Lawmakers don’t need to chase red-herrings

With the new year comes the start of the 2012 legislative session in Juneau and a thorough examination of what legislation is on the agenda for the next three months.

It’s about this time that a bit of editorial ink gets spilled over silly pieces of legislation — Marmot Day and the official state gun, we’re looking at you. Folks tend to wring their hands about what a waste of time those bills are.

On the other end of the spectrum are things like the budget and oil taxes, big issues that require a lot of debate and scrutiny. Here our concern is about whether enough time is being spent on these meaty matters.

Somewhere in between these two is a third category of legislation we would like to address.

A prime example comes from the Mat-Su Valley’s own Mark Neuman.

A piece of legislation he has identified as a personal priority this session would change Alaska laws regarding the use of self-defense. Neuman says it’s a bad idea to require people who are considering using deadly force to attempt to retreat, if possible, because it gives the bad guys the upper hand.

Changing the state’s criminal laws merits caution and deliberation. And while this isn’t Marmot Day, we think you can see Marmot Day from here.

With all due respect to Rep. Neuman and his legislation, exactly how many times has such a scenario occurred?

The one example we recall isn’t exactly a good case study, either. Pastor Philip D. Mielke, in our recollection, wasn’t exactly sanctioned for not retreating when he shot burglars at his Big Lake church back in 2003. The question then was whether he was actually acting in self-defense, whether the burglars were threatening his life.

This law and others like it — we would put measures like Carl Gatto’s attempt to ban Sharia Law in this category, too — deal with serious matters. But these two bills also seem like solutions in search of problems.

We don’t believe the state is replete with bad guys putting people’s lives in danger or folks advocating the institution of foreign laws. In that regard, we find these proposed laws as distracting as Marmot Day.

Farther, in the case of Neuman’s bill, we have concerns about the safety of changing criminal law to say that private citizens have no duty to retreat, while still requiring law enforcement to retreat first.

And while innocuous bills like Marmot Day sail through the Legislature without any debate, we see debate about these two measures as distractions with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Legislators are bound by the statutory restriction of a 90-day session to take care of the people’s business. So any time spent on these two proposals is time that can’t be spent elsewhere. With oil tax reform and the ever-present challenge of formulating a sustainable state budget on the table again this session, we don’t see a compelling public interest in spending much time on anything else.