Local concealed-carry activists adopt a highway and – this seems to confuse some people – actually pick up the trash, while armed…<\/p>\n
…and yet no gunfights broke out:<\/p>\n
A group of Adopt a Highway volunteers were packing more than trash along the shoulder of Minnesota 55 in Mendota Heights on Sunday morning.<\/p>\n
With legal guns on their hips, a dozen area residents spent nearly three hours picking up litter \u2014 everything from cigarette butts to blown-out tires \u2014 along a 2-mile stretch of the highway just east of the Mendota Bridge. It was the inaugural event for the group, which registered with the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Adopt a Highway program under the name Minnesota Carry Permit Holders.<\/p>\n
“We believe this is the safest stretch of road right now in the state,” said Jason Walberg, who collected trash with a Springfield XD .40-caliber, semi-automatic handgun clipped to his belt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s good to know that law-abiding citizens have some friends in officialdom with some common sense:<\/p>\n
“This is a perfectly legal group … what they do is clear in state law,” MnDOT spokesman Kent Barnard said, adding that \u2014 personally \u2014 he has had a gun-carrying permit for several years. “Now, if we had the perverts and pedophiles out there, that would be a different story.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I hope Mr. Barnard doesn’t take any official crap for having said that.<\/p>\n
It should go without saying that any group of rigorously law-abiding citizens availing themselves of their legal right to exercise another legal right peacefully and constructively should get compared in the local media with the worst our society has to offer, naturally:<\/p>\n
Adopt a Highway agreements say the agency can refuse, cancel or revise the agreement “if in its sole judgment the nature of the group or its sign is political or in questionable taste.”<\/p>\n
“If a group is legitimate and wants to pick up litter, we simply can’t turn them away because we might not agree with something,” Ekern said.<\/p>\n
She noted how several years ago the Missouri Department of Transportation lost a legal battle with the Ku Klux Klan over a stretch of highway. The case ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
But Missouri officials “must’ve seen the writing on the wall” before the court decision, Ekern said, because the state renamed the adopted highway for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n