Stand-Your-Ground law passed in Iowa in 2017.
But as gun owners in Iowa know, this was merely the capstone of a 6 year battle that kicked off in 2012, when Aaron and Chris Dorr met Jay Rodney Lewis.
While headed home from his job in an IRS call center in late 2011, Jay Lewis was run off the road by a car full of drunks in West Des Moines. After slamming his car into Lewis’s car, the driver, a two time felon with over 40 criminal convictions stretching back for years, got out of his car with his friend and the two of them tried to smash their way into the car.
Fearing for his life, Lewis drew his .380 and told the pair to back off.
Once they did, Mr. Lewis called 911 and asked for help, then drove 100 yards away to wait for help. As the 911 call proves, the suspects continued to advance at Lewis who told them — eleven separate times — to ‘get down’ and ‘get back!’
The two refused, and, when they got within striking distance, putting him in fear for his life, Lewis shot the leading aggressor with his .380. He continued to do everything by the book, telling dispatchers what happened, what he was wearing, where his gun was and more.
But when the cops arrived, it was Lewis who was led away in handcuffs.
Eventually he was charged with two misdemeanors and two felonies — and a potential jail term that was measured in decades.
After sitting in jail for 112 days, unable to post the ridiculously high bond that was placed on him, Jay Lewis had his day in court. The jury returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict on all charges, in less than 90 minutes, a stunning rebuke to Polk County Attorney John Sarcone.
Aaron Dorr along with Jay Lewis, in the Iowa Capitol, March 2012. Lewis was present with Aaron, urging Senate Democrats to take action on IGO’s Stand-Your-Ground law.
But it came at an extreme cost to Lewis.
When he emerged from jail, Lewis found that his apartment complex evicted him, tossing all of his possessions into the garbage. He had been fired from his job. And he had no money to live off of.
It was at that time that the Dorr Brothers found Mr. Lewis, and talked with him for hours at the Iowa Gun Owners office in West Des Moines.
Hearing Lewis’s story, watching the tears roll down his face, was incredibly difficult.
Aaron and Chris immediately set up a bank account in Jay’s name and urged the members of Iowa Gun Owners to contribute whatever they could to help get him back on his feet. Iowans were generous and Lewis received around $5,000 in the weeks that followed as well as a place to live for a few months, rent free.
As Lewis began to put his life back together, Aaron and Chris began an immediate policy shift at Iowa Gun Owners. The group had been making a primary focus on Constitutional Carry, with a secondary push for Stand-Your-Ground law. The changed immediately.
Iowa Gun Owners launched what would become a six-year long grassroots mobilization effort to build support for Stand-Your-Ground law that involved attending over one hundred gun shows gathering signed petitions, a massive direct mail program, and ramping up our email program which poured hundreds of thousands of emails into the Capitol.
A stack of almost 1,000 signed petitions in support of IGO’s Stand-Your-Ground law at a gun show in Altoona. IGO gathered petitions at over 100 gun shows during our Stand-Your-Ground fight!
At the same time, we began to ramp up pressure on the inside, making sure that Stand-Your-Ground law was filed in both chambers.
In the House, we turned to the absolutely fearless Tom Shaw (R-Laurens) and asked him to file this legislation for us.
He did so immediately, filing HF 2113 in the 2013-2014 cycle of the General Assembly.
In the Senate, Senator Kent Sorenson lead the charge for this legislation, filing SF 255 for the 2013-2014 legislative sessions.
But Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal killed this legislation, refusing to grant us even a sub-committee on the bill.
Aaron decided that for the situation to change, Iowa Gun Owners was going to have to go after vulnerable gun-grabbers in the Senate during the 2014 election cycle — hard! We knew that if we didn’t teach anti-gun politicians a lesson, nothing would change.
In 2014, Iowa Gun Owners put significant effort into exposing Senator Daryl Beall. Beall, from Fort Dodge, was a radical gun-grabber in Des Moines, sponsoring aggressive gun control, while pretending to be a ‘good ole boy’ when talking to gun owners back home.
Once Tim Kraayenbrink signed the Iowa Gun Owners candidate survey, vowing 100% support for gun rights, we went to work!
This was the first election cycle where we used digital and radio ads to expose radical gun grabbers, and boy was it effective.
Check out our radio ad, that ran all over 1040-WHO and local stations during the 2014 election cycle!
