U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “A pregnant black woman is in prison for defending herself. Mainstream gun groups are silent,” Vox reported Friday. “She had a concealed carry permit. The gun wasn’t even loaded. Now she’s facing two years in prison.”
Reason had reported on this a few days earlier, explaining:
“Siwatu-Salama Ra is a 26-year-old black mother who watched in horror as an angry assailant—a neighbor with whom Ra had a dispute—deliberately crashed her vehicle into Ra’s car while Ra’s two-year-old daughter was playing inside. Ra removed her unloaded, legally purchased handgun from the glove box and brandished it, scaring the neighbor off.”
One of Jeff Cooper’s essential rules is all guns are always loaded, and leaving one unattended in the glove box invites trouble and tragedy. And using a gun believed to be unloaded may work as a bluff on occasion, but once the potential for a deadly force response has been introduced into a situation, the wielder had better pray that bluff isn’t called.
Fortunately, neither of those possibilities factored into Ra’s current woes. But what she is facing is nonetheless unjust and unacceptable, especially in light of Michigan’s “stand your ground” law, and established gun owner rights groups ought to involve themselves in appeals. Which brings us to why Vox is really posting this article.
“Making matters worse, while Black Lives Matter and other left-leaning civil rights organizations have been publicizing Ra’s case and others like it, mainstream pro-gun groups, including the National Rifle Association, have been dispiritingly quiet about the incident,” Vox couldn’t resist pointing out.
Everybody sees what they’re doing here, right?
They don’t give a damn about the right to keep and bear arms, nor are they championing it to fellow”progressives” as the most egalitarian power-sharing arrangement yet devised. Vox has long been a leading cheerleader for a state monopoly of violence, with their resident Pajama Boy having called on Barack Obama to to “unilaterally ban all Americans from purchasing guns.” They’re just doing this to try and embarrass NRA, and to smear the Association and its members as racists who don’t care about the plight of non-whites.
In fact, it’s not “conservatives” doing their utmost to disarm urban minorities (and extend it to everyone in Everytown) – it’s “progressives” and their party of choice, the Democrats. Michael Bloomberg went so far as to actually propose race-based gun restrictions – something Vox will never tell its readers about because it doesn’t help with the narrative they’re pushing.
That said, this seems the kind of civil and natural rights abuse stories NRA should champion, especially noting they have their own media group and they’ve made inroads and outreaches with spokesmen like Colion Noir. Add to that the case of Shaneen Allen, resolved “with the aid of untold numbers of Second Amendment supporters who ensured that these struggles did not go unnoticed.”
Gun owners and the groups they belong to should help, not because anti-gun leftists (who will always hate them) are playing “Gotcha!” but because it’s the right thing to do.
It’s a situation rich in opportunities, both to advance rights and to challenge minorities to consider why so many give kneejerk support to politicians who deny their rights and punish those who claim them.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.
In addition to being a field editor/columnist at GUNS Magazine and associate editor for Oath Keepers, he blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
Don’t give a dam about color, it is your choice to own a weapon or not. I support any and all American citizens right to carry, own, firearms and to USE in self defense. No exceptions, no excuses
OK, rich lawyers, who’s going to step up and help this woman?
Where is the NRA when you need them?
Why go through the trouble and expense of fighting it in court. Her neighbor can be convinced to change his testimony. The prosecutors and officers involved all have vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Public officials who commit wrongs by blindly adhering to a law that is unjustly applied to a given situation deserve nothing less. The “just doing their job” defense is not a defense. Violating the Constitution has no defense.
Her case was barely covered by any normal news organization I saw one story on MSN, essentially covering vox’s story, and I don’t consider vox a ligitimate site, and Detroit Free, another rag. The rest of the sites were all blogs, third-rate leftist rags, etc. The few facts on the case made it questionable that it was self-defense, and she was sentenced under a mandatory sentencing law for brandishing, which is how even she described it, though not in those words. She even had left her firearm unattended in her vehicle with her two year old. I don’t blame any… Read more »
Ok, here are some more facts: “The problem is, Harvey filed her report first. And in Detroit, the first person to file a report gets to become the “victim” in a legal dispute. According to the Detroit Metro Times: During the trial, a DPD detective testified that the department considers the person who arrives at the police station first to be the victim, lawyers say. Thus, detectives were not allowed to speak to Ra directly. That wasn’t the only problem during Ra’s trial. First and foremost, the jury — which, according to one of Ra’s attorneys, Victoria Burton-Harris, was “very… Read more »