NRA lobbies for "deadly force"

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, including Washington, 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. "And that is a right that we all should have, regardless of whether there's been any cases where someone has been prosecuted for using self defense or not. It's something that we should not have to worry about, and this is to give back that right to the citizens of Wyoming."

In a statement this 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."

"No one's in jail in Wyoming for acting in legitimate self-defense," Brady said. "The only thing this law might do is keep people out of jail who deserve to be there."

The NRA says 38 states now have some provision allowing people to carry concealed handguns, up from 10 in the mid-1980s, and the NRA scored a victory over gun-control advocates early last year when Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed a no-retreat law in that state.

Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs for NRA in Fairfax, Va., said the NRA is behind similar bills that have been introduced in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota and Washington in addition to Wyoming. He said the NRA was eyeing another five states for possible bill introductions this year but declined to name them.

"It is a priority," Arulanandam said. "In states where the statute calls for victims of crime to retreat, we think that that's wrong."

Arthur C. Hayhoe, executive director of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, says defense lawyers there are starting to raise the new no-retreat law to defend shooting cases.

"What they've done is legalized manslaughter here in Florida," Hayhoe said. "It promotes irresponsible, aggressive, and even illegal use of firearms. What's going to happen when the gun-owning community, it settles into them what this is really about, and they discover that these guys are being exonerated when they're charged with manslaughter?"

Despite Wyoming's overwhelmingly pro-gun culture, Peter Hamm, communications director with the Brady Campaign, said the group intends to muster whatever opposition it can.

"This is not really a gun issue," Hamm said. "It's a violence issue."