It’s actually worse than the headline might lead you to believe. The woman in question is a convicted felon, which means she wasn’t allowed to possess that firearm at all, much less use it to shoot someone.

Yet despite those inconvenient facts, a judge in Davenport, Iowa gave 21-year old G’Sani Natric Bogan one heck of a deal when she appeared in court this week after pleading guilty back in April to charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm and reckless use of a firearm.

On Wednesday, Judge Mark Fowler sentenced her to five years in prison on both charges and ordered the sentences to run concurrently, or at the same time. The judge then suspended the prison sentence and placed her on three years of probation, court records show.

Bogan will not have to serve the prison sentence if she completes probation.

… Also Wednesday, Fowler revoked Bogan’s deferred sentence in an unrelated heroin case and sentenced her to a suspended 10-year prison sentence and placed her on three years of probation. The sentence will run concurrently to the sentences in the shooting case, court records show.

Seriously? How much heroin are we talking about that Bogan was eligible for a ten-year sentence; twice as long as the one she received for shooting a guy in the leg with a gun she wasn’t legally allowed to possess?

I guess it doesn’t really matter, since the end result was a total of three years probation for all charges.

The gun charges stemmed from a fight in the lobby of a Davenport hospital emergency room back in March. Witnesses reported that Bogan and a man identified as 20-year old Fahsheed Rush were fighting, and after Rush punched Bogan in the face, she responded by shooting him twice in the leg. Rush was originally charged with misdemeanor assault, but the charges were dropped. Given that there was surveillance footage of the fight, it sounds like the video evidence demonstrated that Bogan was the initial aggressor.

Iowa has pretty good laws when it comes to protecting the Second Amendment, but it has the same problems as every other state when it comes to the criminal justice system; too many plea deals resulting in too many violent offenders walking away with a slap on the wrist.

There’s also a big difference between state and federal court. While Bogan, for instance, was avoiding time behind bars after shooting someone in the leg with a gun she wasn’t allowed to own, a Waterloo man who accidentally shot his neighbor’s garage while he was on probation for robbery learned that he’ll will be spending the next couple of years in federal prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Judge C.J. Williams on Friday sentenced Seyveion Marchelle James Hayes, 22, to two years and three months in federal prison on a charge of felon in possession of a firearm.

The sentence is to run consecutive to any sentence handed down in the probation revocation hearing.

Authorities allege Hayes was at a friend’s house at 1818 Mulberry St. on May 23, 2020, and was looking at his friend’s guns – a 7.62 mm Russian Mosin Nagant bolt-action rifle, a 7.62 mm Century Arms VSKA military-style rifle and a 12-gauge Stevens 320 shotgun.

He was also handling the shotgun in the backyard and accidentally triggered the weapon, which damaged the neighbor’s garage, according to court records.

Now, Hayes also compounded his trouble by getting caught with a stolen handgun a year later, but as far as I know he didn’t actually shoot anyone with it. Because federal courts tend to take these types of cases more seriously, though, he’s going to prison while Bogan, whose case wasn’t referred to federal court, is walking free.

Gun control activists in Iowa, meanwhile, are bleating about the state’s Constitutional Carry law and trying to defeat a change to the state’s constitution that would offer more protection to the right to keep and bear arms rather than demand “reasonable” and “commonsense” actions to ensure that violent criminals face actual consequences for their misdeeds. Cases like Bogan’s aren’t even on their radar, because their primary target are the state’s legal, law-abiding gun owners.