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.
I don’t know. Too little told…
I gotta liken this case to the case of the EX-marine who got caught trying to sneak guns into Mexico.
How DUMB do you have to be to try to cross an INTERNATIONAL border with guns? As an ex-marine, he should’ve KNOWN BETTER.
Sorry. Sorry he’s sitting in a mexicunt prison. Sorry he’s liable to be convicted. But this is a case where he approached, then crossed an international border, intentionally. It’s not like crossing state lines…
Apparenty, you don’t pay attention to the news very closely, do you?
First of all, he did not want to go to Mexico. He was stuck in a traffic lane he did not want to be in because of bad signage, and ended up with no choice but to go to Mexico. Then once he got there, he informed them about the guns he had, all of them legal. He did not try to “sneak” them in.
Also, at the end of your comment you say “It’s not like crossing state lines…”
but at the beginning you say you gotta liken it to the the case of the marine. Which is it, are they the same or not?
Yes, they really are the same. Law-abiding citizens who merely exercise their 2A right to own legal firearms in potential trouble simply because of stupid laws and stupid politicians.
I’m a lot more sympathetic to this woman’s plight.
Not everyone is up to speed on reciprocity and all that.
Pennsylvania, as I understand it, doesn’t require training and a reasonable person could assume that a carry license is like a driver’s license (as frankly, it should be under the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution).
I wish this woman the best.
I think it might be a good idea if we organize some sort of “call the prosecutor’s office” campaign between now and Aug.
Sam