Betty Winston Baye': Get Real About Domestic Violence And Guns.

Get real about domestic violence and guns
By Betty Winston Baye'

She's baaaack! U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that is.

She's back, and just in time for release this week of her majority opinion reinforcing the federal law that prevents those convicted of domestic violence from legally owning guns.

Justice Ginsburg had pancreatic surgery three weeks ago, and, to his discredit, Kentucky's junior senator, Jim Bunning, publicly predicted that she'll probably be dead in nine months.

Fortunately, most Republicans and Democrats have more class. They were long and strong in applauding the return of the only woman on the U.S. Supreme Court when she walked among her black-robed colleagues into President Obama's economic address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening.

Earlier in the day, Justice Ginsburg's majority opinion in United States v. Hayes was released. In it she said, "Firearms and domestic strife are a potentially deadly combination nationwide." Therefore, even if a state's law against battery doesn't specifically cite domestic battery, a convicted perpetrator is prohibited from gun ownership under the 1996 Lautenberg Amendment.

Many states, unfortunately, still treat domestic battery as a misdemeanor.

In fact, Justice Antonin Scalia, who dissented from the 7-2 majority in Hayes, said that a misdemeanor assault and battery charge implies "not that serious an offense."

"That's why we call it a misdemeanor," he insisted.

A misdemeanor indeed.

The 1994 document setting out charges said that Hayes "hit his wife all around the face until it swelled out, kicked her all around her body and kicked her in the ribs."

Not that serious?

Nevertheless, Randy Hayes is a National Rifle Association poster boy.

And Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum asked, "Why are men with clean histories except for one domestic violence dispute punished like hardened criminals who mug strangers on the street?"

Because, Schlafly speculated, "the feminist agenda calls for domestic violence laws to punish husbands and fathers above and beyond what can be proven in court under due-process procedures."

So, as the NRA fights to arm as many Americans as possible, and as Schlafly continues to attack feminists, real people out in the real world are being battered. Real children are being terrorized by that violence.

And police, who hate answering domestic violence calls, are at risk of being shot by some crazed individual who runs amok because his dinner was cold.

Hayes, it seems, didn't learn to keep his hands to himself after serving a year's probation on the 1994 domestic violence charge. In 2004, when police responded to a 911 domestic call involving Hayes and a girlfriend, they found a rifle under his bed. The battery charge was subsequently dropped, but Hayes was indicted under the so-called Lautenberg Amendment for possessing a firearm. That statute prohibits those convicted of domestic violence from owning guns.

The 4th U.S. Court of Appeals sided with Hayes on grounds that the West Virginia battery law under which he pleaded guilty in 1994 did not specifically cite battery in a domestic relationship between the perpetrator and the victim.

But Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling puts Hayes back on the hook for the illegal gun charge.

Meanwhile, down here on the ground in the real world, the abiding question is why so many states still insist on treating domestic battery as a misdemeanor rather than a felony.

Domestic violence is an international scourge, and whatever the numbers put out by governments and advocacy groups, we can be sure that the numbers of actual incidents are much, much higher. Many victims suffer in silence; they're too terrified or embarrassed to come out of their closets.

Many of us in recent days have seen the photo of a gorgeous young R&B singer, Rihanna, with face bruised and eyes swollen shut. She was allegedly beaten by her boyfriend, the also gorgeous and talented young singer Chris Brown. The 19-year-old Brown will have his day in court, but we are haunted by an earlier interview in which he talked about witnessing, as a youngster, the abuse of his own mother.

Ultimately, the horror of domestic violence is that even if you're someone who can't work up much sympathy for victims who remain in abusive relationships, children who regularly witness such violence often themselves grow up to become abusers.

Betty Winston Bayé's columns appear Thursdays in the Community Forum. E-mail her at bbaye@courier-journal.com.

Editor's comment: I applaud the Supreme Court's opinion, because the ruling makes perfect sense, since it is one of those situations where there is a LOGICAL link connecting the means of commiting a crime (the possession of a DEADLY WEAPON to commit VIOLENCE) and the crime itself (domestic VIOLENCE).

Some other laws, like baring ALL former felons from voting, do NOT provide such a logical link, and therefore make NO legal sense, unless unnecessary VINDICTIVENESS counts for legal sense -- and it SHOULDN'T!