CHEYENNE - A bill that would require Wyoming judges to warn defendants that they would lose their federal gun rights by pleading guilty to misdemeanor domestic violence charges received preliminary approval in the state Senate on Monday.

The Senate unanimously approved Senate File 70, sponsored by Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander. The bill would also classify misdemeanor domestic violence as a serious offense requiring defendants to have lawyers.

Speaking in favor of the bill at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier Monday, Case said, "We still have a situation in the United States of America where you can lose a constitutional right, the Second Amendment, for a misdemeanor crime."

Congress in 1996 expanded the law that bans convicted felons from owning guns to apply to people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence.

Case told the committee that although Congress specified that there was supposed to be a way for people to petition to get their rights restored, the program has never been funded. He said people are commonly caught with no way to get their gun rights back.

Christopher A. "Kip" Crofts, counsel to Gov. Dave Freudenthal, told the committee that the governor supports the bill. Crofts emphasized that the governor wasn't defending or trying to minimize the problem of domestic violence.

Crofts said Freudenthal's office most often gets involved in such cases when it receives applications for pardons. Crofts said applications have come from military personnel and others who didn't realize that they stood to lose their gun rights, and accordingly their jobs, by pleading guilty to domestic violence charges.

Crofts mentioned the case of a young man who was booted out of the military. He said the man entered a guilty plea after kicking down a door when he hadn't physically hurt his wife or anyone else.

Crofts said people commonly plead guilty thinking that they can pay a small fine and put an incident behind them without realizing that they face the loss of their gun rights.

"There's a dynamic; these kids don't know what they're getting involved in," Crofts said. He said that he believes justice is best served when a defendant has a defense lawyer.

Suzan Pauling, public policy director of the Wyoming Coalition against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault in Laramie, said her group supports the bill. She said defendants should realize that they face the loss of their gun rights if they're convicted.

But Pauling emphasized that Congress had a reason for taking gun rights away from people convicted of domestic violence.

"I don't want to debate with you about gun rights, but in Wyoming last year there were five domestic homicides and they were all done with guns," Pauling said.

Case was the author of a 2004 state law that sought to establish a procedure for misdemeanor domestic violence convicts to expunge their first conviction and regain their firearms rights. The federal courts later rejected that law.