It’s really highly unfortunate that this particular debate should hinge on an unhinged character like Leroy Smickle. When the police burst into his home on an unrelated search warrant, they found Smickle waving a loaded gun as he was recording videos for this Facebook account. A judge, Anne Malloy, felt that the minimum sentence imposed by law for gun offences, three years in this case, was too much, and so she decided to take the law into her own hands and gave Smickle one year of house arrest instead.

When I first heard about the story, my initial reaction was to go to Twitter and demand that the judge be impeached and punished for putting herself above the law. To my amazement, what followed in the media was an outflow of pro-Malloy editorials and columns from those who’d normally rail against activist judges. I can only assume that those opinion writers sympathized with Malloy and Smickle, because the case involved a gun, and protecting gun rights seem to matter to them more than continuing the fight against activist judges – who, it should be noted as a reminder, have been responsible for a lot of bad stuff in this country.

While it’s true that Smickle shouldn’t go down for three years for being a fool, waving a loaded gun is dangerous and reckless behaviour. He could have shot himself, or a stray bullet could have penetrated a wall and hit someone else (and those things have happened quite often). Clearly, this is not the kind of behaviour you want to encourage, let alone glorify, especially when you’re a pro-gun type who wishes to see more rights for (responsible) gun owners in Canada (and that includes strengthening the “castle doctrine”, a person’s full and unfettered right to defend his property or family against intruders of any sort).

By standing up for Smickle and Malloy, those otherwise-common-sensical column writers will achieve only two things, neither of which bodes well.

First, Liberals and other left-wingers will use Smickle as a poster boy in future campaigns to limit gun ownership in Canada. See, they’ll say, this is what happens when you allow just about anyone to own a gun. They’ll play around with their guns, and there’s no telling who might get hurt.

Second, judges who like taking the law into their own hands, and usurping legislative powers, will feel empowered and emboldened by the support Malloy has received from the conservative corners of the media. Those are the types of judges that are responsible for criminals roaming our streets who should instead be locked up. They are the bleeding hearts who think that criminals hardly ever deserve to punished, including for cold-blooded murder, and who feel entitled to shape society according to their heart’s content.

The reason why the Harper government passed a minimum sentence law was precisely to rein in all those activist judges. Since the vast majority of our judges had demonstrated again and again that they couldn’t be trusted with their discretion, it was necessary to impose some kind of straitjacket on those judges, so that they couldn’t any longer let criminals go free with as little as a slap on the wrist.

Praising Malloy in the Smickle case is praise for breaking the law. This sets a dangerous precedent and risks rendering the minimum sentencing law ineffective. If we still allow judges to go against the mandatory sentencing requirements enshrined in law, and, worse, even praise them for doing so, then the whole exercise of putting mandatory minimum sentences in place was for nought.

Update: It seems Michael Coren and I are the only common-sense thinkers out there who understand that throwing Smickle in jail for three years would have been the right thing to do and that the activist and self-righteous judge in this case is the real problem.