WeaponsMan:Strange license denial case in NH

We’re not lawyers around here, it’s not our comfort zone. So we’re not always sure, for example, when you should shoot somebody and when you should refrain, although we’ll always be glad to recommend something to shoot him with. So we’re having trouble figuring out what’s happening with this court case, where a Portsmouth, NH, lawyer is suing his town because they denied his shall-issue carry permit renewal.

The reason? His references didn’t respond. But the references aren’t required to respond, under the black-letter law: they’re not required to exist by the law at all but lines for references were added by the state bureaucrat who drafted the form, without any explicit legal authority.

Anti-gun officials in Portsmouth, including Police Chief Stephen duBois and Captain Mike Schwartz, and City Attorney Bob Sullivan, have been using the references and other minutiae to try to turn the state’s preemptive shall-issue law into a de facto local option, which in their hands operates more like Massachusetts’s may-issue-but-really-won’t law.  In fact, the single-state-form was a requirement the state Legislature imposed when local Massachusetts wannabees, including Portsmouth, began placing obstacles in front of licensees.

 WeaponMan.com