LIFE AMONG THE BARBARIANS (CONT’D): Massachusetts Crime Victim Fights The Law.

Instead of thanking McKay for helping get an armed criminal off the streets, Swampscott officials charged him with a felony. As a Swampscott police spokesman said at the time, “We don’t urge anybody to fight back. We want them to call us.”

Thanks to pressure from readers of the Boston Herald and others, McKay will not be prosecuted. But the Essex County District Attorney’s office has made it clear that they are not supporting your right to self defense. . . . McKay’s pro bono attorney, Richard Chambers, was told the same thing. “The Essex DA’s office said they are able to prosecute some cases and not others, and this is one of those that they are not going to prosecute.”

In other words, McKay is lucky that the media made an issue out of this outrageous prosecution. Otherwise he could have spent five years in prison instead of working and paying the bills for his three young children.

It seems to me that Essex County D.A. Jonathan Blodgett needs to catch up with modernity. The backward era in which self-defense was looked down upon as somehow barbaric is long since past in the more enlightened parts of the country.