Churches exempted from conceal-and-carry law

09/13/2005

Matt McKinney,
Star Tribune
September 13, 2005

A church may ban guns from its entire property despite the law passed earlier this year that allows Minnesotans to carry a weapon in public, a Hennepin County District Court judge has ruled.

The state law, which allows most law-abiding adults who have had gun training to carry a weapon, required churches to post a government-authored sign at their doors in order to ban weapons from their sanctuaries. The law also made it difficult for churches to ban guns from their parking lots and rental spaces.

Churches in Edina and St. Paul challenged the law.

“The 2005 Act impermissibly intrudes into the free exercise of religion by arbitrary definitions, which dictate restrictions on the use of church property for worship, childcare, parking and rental space,” wrote Judge LaJune Thomas Lange.

The temporary injunction she granted Friday allows churches to post a sign of their own authoring while completely banning weapons from their property, including spaces used for Sunday school or as homeless shelters.

The ruling comes just months after the Legislature approved a rewritten form of the weapons law, the first draft of which passed into law in 2003 only to fall apart on a technicality.

The law allows Minnesotans 21 years and older with no history of mental illness, a clean record and weapons training to get a gun permit. The law replaced an earlier system in which local authorities, usually the sheriff, determined who could carry a weapon.

The earlier version of the law required churches and businesses to notify people individually and post a sign if they wanted to ban weapons from their property.

Church leaders at the Edina Community Lutheran Church and the Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul filed a lawsuit against the 2003 law, saying it interfered with their religious practices and the way in which they communicated with their worshipers. The churches were granted a religious exemption to the 2003 law, but had to file again after the Legislature passed the revised version of the law this year.

Lange wrote that the revised law still has flaws, including the way it asked church officials to perform the nearly impossible task of determining a person’s state of mind before they could lawfully bar that person from carrying a weapon onto church property.

Under the law, Lange wrote, the state allows a church official to, for example, ban a person from carrying a gun if the person is praying in a car in the church parking lot, but not if the person is merely reading a newspaper.

“The State requirement that the activity in the parking lot triggers the gun ban is an unconstitutional effort to direct the mode and manner of worship,” Lange wrote.

David Lillehaug, of the firm Fredrikson & Byron of Minneapolis, who represented the Edina Community Lutheran Church, said the judge’s decision was expected.

“This last spring the Legislature was explicitly warned that if they reenacted the law this way, it would be found unconstitutional,” he said. “This decision should be no surprise to anyone.”

Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington, the Senate sponsor of the right-to-carry law, was unavailable for comment Monday.

Failing to follow the notification law is a misdemeanor offense.

No trial date has been set for the suit brought by the churches.