A lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s Gun Free School Zone Act. Nik Clark, president of Wisconsin Carry, Incorporated, says the city of Milwaukee is a good illustration of how gun free school zones impact the right to carry. “It’s a pretty smothering map,” says Clark. “In Wisconsin we have a right to carry. Open carry is the only way to do so. And you look at a map and you see that you really can’t exercise that right in many places because there’s just huge areas of the city that are covered by school zones.” The lawsuit filed in January against Governor Jim Doyle, the Cities of Milwaukee and Racine and police officers from both cities, claims the act “covers such a broad area that it practically forecloses a meaningful right to keep and bear arms in large parts of the state.”
Clark says the recent case of a Sheboygan Falls man is a perfect example of how the law can impinge on law-abiding gun owners. The case against Matthew Hubing was dropped – but not until he’d spent sixteen days in jail. “At a minimum, we’d like to see it (the law) changed so that this more of like an enhancer penalty, where if someone commits a crime in a school zone with a gun, or someone comes into a school zone with a gun with criminal intent, then the law would apply,” he says. “Better yet, to make it much easier the define school property.”