Between these ads, a direct mail program, and a massive lit-dropping operation, Beall was wiped out by over 5,000 votes!
Of course, while Iowa Gun Owners members and the Dorr Brothers were fighting like dogs, going house to house in Senate District 5 — the Iowa Firearms Coalition were nowhere to be found.
Having sent a loud message to Mike Gronstal, Iowa Gun Owners immediately re-filed Stand-Your-Ground legislation during the 2015-2016 session (H.F. 52/S.F. 137) with Representative Steve Holt and Senator Rick Bertrand.
While Senate Democrats and moderates in the Iowa House leadership team blocked this bill again, during this two year cycle we continued to add cosponsors to this legislation, eventually getting 100% of the Republican caucus on board our legislation.
With the 2016 election season looming large — and former Senator Beall’s defeat fresh on their minds — Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and Judiciary Chairman Steve Sodders grew desperate.
Working with the Iowa Firearms Coalition, Senate Democrats passed ancillary gun bills during this two year cycle, hoping that they would give them political cover.
Suppressors and ATV-Carry became law in Iowa, because of that reason alone.
It had nothing to do with the Iowa Firearms Coalition, who were more than willing to make deals with Gronstal, even though those deals would harm gun rights long term, and everything to do with the fear that Iowa Gun Owners and the Dorr Brothers had been inflicting on gun-grabbers since the 2010 election cycle.
To read more about the 2010 election program that the Dorr Brothers ran for Iowa Gun Owners, go here.
The moment the 2016 legislature adjourned sine-die, the Dorr Brothers and Iowa Gun Owners began preparing for what would be an epic 2016 election season. In total, Iowa Gun Owners spent $150,000 in a massive operation to expose Mike Gronstal, Steve Sodders and other gun-grabbers in the Iowa Senate.
We used direct mail, email, digital ads, radio ads, TV ads, lit drops — everything we could — to expose the fact that Gronstal and his allies had blocked Stand-Your-Ground law for four years in a row!
To read all about this program, go here. (HOTLINK)
As every gun owner in Iowa knows, the program that the Dorr Brothers ran for Iowa Gun Owners that fall was a massive success. Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal was wiped out. So was Judiciary Chairman Steve Sodders and four other Senate incumbents.
That, plus statewide polling showing that over 53% of Iowans supported our Stand-Your-Ground legislation, thanks to a five year campaign to educate and mobilize Iowans about the bill, meant that the chances of us passing Stand-Your-Ground law in 2017 were high.
But as you’re learning here, none of this just happened. It was because pro-gun stalwarts in the legislature like Senator Rick Bertrand and Representative Tom Shaw blazed that trail, a trail that was getting wider every day, thanks to a years-long effort from the members of Iowa Gun Owners and the Dorr Brothers.
In 2017, Aaron again turned to the Stand-Your-Ground work-horse in the Iowa Senate, Rick Bertrand, who agreed to be our lead sponsor of the bill (S.F. 262.)
Aaron Dorr and Senator Rick Bertrand review the final draft of Stand-Your-Ground law during the opening day of the 2017 legislative session.
Bertrand and Iowa Gun Owners went to work lining up co-sponsors for the legislation, which would demonstrate the broad support that the bill had in the legislature.
Iowa Gun Owners members poured tens of thousands of emails into the Capitol, demanding their politicians co-sponsor.
And it’s impossible to overstate how much effort Senator Bertrand put into this effort, as he spent weeks working on his Senate colleagues.
When the bill was sent to committee, it had a whopping 24 cosponsors!
But that wasn’t good enough for Representative Matt Windshitl. Windshitl, well known for being determined to get the credit for the hard work of other lawmakers in Des Moines, filed his own version of Stand-Your-Ground law, in an effort to steal the victory from the Senate and from Rick Bertrand.
The Dorr Brothers instantly knew that gun owners had a problem, and it had nothing to do with who got the credit for passing Stand-Your-Ground law. The real issue at hand was Matt Windshitl’s long-established willingness to weaken his own bills in an effort to secure friends with House Democrats.
And that’s exactly what happened.
In a Judiciary Committee meeting that Aaron attended on behalf of Iowa Gun Owners, Matt Windshitl called for a caucus (a private meeting between lawmakers) while ‘adjustments’ could be made to Stand-Your-Ground law.
