Second Amendment rights, safety, and due process

I am a military veteran and a gun owner, and I support the Second Amendment. I also believe firearm safety is a serious responsibility— not a slogan, not a culture-war prop, but something that has to be lived. I do not see a contradiction between those positions. I see the whole point.

Camp Williams, 2010. On the range with the Utah Army National Guard, where I qualified on the M16 alongside the soldiers I served with. This is where my respect for firearms was sharpened— in the discipline of doing it right, every time, with people whose lives depended on the person next to them doing the same. I learned gun safety here not as a talking point, but as a duty. That is the place I am speaking from when I talk about the Second Amendment, responsibility, and keeping our people safe. Disclaimer: The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. The use of military imagery, rank, or service history in this material does not imply endorsement by the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, or the Utah National Guard.

Long before I served in uniform, I learned firearm safety through Scouting. Later, the military trained me in responsible handling, discipline, and the weight that comes with carrying or owning a weapon. Firearms were never presented to me as toys, political accessories, or symbols of masculinity. They were tools that demanded knowledge, control, and respect.

I was not taught to fear firearms. I was taught to understand them. That experience shapes how I approach this issue. I do not come at it from panic, absolutism, or political theater. I come at it with respect— for the Constitution, for public safety, and for the responsibility that accompanies the right to own a firearm.

I reject the false choice between defending the Second Amendment and taking preventable firearm deaths seriously. Utah has a strong culture of lawful and responsible gun ownership. We can protect that culture while doing more to keep firearms away from children, thieves, traffickers, domestic abusers, and people in the middle of an acute crisis.

Rights and responsibility are not opposites. In a healthy society, they reinforce one another. I take constitutional rights seriously across the board, not selectively. The government does not get to treat a fundamental right as guilty until proven innocent simply because the issue is emotionally charged. If the state seeks to restrict a person’s access to firearms, the burden belongs to the government.

That requires evidence. It requires a defined legal standard. It requires meaningful judicial review. It requires notice, an opportunity to be heard, a prompt path to appeal, and a process for restoring rights and returning property when the legal standard is no longer met.

Not vague suspicion. Not anonymous accusation standing alone. Not administrative convenience. And not a temporary restriction that quietly becomes permanent because no one built a realistic way out of it.

Due process is not an obstacle to public safety. It is what makes public safety legitimate.

Here is what I actually support. I support firearm safety education and training because responsible ownership is built, not assumed. Gun owners should understand safe handling, maintenance, storage, transportation, and the laws governing the firearms they possess. Utah should support voluntary training, hunter education, community partnerships, and programs that make safety information accessible without treating gun owners as suspects.

I also support secure storage. A firearm that is properly stored is less likely to be accessed by a child, stolen from a home or vehicle, used impulsively during a crisis, or trafficked into another crime.

The most effective approach is to make responsible storage easy, affordable, and culturally normal. Utah should expand access to free or reduced-cost gun locks, lockboxes, safes, and secure vehicle-storage options. We should consider incentives that help families purchase quality storage rather than creating policies that only people with disposable income can easily follow.

We should also expand voluntary temporary-storage options for people who recognize that they or someone in their household may be entering a dangerous period. Utah already recognizes voluntary firearm safe-harbor approaches. We can build on that foundation by making it easier for someone to temporarily place a firearm with an eligible trusted person, participating dealer, range, or law-enforcement agency without stigma, unnecessary bureaucracy, or fear that asking for help will automatically cost them their rights forever.

That matters because Utah’s firearm-death problem is overwhelmingly a suicide problem. More than four out of every five firearm-related deaths in Utah are suicides. Among Utah veterans who died by suicide between 2017 and 2021, nearly three quarters used a firearm.

Those numbers require honesty. The firearm deaths most likely to affect Utah gun owners are not necessarily the incidents that dominate national television. They are often moments of private despair inside homes, vehicles, garages, bedrooms, and rural communities— moments in which someone who may have owned and handled firearms responsibly for decades reaches a crisis that narrows their ability to see beyond the next few minutes.

