Cheyenne, Wyo. – Flush with victory after persuading most state legislatures to approve concealed-carry handgun laws, the National Rifle Association now is lobbying to make it easier for people to defend themselves with deadly force.
In Wyoming and 11 other states, mostly in the West and the South, the NRA is backing bills to specify that people have no duty to retreat from an attacker before using deadly force. Twenty-five states already have such laws on their books.
The Wyoming bill is opposed by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. It plans to write each Wyoming lawmaker urging opposition, making the Cowboy State – where guns are present in more than half of all homes – an unlikely battleground in the fight over appropriate use of firearms.
Neither Rep. Stephen Watt, a Republican sponsor of the Wyoming bill, nor Uinta County Attorney Mike Greer, the president of the Wyoming County and Prosecuting Attorneys Association, could cite a Wyoming case in which someone had been prosecuted who would have been spared if a no-retreat law were on the books.
But Watt says that’s not the point.
“It’s about a right to defend yourself,” said Watt, a former policeman.
In a statement last week calling on Wyoming legislators to oppose Watt’s bill, James Brady, the former press secretary to President Reagan, called the Wyoming bill “a sham, a farce, a dangerous solution to a nonexistent problem.”
