One Honest Mistake Can Make Defending Our Rights Harder

Montana/United States – -(AmmoLand.com)- I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the woman who thought she shot a wolf. I’m not going to throw the poor woman’s name out there. She’s notorious enough for what appears to be an honest mistake.

But it’s an honest mistake that will have consequences for everyone who hunts. Let’s put it this way – when anti-hunting extremists come looking to wreck that shooting sport, this woman’s honest mistake will be front and center in some of their campaigns. The mistake particularly could hurt those who hunt to feed their families or who donate the meat to Hunters for the Hungry.

She’s not the first to make such a mistake, and in fact, she is in some pretty famous company. When he was running for governor of Texas in 1994, former President George W. Bush accidentally shot a killdeer. In the pre-social media era, he paid the fine, and he was rightfully the butt of jokes for a little bit.

Part of it boiled down to a simple failure to follow a basic rule of firearms safety: Be sure of your target and what’s beyond it. There is a responsibility Second Amendment supporters need to shoulder – particularly when they are publicly advocating for the protection of our freedoms – in terms of modeling responsible use of firearms, and she unintentionally failed in that responsibility, albeit not as badly as Madison Cawthorn did.

This woman didn’t, and Second Amendment supporters would do well to learn from her honest mistake and to avoid making similar ones that could do damage to our efforts to preserve our freedoms for future generations. One such case of an honest mistake was when Al Salvi made the infamous claim that Jim Brady had a Class III license when debating anti-Second Amendment extremists Dick Durbin.

We’re all paying for Al Salvi’s honest mistake today, with every vote Dick Durbin makes. Would we likely be dealing with an anti-Second Amendment extremist today? Perhaps. But perhaps it could have been delayed for six years. That would have been a little better for a brief time.

In an ideal world, honest mistakes should be viewed as just what they are: Honest mistakes that people should pay the price for. But we’re not in an ideal world, especially with the double standards many media outlets have.

These days, a momentary lapse of thoughtfulness about how we come across, the brief moment where someone gives in to an understandable impulse, or the failure to select the right approach can make it harder to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists via the ballot box at the federal, state, and local level.

About Harold Hutchison

Writer Harold Hutchison has more than a dozen years of experience covering military affairs, international events, U.S. politics and Second Amendment issues. Harold was consulting senior editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine and is the author of the novel Strike Group Reagan. He has also written for the Daily Caller, National Review, Patriot Post, Strategypage.com, and other national websites.