Katie McDonough, assistant editor of Salon.com, thinks due process rights are great… unless you own icky things like guns, and especially if your name is George Zimmerman:

Less than three months after his estranged wife called the police to report him for allegedly threatening her with a firearm during a domestic dispute, George Zimmerman is in the news for allegedly threatening his current girlfriend, Samantha Scheibe, with a firearm during a domestic dispute. But this time, charges were filed.

As a result, a Florida judge on Tuesday ordered Zimmerman to surrender his firearms— weapons he was allowed to keep and conceal despite a history of the use of deadly force. But being required to give them up doesn’t mean he won’t get them back. In fact, it doesn’t even mean he will have to give them up.

While firearms are often confiscated from the home if there is a domestic violence complaint, the mere act of someone calling police and making a complaint doesn’t mean that domestic violence did in fact take place.

McDonough conveniently skipped over the fact that Shellie Zimmerman was a convicted perjurer, and curiously failed to mention that the current claimant, Samantha Scheib, is accused of making the entire incident up as revenge for Zimmerman wanting to leave her. 

What is the truth of this incident? I don’t claim to know. What I do know is that we have courts and a judicial system to sort out whether there is evidence of a crime, and whether or there is enough evidence to put an offender behind bars. I also know that if there isn’t sufficient evidence to convict someone of a crime we set them free, and they retain their rights.

Isn’t life in a constitutional republic grand?

But following due process and giving Zimmerman his day in court (if it comes to it) doesn’t seem to matter much to this particular junior editor. McDonough believes in her emotional little heart that George Zimmerman is a bad person, and therefore he should be disarmed, regardless of any convictions. Her feelings are enough to justify stripping him of his rights. Who needs courts, or due process, or facts?

Unfortunately, despite what Katie McDonough wishes would happen to George Zimmerman—or forAmerica’s 110 million other gun owners that she obviously holds in only slightly less contempt—due process still matters.

Citizens are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Even George Zimmerman.