Four hours passed by, as Windshitl worked on his ‘adjustments.’ Staffers told Aaron that Windshitl was stalling, hoping that the public left the hearing so that he could unveil his amendment in private.
But Aaron never left. And he was there when Windshit filed his amendment, which gutted the all-important criminal and civil immunity section in the bill.
Civil and criminal immunity is at the heart and soul of Stand-Your-Ground law, as it protects gun owners from the same sort of politically motivated prosecutions that Jay Lewis suffered in Des Moines five years earlier.
No, it’s not a ‘get out of jail free’ card. It would only apply in cases where gun owners used reasonable and justifiable force to defend themselves from a violent criminal — just like Lewis did.
Matt Windshitl, well known for being the vainest politician in Des Moines, tried to drastically weaken Stand-Your-Ground law in 2017 to advance his career and his own ego.
Without this language, gun owners like Jay Lewis would get no additional protections from this legislation, while Matt Windshitl would get plenty of political kudos.
The Iowa Firearms Coalition lobbyists sat in the same room Aaron sat in. And while they hung their head in silent acceptance of what was happening, they refused to lift a finger to expose what Windshitl was doing. It was pathetic.
Aaron, whose phone was at about 3% battery at the end of the committee meeting, did a brief video while walking out of the committee room that night, that you can still see here.
But the very next morning, Aaron and Chris went to work on a digital and email blitz, informing over 100,000 Iowans that Matt Windshitl had taken a sledgehammer to one of the most important parts of Stand-Your-Ground law during a late night committee meeting.
As you can see below, the video that Aaron did for Iowa Gun Owners had over 75,000 views, generating a flood of angry phone calls into the office of Speaker of the House, Linda Upmeyer.
Sure, it didn’t make us any friends. But we never cared about that.
The Dorr Brothers sat with Jay Lewis, watching him weep as he detailed the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Polk County Attorney’s office, and there was no way they were giving up the immunity sections of Stand-Your-Ground law without a fight.
To hear the video alert that 75,000 Iowans heard about Windshitl’s betrayal of gun owners, click the video box or click here.
This pressure worked.
Five days later, when Stand-Your-Ground legislation went before the Iowa House for a full vote, Windshitl was forced to reinsert the immunity language that he had removed in the Judiciary Committee!
When the bill cleared the House and was sent to the Senate, then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Dix, in an act of pure political thievery, gave the bill to freshman Senator Dan Dawson.
Dix, who had repeatedly tried to undermine Stand-Your-Ground and Constitutional Carry law during his time as Senator Majority Leader following the flip of the Senate in 2016, would later resign in disgrace after a video surfaced that showed Dix kissing a lobbyist in a downtown Des Moines bar.
Rick Bertrand had fought like a dog for gun owners…for Stand-Your-Ground law…for four long years and knew this bill inside and out. When Dawson was forced to answer questions about this bill in the committee process, he stammered and mumbled, grasping for answers that he clearly didn’t have, promising Senators that he would ‘look into that.’
It was embarrassing.
Five State Senators, other than Rick Bertrand, told Aaron that if Dan Dawson ‘had any honor or basic decency, he would have turned down the option to floor manage that bill and tell Dix to give it to Bertrand.’
But Dawson was lacking in both character traits.
The bill passed the Senate quickly and was signed into law by then-Governor Terry Bradstad a short time later.
Five years after Jay Rodney Lewis was falsely arrested for the ‘crime’ of defending himself in a non-Stand-Your-Ground law state, the members of Iowa Gun Owners finally passed this crucial legislation.
‘All it took’ was a five year effort on the part of Iowa Gun Owners and the Dorr Brothers, involving hundreds of gun shows, brutally effective election programs in 2014 and 2016, hundreds of email updates and Facebook videos that poured hundreds of thousands of emails from IGO members into the legislature, a willingness to confront weak Republicans who about folded, and a ton of work from Representative Tom Shaw and Senator Rick Bertrand.
Ego-driven maniacs like Matt Windshitl who tried to weaken the bill, and Dan Dawson who had no idea what was even in the bill that he ‘managed,’ can try to claim the credit for this bill if they want to.
The Dorr Brothers are content knowing that Iowa Gun Owners members are safe from the hands of radical leftist prosecutors in Iowa who want to put gun owners in jail for the ‘crime’ of defending themselves against a violent criminal.