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Will Wisconsin go the way of Vermont and Alaska?
Currently citizens of Vermont and Alaska are allowed to legally carry concealed weapons without any sort of permit. Vermont has always been that way – Alaska has just recently done away with the idea of a carry permit for resident’s altogether.
Here’s how the State’s existing 130 year-old concealed carry law will eventually deliver the identical power to the unrestricted carry of concealed weapons everywhere in Wisconsin…
It was just months ago in July that the Wisconsin State Supreme Court had before it a case involving a Milwaukee merchant charged with carrying a concealed weapon. The merchant, Munir Hamdan, runs a grocery in the inner city of Milwaukee. The store had been the victim of several robberies. One day on a routine license inspection, he was asked if he kept a firearm in the store. He responded that he did, and that he carried on his person for the purpose of defense. Dyas following that inspection, police officers returned, found that Mr. Hamdan was indeed carrying a concealed weapon and charged him as such. The judge of the county court that arraigned him apologetically fined Munir the amount of $1.00 and admonished Milwaukee’s District Attorney for wasting the courts time with cases like these. Munir sought appeal after appeal until finally the case went before the Wisconsin Supreme Court . In the State vs. Munir Hamdan, the Wisconsin Supremes looked at our own State constitution, which states:
“Article I, Section 25: The people have the right to keep and bear arms for security, defense, hunting, recreation or any other lawful purpose.”
And contested that against the Jim Crow-era law that Mr. Hamdan was charged with violating:
“Chapter 941.23 - Carrying concealed weapon: Any person except a peace officer who goes armed with a concealed and dangerous weapon is guilty of a Class A misdemeanor.”
They wrote in a 6 to 1 majority decision that “application of the CCW statute effectively disallowed the reasonable exercise of Hamdan's constitutional right to keep and bear arms for the lawful purpose of security.” (State v. Hamdan, p.4)
Knowing full well this could have thrown out Wisconsin’s current 130-year-old concealed weapons prohibition altogether, the majority opinions were written by the Justices to address Munir Hamdan’s “right” to carry a concealed weapon specifically for his stated purpose: self-protection while conducting business in his store. The Wisconsin Supremes voiced their view that to deny someone the right to be armed - concealed or otherwise – for the defense of oneself while running one’s business was a patent violation of the State’s constitution as it is written.
Well, that addresses people who own their own business, fine – but what about you in your own home? Now this has bothered the Wisconsin Supremes for quite a while: Technically any person with a firearm socked away in a drawer, or even locked up in a gun safe, is violating the existing concealed weapon’s law (because the weapon is concealed from the view of anyone in the area, see?). That’s because there were no gun safes when the law was written and there is no exclusion in the law regarding private property!
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has, for the benefit of the majority of home owners in the state, with Hamdan provided for an “affirmative defense” in the unlikely case an over zealous law enforcer chooses to prosecute a person for possession of a concealed weapon in their own home. This is only an “affirmative defense” - it doesn’t mean that you won’t get arrested for having your Grandfather’s old .22 stuffed away in the back of your bedroom closet; it just means that your lawyer will probably be able to get the charge dismissed. Eventually. Now, I’m sure that while there are a myriad of views on gun ownership on the Democratic Underground, nobody here would disagree that it is far safer to have guns locked up when not in use than to leave them out in the open (just to adhere to the very letter of the current concealed weapons law).
So, what about the right of the individual concealing and carrying a weapon out and about in the general public?
Well, before Hamdan, doing that was clearly a misdemeanor offense. However now it appears that with the “affirmative defense” presented via the Hamdan decision, that as long as a person is not in the process of doing anything that could violate any other Wisconsin statute (peddling drugs, driving while intoxicated, etc), they apparently have the constitutionally guaranteed right to defense and may carry a concealed weapon whenever and wherever they choose. Scary isn’t it? Because while I believe that the right “to keep and bear arms” is just that, a right – the carrying of a concealed weapon out among the general public wherever one chooses is not.
Here’s what Chief Justice Shirely Abrahamson wrote in of State v. Hamdan (keep in mind that this was the sole dissenting opinion in this landmark case):
“anyone who must walk home from a bus stop every night after work through a high crime neighborhood can surely argue that his or her need to exercise the right to bear arms is high, concealment is necessary, and that his or her interests in self-protection substantially outweigh the State's interest in regulating concealed weapons… The number of individuals who can fit under (this) umbrella is large.”(State v. Hamdan, p.87)
And under this umbrella is where the people of Wisconsin stand – somewhere between the Governors’s veto pen and Vermont. The Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices have indicated that the day may come when they’ll have no choice but to rule that Wisconsin is to join the ranks of Vermont and Alaska in allowing any resident to a carry concealed weapon wherever and whenever they choose. The Supremes asked the Legislature to address this issue once, nicely – and that exactly is why Senate Bill 214 was reintroduced in Madison so soon after this decision.
. It was highly irresponsible for Governor Jim Doyle to hope that the Wisconsin Supreme Court will continue to defend this State’s archaic concealed weapon prohibition over and over again as they continuously watch it fail real world application.
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