If you tell an anti-gunner that they see the Second Amendment as a second-class right, they’ll likely scoff at you. They’ll say that no right is absolute and that wanting a few restrictions isn’t the same thing as thinking it’s a second-class right.
Never mind that they would never tolerate the level of intrusions we see in the Second Amendment exist in the First. Want to require special licenses before starting a blog or Substack? You’re a monster! Want to require a permit before buying a gun? GENIUS!
So yeah, they see it that way, even if they won’t admit it.
But the truth is that Wyoming, a pro-gun state, actually sees it the same way to some degree, and that’s clear with their refusal to pass a recent bill that would be good for gun owners and all those who are forced to act in self-defense.
HB14 would have helped citizens acquitted of charges arising from using deadly force in self-defense. It would have allowed the citizen to recover some of their legal expenses from the prosecuting county and would have applied to both acquittals and dropped charges. There was even a provision to expedite expungement: There would be no records to haunt the citizen in the future.
Though Wyoming is one of the reddest states, House Bill 14 failed to advance. Twenty-nine Republicans voted for it; 26 Republicans and six Democrats killed it. It’s likely cost was a factor. Eight of Wyoming’s 23 counties have fewer than 10,000 residents, and it wouldn’t take a particularly large settlement to bankrupt them.
It’s a pity we can’t cut to the chase and enact this as a federal law. The cost of defending oneself from charges such as this can easily run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and would bankrupt most people. But any such law passed by Congress would apply only to federal cases. [Note: The one big exception could be clarifying the interstate transportation of firearms under the Firearm Owners Protection Act and adding sanctions like those in Wyoming HB14 to discourage malicious enforcement and prosecution by certain states we all know and loathe.]
In reality, contrary to the “second-class right” meme, a more accurate description would be “steerage.”Steerage is the lowest class of passenger on a ship. It was usually called “third-class,” but in practice it was more like “fourth-class.”
Sounds about right.
The foundation of our system of justice is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Gun control turns this on its head. Far too many politicians and their fellow travelers assume the only reason anyone wants a gun is so they can commit evil with it.
And the idea that people have to defend themselves in a court of law because they acted in the protection of innocent life, namely their own, but not exclusively so, is asinine. I get that there are times when things look murky, but that’s not always the case. George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse were both prosecuted not because the evidence suggested they acted inappropriately, but because it was politically expedient to do so.
They were on the hook for thousands of dollars in legal fees, all because some prosecutor wanted to make sure he headed off his next opponent for district attorney.
Knowing that such people could recoup the costs of their defense, potentially bankrupting a community, would serve as a check against these malicious prosecutions.
Good-faith mistakes are one thing, but we’ve seen what happens when politics enters the picture.
Even the Republicans in Wyoming considered communities’ financial woes before the rights of the law-abiding people who might use their Second Amendment rights to protect themselves.
But this isn’t even purely a Second Amendment issue.
Think about people who act in self-defense with things that wouldn’t normally be classified as “arms.” Running over a carjacker, for example, is an act of self-defense, but few could successfully argue that cars are arms. Using a frying pan to bash a home invader over the head–an act that can kill, despite what Hollywood might tell you–is self-defense, but it’s not the use of “arms” as typically defined.
So yeah, this goes beyond a Second Amendment issue and is just a moral one. People shouldn’t have their lives destroyed because a government official maliciously decided to use the power of his or her office to make a point at the expense of someone who did nothing wrong. There needs to be ramifications for that, but usually, they are.
Sure, Mike Nifong was disbarred after his politically-motivated prosecution of Duke lacrosse players for a rape that never happened, but that wasn’t because he prosecuted them. It was because he broke every rule in the book to do so.
Rittenhouse’s prosecutor wasn’t disbarred, and neither was Zimmerman’s. Those guys were never touched, really, and they should have been.
The fact that self-defense matters less to some so-called Republicans than people’s rights is an extreme problem, and if it’s like that in Wyoming, where else do you think it’ll be like that?
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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