slickvic107 wrote:A friend of my wife's is a State Trooper and she had asked him about me carrying my gun in my truck. He told her that if he were to pull me over and my gun was in my vehicle and not locked in case out of reach I would be arrested no matter what. That the Law states that you must have the gun unloaded and in a case out of reach. I have read all the documents, and I even asked him where in the code does it say that all I get is Title 11. If I have the gun on the passenger seat when I am alone is there a chapter or other document I can have on me to show the officer that I am not breaking the law? This ST was pretty adamant about stating that there is no legal way to carry a loaded firearm in the vehicle. That it needed to be unloaded and ammo in a separate place.
First, police are the last authority I'd go to with a legal question (or rather, I won't go to one simply BECAUSE they are a cop). They aren't lawyers, are not required to give you correct info, can outright intentionally lie to you, and are often protected from any serious personal repercussions should they make a mistake in interpreting the law on the job. Nobody here is a lawyer either (that I'm aware of), but we'll usually at least look up the code before offering an opinion as fact.
OC is legal in Delaware simply because there's no law prohibiting it. There's a law against carrying a CONCEALED deadly weapon without a license, but nothing expressly forbids OC. There's no section explaining that OC is legal because by default, if an action is not prohibited, it is lawful. If the cop can't even find the section he thinks you'd be violating he'll have a hard time charging you with it. That said, arguing the law with a cop on the side of the road probably isn't going to work out very well for you anyways.
In the past there have been a couple incidents where individuals were illegally detained or arrested for OCing. IIRC one individual was held for a couple hours before they realized there was nothing to charge him with, then he was released and eventually received some sort of settlement for the violation of his rights. LE agencies in Delaware should really be aware of OC's legality by now. I haven't heard of any such incidents happening in the past several years.
slickvic107 wrote:And I may have asked this but if I put my gun in the open center console, there is a small tray where lets say if the vehicle was a manual shift the shifter would be, and is visible on both sides of the vehicle is this considered in plain view. The plain view of other ppl vs plain view of officer confuses me a bit.
Whether you're carrying "openly enough" must meet a higher standard than just being "in plain view" like a cop needs to seize contraband. Meaning just having a tiny bit visible so a cop can barely figure out what it is won't cut it. This court case decision may help:
A weapon is "concealed" if it is hidden from the ordinary sight of another person, i.e., the casual and ordinary observation of another in the normal associations of life; however, since "ordinary observations" are not the same as the observations of an investigating police officer, a weapon concealed from an ordinary person may be in the plain view of a police officer. Robertson v. State, 794 A.2d 267 (Del. 1997).
So if someone can walk up to your window and at a glance see the gun out in the open then you're likely ok, if they see a piece of it sticking out of a hidden area then that's possibly going to get you a felony. It's a bit of a grey area with serious consequences so I'd recommend being cautious. If it's a shallow tray easily seen by someone walking past, say the same as if it were sitting on the passenger seat, then it's probably ok. If it's a deep tray that you'd have to take some effort to look down into then it would probably be too concealed. I'd err on the side of caution until you get the CCDW. Sorry if that doesn't really help much.
