The story of Shaneen Allen has hit the mainstream media and the pressure is building on Atlantic County prosecutors to drop the case against a mom from Pennsylvania arrested for carrying a concealed firearm and hollow-point ammunition on a traffic stop in New Jersey.
The young mom, who didn’t realize her carry permit wasn’t like her driver’s license in terms of national recognition, was arrested and now faces a mandatory minimum of three years in New Jersey prison. Until now, she had no criminal record at all.
There’s no justice there.
A Philadelphia mother of two is facing three years in prison after she mistakenly entered New Jersey, where she was stopped for a traffic violation and found in possession of a handgun loaded with hollow-point bullets.
Shaneen Allen, 27, was pulled over in New Jersey’s Atlantic County after making an unsafe lane change in the early morning hours of Oct. 1. Allen then told the officer that she had the .380 Bersa Thunder handgun, as well as a concealed carry permit for Pennsylvania, unaware that her permit was not transferable to The Garden State.
“The gun charge was not proper to begin with at all,” her attorney, Evan Nappen, told FoxNews.com. “She made an honest mistake.”
Guns Save Life contributor Julie on Politics sent us her thoughts on the whole sordid mess. This is right up her alley as she’s from Pennsylvania.
New Jersey’s Gun Laws: Taking Innocent Single Mothers Away From Their Children
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.
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