\u00a0I believe if you\u2019re a violent felon with gun charges or anything else, you should not be allowed to own or use a firearm. But for those of us that aren\u2019t into that kind of thing, I believe you should be allowed to hunt because it is a means to support your family.You know?<\/em><\/p>\nCU: Yeah. So loss of that right is especially important to you, the hunt-, or the firearms?<\/p>\n
Daniel: Yeah. Because it\u2019s hurting my family. I mean they look at it, \u201cWell, he\u2019s a felon, he doesn\u2019t get to use a gun. The community will be safer.\u201d Yet they don\u2019t look at it like, \u201cOkay. We won\u2019t let him hunt. We\u2019re taking food out of his kids\u2019 mouths.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nCU: Yeah. So when you say that- So you\u2019re someone who would go out and get a deer or get something-<\/p>\n
Daniel: I was born and raised like that. And, you know, it\u2019s not the sport of it. I was never raised like that. It\u2019s not a sport to me, it\u2019s a way of life. Means, you know, to feed my kids.<\/em><\/p>\nCU: Yeah. Yeah. So you hunt year-round?<\/p>\n
Daniel: \u00a0I can\u2019t hunt. I can\u2019t hunt \u2018til I don\u2019t know when I get my rights back….<\/em><\/p>\nCU: \u00a0See \u2018cause to me, I think of hunting as like something, you know, one week of deer, and you go and do that. And I don\u2019t think of it in terms of the food. But for you, that\u2019s a big part of it.<\/p>\n
Daniel: Right.<\/em><\/p>\nCU: And that ha- And since a gun- Let me just make sure I\u2019m tracking. So since a gun had nothing to do with your crime,<\/p>\n
Daniel: I should be allowed to own one. \u2018Cause you know, even, even if it\u2019s I gotta go in and get a permit once a year, say, to use a firearm, a rifle. Fine. You know, I\u2019ll go in, I\u2019ll pay the extra money for a permit. Plus you know, it\u2019s income the state could be collecting, for whatever.<\/em><\/p>\nSo hunting and guns were a much bigger deal to Daniel than they were to me — for reasons that had nothing to do with criminal activity.\u00a0But it isn’t just men. Here’s how Mary, a White woman from greater Minnesota who was incarcerated for a drug-related offense, described the importance of hunting in her family:<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t hunt. I can\u2019t carry a firearm. And in my family, I have two young boys so, you know, we take [them] out hunting. My husband and I hunt, I hunt with my father, and so on and so forth. We go deer-hunting every year. Well, now all I can do is walk in the bush. I can\u2019t carry a gun. And it makes it difficult.\u00a0[We\u2019ve been going] ever since I was twelve years old, and I\u2019m forty. That\u2019s an awful long time.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nDiana, another female hunter, offered a similar account.<\/p>\n
I love deer hunting. I love goose, I love bear. I\u2019m a country girl- that\u2019s the way I was raised.\u00a0And I am a member of the NR-, well I was a member of the NRA. My father was, I mean, my brother, the whole bit.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nI haven\u2019t done much research on this issue outside Minnesota, but I found that gun rights were also important to former felons in a random sample of Florida clemency applications I examined a decade ago. There, White ex-felons were especially likely to seek restoration of firearms privileges (while African Americans were especially likely to be seeking restoration of voting rights).<\/p>\n
Given the potential risk to public safety, I’d likely oppose any sort of blanket restoration of firearms rights — despite the salience of the issue to those I interviewed and the reassuring absence of gun crimes among those who’ve had their rights restored. That said, I’d likely oppose the bill presented by Senator Goodwin, which create further barriers for people like Daniel, Mary, and Diana to regain these rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I discuss voting rights for people convicted of felonies, I’m often asked whether I’d favor restoring gun rights as well. Hostile talk show hosts sometimes take this tack, perhaps anticipating a knee-jerk liberal response that will lay bare the contradictions in my position. But I always respond that I haven’t done enough research on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[124,13,85],"class_list":["post-1710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crime","tag-inequality","tag-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1710"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1860,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions\/1860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}