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The one person out of 5,800 denied Wisconsin concealed carry permits who decided to challenge the decision has lost another round, this time at the state Court of Appeals.

If he had prevailed, Robert W. Evans might have cleared the way for those with certain domestic violence convictions to legally carry hidden guns.

Congress in 1996 banned people convicted of domestic violence from possessing guns, and some gun rights advocates have challenged the reach of the so-called Lautenberg Amendment ever since.

But the Court of Appeals has affirmed a Dane County Circuit Court ruling that the state Department of Justice properly rejected Evans' application because his 2002 misdemeanor conviction for disorderly conduct met the federal law's definition of domestic violence.

It prohibits gun ownership when someone is convicted of any crime, an element of which is the use of physical force, against someone in one of several kinds of relationships to the victim.

Evans, 68, of Cottage Grove had argued that his misdemeanor did not meet the federal definition because in Wisconsin "disorderly conduct" does not require that a person use force against another as an element of the offense.

Evans had pleaded no contest to pushing his adult stepdaughter. He denied her claims that he struck her. He has no other criminal record.

But the court said Wisconsin's statute doesn't require that disorderly conduct be all the things listed (profane, abusive, boisterous, violent, etc.) but any of them, or any combination of them.

Writing for a three-judge panel of the District 4 court, Judge Paul Lundsten concluded that Evans was convicted of “violent, abusive, and otherwise disorderly conduct” and that “violent conduct necessarily implies the use of physical force.”

The court did not consider Evans' actual conduct.

“We have considered only the fact of his conviction, the statutory definition of disorderly conduct, and the ‘permitted class of documents,’ ” Lundsten wrote.

Evans also had argued that his case didn't meet the second prong required to trigger the federal firearm prohibition -- that he was "similarly situated... as a parent" to the stepdaughter, because she was already an adult when Evans married her mother, he was never involved in her parenting, and she was only staying with the couple temporarily.

But the court ignored those particulars and said without much discussion that because Evans was a stepparent to the victim, he met the second prong of the federal law.