In Ok, you are forced to choose between fostering children and your right to bear arms
Apparently Oklahoma is not an advocate for using the Second Amendment to protect your foster family. They must be jumping on the “guns only cause violence” bandwagon that seems to be sweeping the nation. Via gunsamerica.com/blog
The Oklahoma Department of Human Services has a strict policy when it comes to the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding foster parents that leave many with a precarious choice: go unarmed and keep the children or arm oneself and risk losing the children.
To explicate, under the state DHS’s “Weapons Safety Agreement,” foster and adoptive parents must agree to keep their weapons locked up when their not in use, to not carry their firearms if a child is present (there is an exemption if one is required to carry a gun for work, e.g. a police officer) and to keep any firearm in an automobile unloaded, disabled and stored in a locked container.
In other words, one must disarm when one’s foster children are present. One cannot carry a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense outside the home, with foster children. According to the bureaucrats that run the DHS, the two-year-old policy isn’t an undue restriction on one’s right to keep and bear arms, but a sensible way to protect the children.
“Our agency policy does not prohibit gun ownership by foster parents,” Sheree Powell, the DHS communications director, toldNewsOK. “It does, however, require reasonable safety measures to protect the children in DHS care, many of whom come from traumatic and tragic circumstances.”
Thankfully, the Second Amendment Foundation has filed a lawsuit challenging the policy on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.
“This mandate for foster parents is not just restrictive, it’s ridiculous,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb in a press release. “Why should a foster parent be stripped of his or her right to self-defense, or their ability to defend their foster child, simply to appease some bureaucrat’s anti-gun philosophy?
“It is completely unconstitutional, and unfair,” began attorney David G. Sigale, who is representing the plaintiffs, a married couple from Moore who’ve, over the years, housed 34 foster children, “that those persons who are providing a better life and environment for children, through the State’s DHS foster care and adoption process, would have to give up the fundamental rights of self-defense and defense of family in order to do so.
Foster children don’t have the right to be protected and parents don’t have the right to protect them? How completely unconstitutional and infringing is this?!
This would also discourage people from becoming foster parents which is exactly the opposite of what needs to be happening!
This ridiculous anti-gun sentiment that has been going around needs to be stopped, guns are responsible for saving lives and preventing tragedy every day.
Our Second Amendment is vital to the freedom and safety of our country.
What people don’t realize is that guns do exceedingly more good than bad, they prove to even out the playing field for the weak against the stronger criminals. Not only the weak but for those in a disadvantage that would normally end in tragedy. They prevents victimization of the innocent.
Even if there were no guns there would be a ridiculous wave of people trying to ban an alternate weapon. There were always be criminals and murderers but it makes no sense to ban a weapon that saves more lives than it takes… And a weapon that is protected by the constitution.
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