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deRodes
Honored Fellow Grover
| Joined: | Fri Aug 31st, 2007 |
| Location: | Washington USA |
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Posted: Thu Jan 15th, 2009 06:32 pm |
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http://www.lakelandtimes.com/main.asp?SectionID=9&SubSectionID=9&ArticleID=8907&TM=37236.69
Richard Moore
Investigative Reporter
First of a two-part series
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has a simple, blunt message for hunters in Wisconsin: When a DNR warden asks you to give up your legal firearm, do so, plain and simple, no matter what.
What's more, that goes for all citizens, the agency has asserted. Citizens with firearms, the DNR argues, should always do exactly what law enforcement officers tell them to do, regardless of the circumstances of the situation.
To which one former hunter education instructor for the department has an equally simple and blunt response: The agency's directive is unconstitutional, plain and simple, and citizens don't have to hand over their firearms without any probable cause.
That viewpoint is the reason Mark Palan, the owner of Palan's Outpost Sporting Goods in Iowa County, has the word 'former' attached to his title. After 14 years as a volunteer instructor, the DNR cast him out last year for, in the agency's words, misrepresenting agency standards to hunter education students.
The issue promises to affect many more people than hunters in the coming year. In fact, the DNR's foray into gun rights issues on the Palan matter represents just one cloud in a growing storm over what authority law enforcement officers actually have to seize openly carried but legal firearms, whether it's from a hunter in the field or a citizen on the street.
Wisconsin is ostensibly an open-carry state; the media debate thus far has focused on whether to extend so-called carrying rights to concealed weapons.
But the latter could soon be yesterday's news; the DNR's excommunication of Palan, and its subsequent articulation of a broad grant of power for law enforcement to confiscate legal firearms, has suddenly called the legitimacy and reality of open carry itself into question.
Just as important, along with an ongoing non-DNR case in West Allis, the agency's expression of support for the ability of police to take away legal firearms upon simple command has in effect opened the door for a de facto state policy for all law enforcement.
The question is, is it constitutional, or, as Palan contends, does the DNR's position characterize an unconstitutional breach of a citizen's Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure?
Simply asked, can law enforcement take a person's legally carried firearm without any probable cause that a crime is being committed? Must a hunter in the field surrender his firearm just because a conservation warden tells him to?
Palan's encounter
To Palan, the answer is no.
"For 14 years, I've been teaching my students the same thing, over and over and over," Palan told The Lakeland Times.
The first thing he teaches is, he said, when a person is on private property and a warden stops and asks to see a license, the first thing to do is ask the warden for his credentials. The second thing, Palan said, is to boot the warden off the property because he's trespassing.
"And when they start throwing their weight around, you just reach in your pocket and dial 911 and have the police come out and have them removed," he said.
Being approached by a warden on public land is different, Palan said.
"If you are on public ground and a warden stops you and wants to see your license, you should ask him for his credentials, then you show him your license," he said. "And when he says, give me your gun, you show him your gun. You set it down on the ground or you can hand it to him. But your right is that you do not have to give him your gun. And if you set it down on the ground and he picks it up, now he's taken your gun without your permission. I've been teaching that for 14 years."
But, Palan said, his instruction collided with DNR attitudes last March when a local conservation warden lectured at one of his classes and discovered what Palan was teaching.
A confrontation ensued, Palan recalls, both in the class that night and a few days later in his store, and Palan says the DNR gave him a choice - either admit to the class that what he had been teaching was wrong, or get kicked out.
Palan got kicked out.
For the record
DNR documents corroborate Palan's version of events.
In an April 28, 2008, letter, DNR hunter education administrator Timothy Lawhern told Palan he was being ousted as a DNR instructor for a variety of reasons, including Palan's alleged refusal to abide by a program instructor code of conduct, his refusal to accept constructive criticism from local conservation warden Joe Frost, and his refusal to teach the program as the DNR wanted.
The removal applied to all recreational safety programs, Lawhern stated, boater education as well as snowmobile education, ATV education as well as hunter education and bow hunter education.
"You have trained many hunter education graduates contrary to our program standards of how to handle a firearm when approached by a law enforcement officer," Lawhern wrote. "This training has now placed those students in a potentially dangerous attitude which could have catastrophic results for themselves and members of the law enforcement community."
continued
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Politicians and diapers should be changed often - for the same reason!
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Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit. Proverbs 18:21
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