Violators face up to five years at hard labor in a Louisiana state prison.

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by in a statement posted on social media.

“Schools have classrooms, not booking rooms,” Murrill said in another post.

Previous civil rights abuse

Law-abiding gun owners should use extreme caution until the Bourbon Street gun-free zone can be overturned, because NOPD officers have a history of aggressively targeting concealed carriers, including tourists. In fact, the NOPD has an abysmal record of infringing upon the Second Amendment.

After Hurricane Katrina devasted large portions of the city, NOPD officers went door-to-door confiscating legally owned firearms from city residents — in complete contravention of the Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Years later, after the courts ordered the weapons returned to their owners, it was learned most were improperly stored and were allowed to rust into dust.

Since 2012, the NOPD has operated under a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice after a federal civil rights investigation found that the department had “a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers that deprives individuals of rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution or federal law.” In other words, the federal government took control of the police department and ordered them to comply with a massive list of changes and issue quarterly compliance reports of their progress. So far, the DOJ has shot down all attempts by NOPD to terminate the agreement.

Reaction

No one from NOPD’s public affairs division returned calls or emails for this story.

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell did not return calls or emails sent to her staff seeking her comments for this story.

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.”

Takeaways

Clearly, city officials made an end run around state law and the constitution. They have never understood it’s the hoodlums, not the guns, who have turned their beautiful city into a crime-ridden hellhole, and that gun-free zones are magnets for mayhem and don’t reduce crime because they intensify the problem.

Since they now can turn police stations into schools with a wave of their magic wand, why stop there? Why not turn shopping malls into unicorn sanctuaries, fire departments into spaceports or Caesars Superdome into a Quidditch field.

That they have become so desperate indicates that the gun-banners are losing, and they know it. Twenty-nine states now offer some form of permitless or constitutional carry, and more are coming.

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