Women of America, relax. There’s no need to carry a gun for self-defense, not when you can vomit on your attacker. Vomiting on command not a skill you’ve cultivated? Never fear, just proceed to the nearest rape-free zone at the boundary of which your attacker will be forced to meekly retreat. If there’s no rape-free zone in your immediate vicinity, maybe passive resistance is your best option. Or, have you considered that you might be imagining the whole thing?

Is the above absurdly satirical? Well, yes and no. Apparently, if you’re a male Democratic politician in Colorado, this is perfectly sound logic.

This week, Colorado Democratic Congressman Joe Salazar suggested that women don’t need guns for self-defense. They may willy nilly shoot someone because their intuition can’t discern between a member of normal pedestrian traffic and a stalker. Instead, he argues, women should rest easy knowing that there are call boxes, rape whistles and safe zones. His colleague Paul Rosenthal suggested that instead of carrying a gun, women should rely on the buddy system for safety.

As if this weren’t asinine enough, the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs released a list of tips for rape prevention that included vomiting or urinating on the attacker. They also suggested that passive resistance, i.e., submitting, might be the best option. The list has since been scrubbed from their website with the excuse that it was taken out of context by popular media.

Then there’s the dazzling intellect of our honorable vice president and formerly unbeknownst firearms connoisseur Joe Biden, who informed the media this week that women shouldn’t use semi-automatic weapons like an AR-15 for defense because they’re too difficult for women to shoot. Instead, he suggested they arm themselves with double barrel shotguns and if threatened, fire warning shots out the front door.

Hey, Joe — your argument is malarkey.

First of all, randomly firing a gun on your property is illegal. The Castle Doctrine, which allows an individual to use deadly force in their home, is only applicable if there’s demonstrable evidence that someone is breaking in. It does not give the right to shoot haphazardly at noises in the night. Secondly, firing both rounds of a double barrel shotgun leaves that person utterly defenseless until they reload, and as the federal government has urgently been churning out propaganda to demonstrate, that’s the perfect time to take down a gunman. Obviously, semi-automatic rifles, which are more accurate and don’t have to be manually reloaded, are more effective defensive weapons.

Although this collection of statements by itself is a stunning exhibition of the collective idiocy that defines the modern politician, it is also patently offensive as it completely denigrates the mental and physical capabilities of women.

It is absolutely despicable that these men feel they can so condescendingly spew this politically incorrect drivel. They will never know how vulnerable a woman can feel, even when she’s in a public space, when approached by a stranger, and how terrifying it can be. Their supposed ideological sincerity is utterly feckless — these are the same people who brand anyone who dare voice a pro-life position as “anti-woman” and then turn around and say women are mentally and physically incapable of using judgment in matters concerning their own safety.

Apparently, the modern feminist attitude of self-empowerment is irrelevant when it comes to self-defense. Instead women should rely on the sage council of bureaucrats. Apparently it’s wrong to discriminate between gender-based physical and mental capacities in an active combat role, but when it comes to self-defense, it’s totally cogent.

A cacophony of logical fallacies hocked to the masses with a heightened sense of urgency in the name of inclusiveness and sensitivity, superficially weighed and deemed sensible by the masses, the hollow core exposed but unchallenged — this has become the kernel of public policy, as evidenced by the claptrap emanating from Colorado.

But this is just the latest instance in a string of similar episodes, the heredity of which can be traced to the election. Is this to be the death knell of rationality? Or is it part of the ebbs and flows that define the cycle of American politics? Hopefully it is the latter, but disquieting nonetheless.

Katherine Revello is a second-year journalism and political science student