You’ve got to hand one thing to the gun-grabbers: Their shameless, brazen tactics to disarm law-abiding American citizens know no bounds. There’s no strategy so dirty, underhanded or silly that they won’t try it. Today’s case in point: To disarm people visiting the French Quarter, they just declared that a police station is actually a vocational school.
After New Orleans city officials were unsuccessful in their attempts to get state lawmakers to designate vast swathes of their city’s popular tourist area as a gun-free zone before Louisiana’s new permitless carry law went live July 4, they came up with their own solution, which is probably unconstitutional, definitely whacky and certain to be contested in court.
The New Orleans Police Department has designated their Eighth District police station – which is located in the middle of the French Quarter – as a vocational technical school. In other words, they turned a working police station into a vo-tech. Now, everything within a 1,000-foot radius of the “school” is a gun-free zone, including more than five blocks of Bourbon Street, an international tourist destination.
It is a felony in Louisiana to violate a gun-free zone, which is punishable by up to five years in a state prison at hard labor.
Who will actually attend classes at the new “school” is not known. New Orleans Police recruits are trained at the police academy, which is located at a different facility. However, city and police officials now claim some of the recruits may take at least one class in a small room at the new “vo-tech.” There are no classes planned for civilian students.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill balked at the city’s move, warning officials they could face civil rights lawsuits because of their “made-up designation.”
“I’m working hard to help keep New Orleans safe, but the City cannot avoid state law by unilaterally designating police stations ‘vo-tech locations.’ You cannot just ‘designate’ yourself a vo-tech school. Among other implications, if it was one (it’s not) the police department would be under the jurisdiction of a board of supervisors for higher education, and it would be subject to other oversight requirements. I have no specific plans yet, but would caution the NOPD that it will likely be subject to civil rights lawsuits under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act if it arrests people pursuant to its made-up designation, which is clearly not legal or effective. I certainly hope the NOPD isn’t violating people’s rights by making up their own rules, which is why the Department is under a federal consent decree,” Murrill said in a statement posted on social media.
“Schools have classrooms, not booking rooms,” Murrill said in another post.
Snip.
Dan Zelenka is an attorney, a board member of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and president of the Louisiana Shooting Association, a nonprofit founded in 1966 with thousands of members, which is affiliated with the Civilian Marksmanship Program and the National Rifle Association.
“The Louisiana Shooting Association of course opposes this redesignation, and the reason is that it’s not a school. You can’t wave a magic wand and create a school just because you teach a class there,” Zelenka told the Second Amendment Foundation Monday.
Louisiana state law is very specific, Zelenka said, regarding what constitutes a vo-tech which, as the Attorney General pointed out in her statement, are subject to the supervision of a board of supervisors for higher education.
“They’re claiming their new school is an adjunct of their police academy, but their police academy is not supervised or managed by this board of supervisors, so they can’t be a vo-tech,” Zelenka said.
City officials, he said, have already changed their gun-free zone maps to include the 1,000-foot circle around the Eighth District station.
“Personally, I think our laws are clear,” Zelenka said. “A police station is not a school.”
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell essentially slapped a Burger King crown on her head and demanded that people bow to her because she’s the Queen of Romania. A police station is not a vocational school, no matter how loudly the Democrats running New Orleans proclaim it nor how many signs they put up to that effect.
But this is part and parcel of the Democratic Party’s insistence that they can ignore both law and reality at will if it furthers their political goals. A man wearing a dress magically becomes a woman simply by declaring it so, a widespread spree of looting and arson becomes “a mostly peaceful,” and state and federal statues can be mixed willy-nilly to charge and convict political enemies.
Fortunately for law-abiding gun owners visiting New Orleans, the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General are all Republicans, and Republicans run both houses of the legislature. The chances they let these blatantly unlawful shenanigans stand is very slim indeed.
Perhaps the legislature should respond by simply scrapping ineffective, counterproductive “gun free zones” entirely.