women are shifting the conversations around gun violence.

At times their work is boldly political, at times they are meant to change hearts and minds. Equally beautiful, these artists use their work to shine a light on one courageous woman/survivor/resistor/disruptor after another—reminding us to trust in the power of women.

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