Washington County declared Second Amendment sanctuary

The Washington County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution declaring the region a Second Amendment sanctuary at its regular meeting Tuesday morning.

Board Member Jack Seward Jr. said gun control rhetoric from President Joe Biden had the wrong priorities, focusing too much on the abilities of weapons rather than who had them.

“If all you concentrate on is the ability, that is going to effect every modern weapon in common use today,” Seward said. “It’s not what it can do, it’s what a person actually does with it, that’s where it goes too far.”

The motion carried on a 4-1 vote, with board Vice Chair Bob Yoder the lone vote against. The move made Yoder the first supervisor in the state to vote against a Second Amendment sanctuary resolution, which passed unanimously in Jasper, Hardin, Madison, Cedar, Adams, Mills and Clarke Counties in the last two months.

Yoder said his constituents had doubts about the motion.

“Last night I went to Kalona and Riverside City Council meetings and got mixed reviews,” he said. “Kalona was dead set against it, all five council members. Riverside, it was all over the board.”

Yoder said the resolution would not establish meaningful protection of the gun rights.

“I’ve never seen one of these proclamations yet that was worth the ink of the paper it took to produce it,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot of legal standing here that I see. The state of Iowa is in the process of adding the Second Amendment right to the state constitution, and I’d have a whole lot more faith in that than this proclamation.”

Despite his vote against, Yoder added that he agreed with the resolution’s sentiment.

“For the record, I am a gun owner; I do own some firearms, and I enjoy those sports considerably,” he said. “If different politicians would like to take our guns away, or certain ones, something like this wouldn’t slow them down for five minutes.”

Indeed, proponents on the board stressed in previous discussions that the sanctuary resolution was only a statement of opinion, not an expansion of gun rights.

“This has nothing to do with impeding enforcement of current law,” Seward said last week, in response to a comment that the resolution would increase access to guns. “It has nothing to do with expanding anybody’s rights, it has to do with saying we respect the Constitution of the United States.”

Board Chair Richard Young conceded that the county lacked the legal standing to interpret what laws did or did not violate the federal Second Amendment.

“We would not overrule anything that the federal courts would say,” he said. “The Supreme Court ruled lately that the Second Amendment is protected.”

Still, Young said the resolution backed the interpretation of the Second Amendment from the D.C. v. Heller Supreme Court case, a 5-4 ruling in 2008 that ruled against a weapon-based restriction but conceded the necessity of other aspects of gun control.

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” the late Justice Antonin Scalia said in the case’s majority opinion. “Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”