Is self-defense now a crime? Some are concluding it is — that is, if you’re the wrong kind of person. Inspiring this opinion is that Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who late last month brandished firearms to defend their home from a menacing mob, have now had their weapons seized by police in a move that smacks of declawing a cat and then throwing him to the wolves.
The McCloskeys are being targeted by St. Louis circuit attorney Kimberly Gardner, a corrupt public official who Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt says “has a sketchy track record of making politically based decisions.” Gardner had vowed on June 29 to use “the full power of Missouri law” against the couple, and now….
As KSDK’s 5 On Your Side reports:
St. Louis police officers executed a search warrant Friday evening at the home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the Central West end couple who confronted protesters with weapons in June.
Sources told 5 On Your Side that police seized one of the weapons, the rifle, from the couple and they told police their attorney has the pistol seen in photos.
5 On Your Side is not aware of any charges against the McCloskeys at this time, and the warrant served Friday evening was just for the guns.
Late Friday evening 5 On Your Side confirmed attorney Al Watkins was no longer representing the McCloskeys, and that attorney Joel Schwartz had taken over.
Authorities later obtained the pistol from Watkins; that weapon was found to be inoperable. Below is a video, which includes an interview with Attorney General Schmitt, on the warrant’s execution.
For a little more background, the McCloskeys’ ordeal began when Black Lives Matter protesters approached their home June 23. Mark McCloskey, a 63-year-old personal injury attorney who’s actually sympathetic to BLM’s cause, related to KSDK in a June 29 interview (video below) what then transpired after he perceived danger and fetched his rifle:
At that point, everybody got enraged. There were people wearing body armor. One person pulled out some loaded pistol magazine and clicked them together and said that you were next. We were threatened with our lives, threatened with a [our] house being burned down, my office building being burned down, even our dog’s life being threatened. It was, it was about as bad as it can get…. I really thought it was Storming the Bastille, that we would be dead and the house would be burned and there was nothing we could do about it. It was a huge and frightening crowd. And…they’d broken the gate [and] were coming at us.
What the McCloskeys do have going for them legality-wise is that Missouri is a Castle Doctrine state, which offers “the broadest latitudes of any state in using even deadly force to protect yourself or your property,” Powerline reports attorney Harmeet Dhillon as stating.
“This couple used NO force, despite the imminent threat from a trespassing mob,” she continued. “The seizure of weapons is government overreach.”
What’s more, “Anders Walker, a constitutional law professor at St. Louis University, said that Mark McCloskey and his wife Patricia did not break any laws because the street where they live, Portland Place, is a private street,” Daily Wire adds.
“‘At any point that you enter the property, they can then, in Missouri, use deadly force to get you off the lawn,’ said Walker, adding, ‘There’s no right to protest on those streets,’” the site also related.
“It’s essentially a private estate. If anyone was violating the law, it was the protesters,” Walker further stated. “In fact, if (the McCloskeys) have photos of the protesters, they could go after them for trespassing.” To this point, the police were considering charging the angry mob with just that.
But none of this matters to prosecutor Gardner, who on June 29 issued the following statement on the McCloskey affair:
Statement from Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner in regards to events over weekend: pic.twitter.com/KqqFHIvL9Q
— Circuit Attorney (@stlcao) June 29, 2020
This attitude isn’t surprising, though, as Gardner is a far-left, Soros-money-bought prosecutor who abets criminality via inaction. Commentator Tucker Carlson exposed her corruption on a June 30 edition of his Fox News program (video below. Relevant portion begins at 0:55).
As Powerline put it addressing her biases, when she said she “‘will use the full power of Missouri law to hold people accountable,’” Gardner “means white people who defend their property without resorting to actual violence. She does not mean the people who trespass on their property and terrorize them.”
“Nor does she mean rioters,” the site added. “She had all 36 of those arrested during recent St. Louis riots released.”
So the message is clear. The McCloskeys’ case and others reflect how mob-abetting leftist governments are telling citizens: You’re on your own — but don’t dare defend yourself.
In fact, the McCloskeys said earlier this month that they were threatened with yet another attack, but that the police ignored their pleas, they couldn’t find a private security firm that would help, and that one security expert actually told them, “The only advice I can give you is abandon the house. Run. Let the mob have its way. Let it burn.”
And now, while we don’t know if the McCloskeys’ seized firearms are the only ones they own, it’s apparent that leftist governments’ don’t want the couple — or any of us — having recourse to self-defense, either.
Why, the cynical could even suspect the weapons’ seizure is a wink-and-nod “go-time” signal to the mob. Of course, if so, it wouldn’t be leftist local governments’ first one.
Photo: screen-grab from YouTube video
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
