Friday, February 20, 2015

WI: Woman School Worker, with Permit, Placed on Leave for Stun Gun in Glove Box



A Wisconsin woman who works for the Oconomowoc School District is being harassed over the possession of an electrical stun gun in her vehicle's glove box.  She may be criminally charged.  In most of the country, this would not be an issue.  But Wisconsin is a swing state.   In the 90's, Democrats dominated, and passed a law that seemed designed to snare legal gun owners, modeled after the Federal gun free school zone act.   The act has been an abysmal failure nationally.   School shooting shot up after the act passed.    The federal law was ruled unconstitutional in 1995, and under heavy lobbying from President Clinton, was passed again, with slight modification, in 1996.   One of those modifications was to put an exemption in the law for people with concealed carry weapons permits.

The Wisconsin law does not have the exemption.  From lakecountrynow.com:
According to the police report, another member of the buildings and grounds department approached an officer at Oconomowoc High School and reported that the woman supposedly kept a firearm in her vehicle that was parked on school premises.
Approached by an officer, the woman denied having a firearm but admitted to having the stun gun. The officer accompanied her to the vehicle, and she retrieved it from the glove box.

The woman, who had a permit for the stun gun, said her husband purchased it for her protection after her vehicle was broken into one night in Milwaukee while working for another company.

Police checked state statutes to see if the electronic control device fell under the dangerous weapon statute and found that it did, and the Oconomowoc School District is pressing charges.
I do not know what sort of interpersonal dynamics led one co-worker to claim that the accused woman had a gun in her vehicle.  Perhaps the co-worker had learned that the woman had a concealed carry permit.  There is no separate "stun gun permit" in Wisconsin.  This sort of harassment has been promoted by disarmists on social media such as the facebook site for Moms Demand Action. 

Wisconsin Carry  is asking legislators to fix this oversight by mirroring the federal exemption in state law.  It would be better to simply repeal the Wisconsin gun free school zone ban.  It does nothing to protect children, and it entraps innocent gun owners.  One gun owner spent 16 days in jail before the charge was finally dropped.  He had used Google earth to measure the distance so that he would be sure to follow the law.   A police officer had the distance surveyed, and arrested him for being a few feet inside the 1,000 foot limit.

The law was and is bad law.

  Definition of  disarmist 

©2015 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
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