The state lawmaker, a gun, Planned Parenthood and... a girlfriend?
Tuesday afternoon, state Rep. Tom Hackbarth went to the St. Paul Police Department and picked up his gun.
How his silver .38-caliber revolver came into the possession of the cops is a story that Hackbarth himself acknowledges sounds "really weird and odd."
Last week, St. Paul police pulled the Anoka County Republican over and seized his loaded Smith & Wesson after he told them he was "jealous" about his "girlfriend," whom he didn't have any contact information for but suspected was with another man, according to police reports.
Police had been called to the city's Highland Park neighborhood by a security guard at a Planned Parenthood clinic, where Hackbarth had parked and appeared "suspicious."
Hackbarth, who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon, was briefly handcuffed and released without being charged with a crime, and he told the Pioneer Press he did nothing wrong or illegal.
Officers at the scene, however, suspected him of "stalking-like behavior" and borderline "harassment or terroristic threats," so they hung on to his weapon, reports state.
"What did I do that was so bad?" he asked a reporter during an interview Tuesday. "According to me, all I did was go to an empty parking lot and parked my truck ... walked around the block, and picked up the car and left."
Hackbarth said he had no idea he was parking in a Planned Parenthood parking lot. A gun-rights advocate, he said he usually carries his revolver on him and emphasized that's perfectly legal.
The 58-year-old married father of three said he and his wife are separated and planning to divorce. He said the woman, whom he met through an online dating service, "wasn't even a girlfriend" and said his description to police that he was "jealous" wasn't accurate.
"It's not like I was really jealous, but you know how you meet this person and you really like her, and she's saying all the right things, but you think she's feeding you a line of bull—? She's giving you all this ... and you want to figure out what's going on. Well that's what I did," he said in a telephone interview in which he readily talked about the incident but questioned its newsworthiness. "Sure enough, she lied to me and I'm done with it."
He said the notion that police suspected him of terroristic behavior is "insane," but he acknowledged, "It's really weird and odd when all taken together, and I can see how people took things the way they did."