I posted words the legislature used to describe hunting earlier. It's their place to define words they use in criminal statutes, not mine.
Nowhere is the mere possession of a firearm defined as hunting in the law. If there is any doubt as to the meaning, the interpretation is supposed to be made in favor of the accused:
Quote:
A basic rule of review in criminal cases is that criminal statutes are to be strictly construed in favor of those persons sought to be subjected to their operation, i.e., defendants. Schenher v. State, 38 Ala. App. 573, 90 So.2d 234, cert. denied, 265 Ala. 700, 90 So.2d 238 (1956).
Penal statutes are to reach no further in meaning than their words. Fuller v. State, 257 Ala. 502, 60 So.2d 202 (1952).
One who commits an act which does not come within the words of a criminal statute, according to the general and popular understanding of those words, when they are not used technically, is not to be punished thereunder, merely because the act may contravene the policy of the statute. Fuller v. State, supra, citing Young's Case, 58 Ala. 358 (1877).
No person is to be made subject to penal statutes by implication and all doubts concerning their interpretation are to predominate in favor of the accused. Fuller v. State, supra.
A statute defining a crime must be strictly construed and "one cannot commit an offense under a statute except in the circumstances it specifies." Peinhardt v. State, 161 Ala. 70, 49 So. 831, 832 (1909), overruled on other grounds, Williams v. State, 177 Ala. 34, 58 So. 921, 923 (1912).
I saw a cop wearing an orange vest with a loaded gun in the road at a wreck the other day. I don't define what he was doing as hunting from a public road.
I saw some tree trimmers wearing orange vests in the road just yesterday morning and they were looking from the road into the trees. I don't interpret that as hunting from the road.
The game warden who wrote the subject ticket was wearing green and had a loaded firearm on the railroad when he stopped Bucky. If the defintion of hunting is the mere possession of a loaded firearm, then the officer who wrote the ticket was hunting while on duty when he should have been working.
If you people think it is constitutional to make the possession of a loaded firearm while walking back to your truck after hunting a crime to help stop people from hunting illegally, then you probably agree with Sarah Brady that guns should be banned to keep people from committing murder. It's the same flawed logic that gun grabbing liberals use to attack our right to bear arms.
If the man who met Bucky with a loaded gun that day had been a robber instead of a game warden, Bucky had a gun without a bullet in the chamber because he was trying to appease game wardens who want to write their own laws. He would have been in trouble.
Bucky has a right to bear arms to defend himself while walking back to his truck from hunting. The Constituion still applies there.
