Gun owners watching Ríhanna Kelver’s case should look past her and at the reasoning being used to condemn her, because that reasoning travels.
The facts are on video. A man shoved her to the ground. She drew her pistol, racked it so they would hear it, and pointed it at the man who had just attacked her. She never fired and kept the safety on. The man who shoved her first was never charged. She was, with two felonies and up to fifteen years.
Kelver is not the careless stranger her critics imagine. She grew up around guns and took hunter and firearm safety courses. She was armed that night because of a stalking situation serious enough that the man had already been thrown out of her workplace. That is the responsible carrier the gun community claims to defend.
Even the law she’s charged under protects her. Wyoming only makes drawing a weapon a crime when it is not “reasonably necessary in defense of his person.” Yet many of the people demanding her conviction are not arguing the facts. They are arguing that someone like her had no business being armed at all. The transphobia is doing the work the evidence can’t.
That is what gun owners should sit with. Once a community accepts that a self-defense right can be revoked because the defender is the wrong kind of person, the standard stops being what you did when attacked. It becomes whether the people judging you approve of you. That logic will not stay aimed at trans women in Wyoming. Gun owners are a despised minority in plenty of places, and the same reasoning can be turned on a rancher or a concealed carrier just as easily.
Transphobes need to get a grip and see this for the trap that it is. A right that only protects who you like is not a right. It is a permission slip, and permission slips can be revoked.