Iowa's finest this week decided to kill "stand-your-ground" legislation. The old law will continue to govern your legal actions when a thug approaches you on the street. You must try to retreat, giving the goblin a nice broad back to aim at.
It's more complicated than that, of course. The measure would have made it very difficult for a prosecutor to pursue charges when a citizen met force with force. He could nail you for egregious lapses of perception and judgement, but not because he didn't like you, or guns, or the very concept of a citizen assuming responsibility for his own survival.
Even with the duty-to-skedaddle, you retain the right to pay a lawyer to try to talk the county attorney out of prosecution, and to pay him more to tell your tale to a jury -- that is, to bankrupt yourself with legal costs because, in a very tough moment, you decided to stay alive.
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Also dead are moves to ban cops from confiscating your firearms during a "state of emergency" and to let professional school security guards carry sidearms. Iowa legislators looked at New Orleans and Columbine and pronounced them good?
A Constitutional carry bill is still alive, but that's probably going nowhere. It died in the first "funnel" week but was revived as a funnel-exempt tax measure when a backer argued that its tinkering with permit fees constituted tax law.
(It is possible that one or more of the dead bills could also resurface as "tax" measures, but with a liberal majority in the senate, chances of passage remain slim.)
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If you like, you can forgive these poor fellows and girls. They were badly distracted this week. The first new legislative redistricting map surfaced yesterday, and all of what ever mental power exists down there was focused on, "Jayzuss! Am I losing my seat?"
They know what's important.
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