Palmer dumps gun law that limited where they could be carried

"I'm thoroughly excited," said Ryan Clark, a former Marine and now a plumber who lives outside Palmer.

The outdated law prohibited anyone other than a peace officer or Alaskan with a permit to carry a concealed weapon from carrying any weapon, concealed or not, in government office buildings, courthouses, hospitals, schools, places where alcohol is sold or served, domestic violence or sexual assault shelters, city parks, fair grounds and banks.

State law says most of those places are off-limits to guns anyway. The problem, Clark said, is that Alaska law changed in 2003 to do away with the requirement for a concealed-carry permit. If you can legally carry a weapon in Alaska, you can also legally carry a concealed weapon.

Also, Clark said, the Palmer rule restricted carrying weapons at fair grounds, in parks and in banks. None of those are part of the state law.

Clark, who described himself as "kind of a gun guy," complained to Palmer City Council in August that the law was too restrictive. This summer, he had taken a more public stance by complaining to conservative talk-radio host Eddie Burke.

Burke had Palmer Public Safety Director Jon Owen on his show in August to talk about the issue. Clark called in and pressed Owen on the issue, but he said he still wasn't sure the city was going to do anything about it.

Owen, by phone last week, said the city rule was outdated and just hadn't been changed to reflect new state laws.

"The city ordinance was more restrictive than the state law," Owen said. "We just deleted the whole thing."

Anyone who was caught violating the rule would have been issued a ticket, Owen said. He didn't know how much the ticket would cost or when the rule was last enforced. Owen said several longtime department officers he spoke with couldn't remember a ticket ever being issued for violating the law.

The weapon measure wasn't the only outdated law found on the city books in recent years.

City clerk Janette Bower has been systematically reviewing the city charter and its ordinances. In 2005 city voters changed an outdated section of the city charter, or founding document, that required voters to be 19 years or older and to speak or read English.

Also the charter required anyone who wanted a say in whether the city could borrow money, for example to issue a bond for a city project, to be a registered property owner.

"Of course it was illegal, so it hadn't been followed in years," Bower said.

Eighteen-year-olds were given the right to vote in 1971. Requiring citizens to own property in order to vote mostly went out of fashion in the 1800s -- North Carolina was the last state to eliminate that rule in 1856, according to an online American Civil Liberties Union voting rights timeline.

Find Rindi White online at adn.com/contact/rwhite or call 352-6709.