Tag: Shaneen Allen

Governor Christie, You Have A Problem

 

shutterstock_95092702On Friday, our own Charles C. W. Cooke and Kevin Williamson discussed the latest firearms-related injustice from New Jersey, in which Carol Bowne was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend — against whom she had a restraining order — while awaiting approval to own a firearm. Cameron Gray ably took the matter up again yesterday, reiterating the injustice New Jersey committed against her.

Amazingly, there was yet more news on the Garden State’s terrible gun laws yesterday: Governor Chris Christie pardoned Steffon Josey-Davis for unlawful possession of a weapon (a felony). More specifically, Josey-Davis was charged and convicted for forgetting to unload his legal handgun and merely securing it in his glove compartment during a harried commute to work as a security guard. Though his legal troubles are now over, his financial ones are not, and his legal defense fund is still taking donations.

This is the third time I am aware of that Christie has intervened on behalf of a generally-lawful citizen — Shaneen Allen and Brian Aitken being the other two — charged with felony weapons violations. Despite the injustice and the fact that no one was actually in danger in these cases, the most unsettling aspect of these cases is that these people got into trouble because of their lawful and responsible instincts: Aitken came to authorities’ attention because his family called the police to say they were worried he might be suicidal, and found the guns he had stored in the trunk because he thought they’d be safer there than in his apartment; and and both Josey-Davis and Aitken would almost certainly have left the scene of their traffic stops with nothing more than a citation had they not disclosed to the arresting officers that they had a weapon on them. As Cooke and others have noted, Carol Bowne died in no small part because she was unwilling to break the law to protect herself.

Shaneen Allen and The Democratic Narrative

 

pic_giant_091814_SM_Shaneen-Allen(Update 09/24/2014: McClain has reversed course and admitted Allen to the Pre-Trial Intervention Program she’d been denied access to. Whatever else it may be, that’s wonderful new for Allen and worth celebrating).

It’s not necessarily damning that Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown’s deaths became rallying cries within Leftist and Civil Rights circles: as initially presented, both cases appeared to confirm the Democratic narrative that American society is beleaguered by divisions of race, gender, and class.

It does, however, say a lot about those groups that they stuck with those stories long after the original facts were shown to be factually incorrect, heavily edited, or outright fabricated in an effort to cast Martin and Brown as hapless victims of prejudice.