I take that personally. These are people like the veterans I served beside and the veterans I continue to work with. A person can be a responsible gun owner and still experience depression, trauma, grief, chronic pain, financial collapse, relationship loss, or a moment of suicidal crisis. Those realities do not cancel one another out. Pretending otherwise only makes it harder for people to ask for help before a crisis becomes irreversible.

Putting time and distance between a person and a lethal means during an acute crisis saves lives. That is not an attack on gun ownership. It is one of the ways responsible gun owners protect their own families and communities.

I support expanding voluntary safe-storage programs, suicide-prevention education designed with gun owners rather than imposed on them, access to gun locks and safes, peer-led veteran outreach, crisis lines that answer, mobile crisis services that can respond without automatically escalating a situation, and mental healthcare that is available before someone reaches the breaking point.

Veterans and other gun owners should be able to seek mental healthcare without assuming that asking for help will automatically cost them a constitutional right. Mental illness is not synonymous with violence. Broad policies that stigmatize diagnoses, punish people for seeking treatment, or treat every person with depression or post-traumatic stress as inherently dangerous are both unjust and counterproductive.

They drive people away from the very care that could prevent harm.

Intervention should be based on credible evidence of dangerous conduct or an imminent threat, not a diagnosis, identity, stereotype, or political assumption.

When there is compelling evidence that someone presents an immediate danger to themselves or others, I support narrowly tailored judicial intervention— but only with real due process built into every stage.

Any emergency process must require sworn and specific evidence. A judge must independently evaluate that evidence. Any order issued without the person present must be brief and followed quickly by a full hearing. The government or petitioner must carry a meaningful burden of proof. The person affected must have the opportunity to respond, present evidence, challenge allegations, seek legal representation, and appeal the decision.

Orders must be limited in duration, reviewed before renewal, and accompanied by a clear process for returning firearms when the evidentiary standard is no longer met. Knowingly false or malicious claims should carry consequences. Records should be handled carefully so that a temporary crisis does not become a permanent public label.

A process with weak safeguards can be weaponized in divorces, family disputes, political conflicts, or against people who lack the resources to defend themselves. We should be honest about that risk and design against it from the beginning.

Get the due process right, and it is possible to respond to a genuine danger without putting everyone’s liberty on the table.

Public safety also requires enforcing laws against the people who actually break them. I support serious investigation and prosecution of firearm trafficking, straw purchasing, theft rings, and anyone who knowingly provides firearms to a prohibited person. I support holding people accountable when they use firearms in violence, threats, coercion, or domestic abuse.

Too often, lazy policymaking directs attention toward people who follow the law because they are easier to regulate, while sophisticated trafficking networks, repeat violent offenders, and failures of enforcement receive less attention. Responsible owners should not be used as a substitute for competent investigation.

We also have to address the conditions beneath violence. A firearm can make an act of violence more lethal, but it does not create domestic abuse, organized trafficking, untreated trauma, economic desperation, social isolation, or institutional failure. Serious public policy has to address both access to lethal means and the crises that make their misuse more likely.

That means functioning mental healthcare, intervention in domestic violence, stable housing, substance-use treatment, youth support, safe schools, community trust, and law enforcement focused on genuinely dangerous behavior rather than broad suspicion.

I will not use gun owners as political props. I will not use survivors of firearm violence as political props either. Both deserve better than a debate designed to generate fear, fundraising, and partisan loyalty while leaving the underlying problems unresolved.

My position is not complicated. I support the right of law-abiding Utahns to own firearms. I support a strong culture of responsible ownership. I support voluntary safety measures that are accessible and grounded in respect. I support intervention when credible evidence demonstrates a genuine danger. I support enforcement against traffickers, violent offenders, and people who knowingly arm prohibited individuals.

And I support a constitutional framework in which the government must meet its burden before it restricts a fundamental right.

Freedom without responsibility becomes recklessness. Responsibility without freedom becomes control. Our job is to protect both.