Anti-Second Amendment Bill Passes Iowa Senate

Thursday the anti-gun and anti-due process Senate File 2357 easily passed in the Iowa Senate with only 11 Senators voting against it. I'm a bit late writing about this and the boys at Between Two Rivers and Iowa Patriots have covered it more thoroughly than I.

According to Iowa Gun Owners, the bill would:

• Allow virtually anyone who knows you to apply to the court for a no-contact order – even if no physical contact has ever occurred between the two of you. As condition of this no-contact order you would be required to hand over all of your firearms and ammunition.
• Not require that you even be present at the court hearing. This bill does not even ensure that you have the right to even have legal counsel present or a chance to confront your accusers in a court of law.
• Allow an anti-gun court to decide who is qualified to take possession of your firearms should they decide to take them from you.
• Allow this same court to decide that no one is qualified to take your guns and order the sheriff’s department to seize them, and make you pay the sheriff for the right to lose your guns! Yeah, you get to pay the government $50 per gun that they seize from you!
• Declare you a felon, and unable to ever own guns again, if you fail to turn over so much as a single .22 cartridge.

All of this is done in the name of "combating domestic abuse." Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller gleefully approved the Senate's passage: "This law will help prevent women, men and children from being terrorized, maimed and killed by violent domestic abusers. It will only remove guns from domestic abusers. This is a big victory for public safety[.]"

I wouldn't count on it "only remov[ing] guns from domestic abusers." As I've written about the federal Lautenberg Amendment, feel-good legislation like this ensnares more innocuous parties than deranged stalkers.

I think that the blogger strandediniowa at Between Two Rivers summed it up best: "If the women's groups that lobbied in favor of SF2357, could possibly put some effort into making it easier for women to purchase and carry firearms for their protection, maybe a few less abusers would be stalking their victims."

Let's hope we can kill this bill in the House of Representatives.