So says Green Bay:

A group promoting gun owner rights in Wisconsin is suing the city of Green Bay in a dispute that stems from restrictions on guns inside a popular farmers market.

Wisconsin Carry Inc. has asked a judge in Brown County Circuit Court to order Green Bay city officials to relinquish public records that might indicate whether the city has a policy on carrying guns in the open.

The same group previously sued Ashwaubenon and Madison after both municipalities arrested individuals suspected of improperly carrying guns in public.

Nik Clark, president of Wisconsin Carry Inc., said a member of the organization complained this summer after he was told he couldn’t open-carry a gun in a Green Bay downtown farmers market. Police officers told him that guns were not permitted at the Saturday morning event, Clark said.

Afterward, Wisconsin Carry asked the city police department for copies of any procedures or directives on the subject. The department declined, citing attorney-client confidentiality.

Clark said his group decided to file suit because, he said, Green Bay residents have a right to know their city government’s policy on controlling open-carry of guns.

I’m not a lawyer, but this has got to be the most oddball, peculiar application of attorney-client privilege I have ever heard.  Surely they don’t mean that laws and regulations are not subject to public knowledge and scrutiny?  That would be absurd.

More than likely they mean that the officers who stopped the gentlemen didn’t have a basis for doing so and they don’t want to divulge their vulnerability to anyone.  For the stop to have been legitimate there would have to be a specific regulation pertaining to this establishment and/or the establishment would have to post.  Wisconsin is an open carry state with complete state preemption and has only weak stop and identify laws (the one stopped need not follow the request even though an officer can ask for identification).

Perhaps someone who is more familiar with Wisconsin law can weigh in, but it appears to me that the police acted improperly and fear just the sort of lawsuit they are currently facing.

I had previously said this:

I am a long standing and diehard advocate of State’s rights, even to the extent that I don’t think the federal court system should be invoked when local gun control is concerned.  All gun politics is local, I have said.  The corollary is that in order to prevent local hicks, ne’er-do-wells and criminals from acting out their Napoleon fantasies upon other men, association with the state means that – assuming robust gun rights laws already exist – local municipalities and townships shouldn’t be able to preempt state laws.  The state is the right size for law-making and control.  Our founding fathers were wise.

And true to form for the little Napoleon child-emperors, Wisconsin gun laws may soon be a mess.

Wisconsin wildlife officials’ decision to drop rifle restrictions going into this month’s gun deer hunt was supposed to make things simpler. But hunters better do their homework before they head into the woods because local governments now are weighing whether to impose their own bans, potentially creating a patchwork of rules.

The DNR lifted its rifle ban earlier this year in the nearly 20 counties where it remained in effect. The move makes more powerful and accurate weapons available to deer hunters who had been limited to shotguns during the nine-day gun hunt.

Local governments can still restrict rifles, however, and a number have been working to pass limits before the season starts Nov. 23. That could leave hunters sifting through a patchwork of regulations to figure out whether they can use a rifle in their favorite patch of woods.

“Hunters will have to literally check the specific rules for every community they hunt, and don’t think that a single round of phone calls will be sufficient for your whole season,” Rep. Joel Kleefisch, R-Oconomowoc, one of the most avid hunters in the Legislature, warned in a statement. “The bottom line here is that the hunter still has (to do) the homework.”

The DNR banned rifles decades ago in a number of southern counties to limit the deer kill and grow local herds. Hunters in those areas were forced to use weapons with less accuracy and range, such as shotguns, muzzleloaders, pistols or bows and arrows. As the deer population grew, justification for the regulations shifted to protecting the public from far-traveling rifle rounds.

But over the past 15 years or so, the DNR has lifted the restrictions on a county-by-county basis. By last spring, the ban was still in place in all or part of only 19 counties.

The agency’s board decided in May to lift the ban completely. DNR Administrative Warden Matt O’Brien wrote in an October memo the change was meant to streamline deer hunting rules. It also had become difficult for the agency to back up the idea that shotguns were safer when rifles had always been legal for hunting coyote, fox and bear, he wrote.

Or a better way of saying is that Wisconsin gun laws have always been a mess and will continue to be so because of patchwork regulations.  And isn’t it interesting that the original justification (i.e., game management) had to be replaced with something else (i.e., public safety) because the government likes laws and reflexively regulates and controls, whether the justification exists or not.

I have advocated disobedience to unrighteous laws, but it’s still true that one pleasure the righteous man enjoys is obedience to righteous laws.  The good man knows that a truthful hunt for perpetrators of murder and theft won’t roll him into the tide because he is not guilty.

But untruthful and indiscreet law enforcement works just like patchwork regulations and laws.  They frustrate the righteous man because what’s legal over here isn’t over there, and what’s legal now won’t be tomorrow.  If you get caught not knowledgeable on all of the impossible nuances, evolutions and exigencies of the laws, you’re turned into a lawbreaker by prosecutors who have no concept of true justice.  They know the law, but not intrinsic good.

The justification against preemption of state laws by the federal government is the same as that by localities, municipalities, cities and townships.  Patchwork regulation frustrates and mocks the righteous man, and replaces intrinsic good with the law.  Patchwork regulation is fundamentally wicked.