Once again, New Jersey has shown why it has some of the worst gun laws in the country.
A Philadelphia mother of two is facing a minimum three-year prison sentence simply for bringing a legally obtained gun within New Jersey state lines.
Last fall, Shaneen Allen was pulled over for a routine traffic stop in Atlantic County. Not realizing that her Pennsylvania gun license did not apply in the state of New Jersey, she voluntarily gave the police officer her firearms license and told him that she had a gun packed away in the back of her car.
Now she is facing a minimum of three years behind bars for what essentially amounts to a misunderstanding.
Despite having all of the proper licenses and training and despite being a single mother who owned a gun simply to “protect me and my kids,” the state of New Jersey considers Shaneen Allen to be a dangerous felon.
Allen has been charged under a draconian law called the Graves Act, which mandates that unlawful possession of a firearm is a second-degree crime punishable by a minimum of three years in New Jersey State Prison without parole.
This means that the judge has almost no discretion in this case. If Allen is convicted, the judge will have no choice but to send her to jail. Her children, who already do not have a father, would also be without a mother for the next three years.
This is both an individual tragedy and a gross violation of the Second Amendment. Gun laws exist to keep people safe, not to take innocent single mothers away from their children.
If anyone has to go to prison, it should be the statist bureaucrats who passed these laws in the first place.
(image source: http://www.ammoland.com/2014/07/njs-racist-sexist-gun-control-claims-yet-another-victim/#axzz37SDUmJWL)
Well, it IS illegal to deprive someone of their Constitutional rights under color of law...but in order for these bureaucrats to be locked up, we'd need to actually have a rule of law, and that died in America a while ago.
ReplyDelete"...Gun laws exist to keep people safe, not to take innocent single mothers away from their children...."
ReplyDeleteBull shit... every single gun law takes away a right and turns a right into a permission.
If law-abiding citizens are not daily DEMANDING all no-longer-incarcerated people have an inalienable right and be allowed to keep and bear arms no matter if the state calls their crime "violent" or not.
ReplyDeleteIf they're safe enough to be let out of prison, they're safe enough to be armed.
When any citizen is derived any of their rights by government edict, we all are in jeopardy of losing our rights as well.