Have you ever met Mel Gibson?

Most of us haven't. In fact, most of us have never met all that many celebrities, if any. That's especially true if you're not someone who lives where they make a lot of movies or record a lot of music. 

As such, is there any real threat to people because Mel Gibson got his rights back?

For most of us, of course not. But Brady president Kris Brown seems to think that it's the ultimate harbinger of doom for women across the nation, as she wrote in Ms. Magazine.

Ahead of the presidential election, I wrote about how dangerous Project 2025 was for women, especially its radical “guns everywhere” agenda. Its vision of a country flooded with guns, stripped of safeguards, was alarming then. Now it’s becoming reality.

Last month, The New York Times revealed that a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney was fired by the Trump administration after refusing to restore gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, a convicted domestic abuser. But the deeper issue is more alarming: She was on a “working group to restore gun rights to people convicted of crimes.” 

This points to a dangerous broader agenda of the Trump administration: rearming people with criminal convictions, including domestic abusers. Shortly after I raised alarm bells, it was announced that Gibson, along with nine others, would have his gun rights restored.

Since 1992, Congress has prohibited the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from using federal funds to restore gun rights to prohibited individuals. Receiving a presidential pardon has been the only path for restoration. We have long recognized that gun rights should only ever be restored through a structured system that assesses danger and risk. However, reports suggest the Trump administration is, at best, instituting a pay-to-play system that could arm the highest bidder, or at worst, automating a process that could arm those with criminal histories and dangerous behaviors.

The end result? Trump restored gun rights to a man who admitted to abusing his girlfriend—and is a friend of the president. In a reality where domestic abusers are armed, women will suffer most.

First, Mel Gibson didn't admit to anything. He pleaded no contest, which means there is no admission of guilt. That report is wrong. A lot of people don't see the difference between a "no contest" plea and a "guilty" plea, which is understandable since both are cases of taking the punishment without a trial. However, a no-contest plea has no admission of guilt.

It was also for a misdemeanor, which normally doesn't have any impact on people's gun rights. It's only in misdemeanor domestic violence cases when that happens, and I fail to see why there are any misdemeanor domestic violence laws in the first place. If it's that bad, why aren't they all felonies in the first place?

This was also nearly 15 years ago, and Gibson has kept his nose clean since then.

But I'll agree that the optics on Gibson getting his rights restored right from the start of the Trump administration aren't good. It does look like a pay-to-play kind of thing.

Where I differ from Brown on this is that she touts presidential pardons as the pathway forward for people getting their rights restored, but what's to stop a president from pardoning a donor just the same? Where was Brown's criticism of Hunter Biden getting a pardon before he spent even a single day in jail, much less having his rights restored?

Yet as we also see above, Brown is openly celebrating that Congress defunded the pathway for the ATF to restore gun rights to anyone, then says, "gun rights should only ever be restored through a structured system that assesses danger and risk," which is what the ATF had and was defunded.

See, Gibson's rights being restored is being used as a proxy.

Brown wants women to think that every man everywhere who has a domestic violence charge on the books is suddenly going to be able to walk into the local gun store and buy a gun. That's simply not the case, and she knows it.

Well, probably not. This is the woman who celebrated the Star Wars series The Acolyte because there wouldn't be blasters anywhere in the series, forgetting how Anakin Skywalker basically committed a school massacre with a lightsaber.

To call her "smart" would require the points of comparison to be AOC and Jasmine Crockett and no one else.