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‘Guns Get None’: Toronto woman encourages gang members’ girlfriends to withhold sex

"Got a gun? You get none."

Nicole Osbourne James started a blog, Guns Get None, following the mid-July mass shooting in Scarborough, Ontario. She's urging women to ban sexual relationships with men who have guns.

"Women. Mothers. Lovers. We need to use our own power and have a ban on sexual relationships with men that have guns. We need to stop harbouring and enabling our sons with guns. Can we make it happen?" she wrote.

"The idea is that we, as women, should take responsibility and ownership of the men in our lives," James, 39, a community activist, told the Toronto Star.

James is using her blog to start a conversation, she said. While her husband isn't a gangbanger, she did have a close male friend in university who carried a gun, and even offered to settle conflict using it.

[ Related: Toronto bullet ban gets shot down, and with good reason ]

"Listen, we do use sex to get what we want," James told the Toronto Star. "My man comes home late and I'm mad — there won't be any action in that moment. We do it for minimal reasons, why should it be different if he's out gangbanging?"

Sex strikes are hardly new — the Greek play Lysistrata tells the story of women withholding sex as a strategy to end the Peloponnesian War — and have actually proven effective in some cases.

In 2003, the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace organized nonviolence protests that included a sex strike. They were able to bring about peace after 14 years of warfare, and helped usher in the country's first female head of state.

In 2006, Columbian gang members' wives and girlfriends started a sex strike to curb gang violence in response to 480 gang-related deaths in Pereira, Colombia. In 2010, "the city's murder rate saw the steepest decline in Colombia, down by 26.5%," the Guardian reported.

In 2011, a sex strike brought peace to a Filipino village. Women in a sewing collective refused to sleep with their husbands until the violence between neighbouring villages stopped.

Also in 2011, Columbian women refused to have sex with their partners until the government agreed to pave part of a 163-year-old horse trail. It worked.

And this summer, inspired by the 2003 Liberian sex strike, political opposition coalition "Let's Save Togo" asked Togolese women to withhold sex as a protest against President Faure Gnassingbé.

Isabelle Ameganvi, leader of the women's wing of the group Let's Save Togo, told the BBC that sex could be a "weapon of battle" to achieve political change:

"We have many means to oblige men to understand what women want in Togo," Ameganvi said.

[ Related: Canada has a 'gun culture' too ]

Maybe James' call to action is worth considering. Would a sex strike make men think twice about packing heat? Or will James' challenge at least empower women to take a stand against violence in their communities?