Yep, but I bet you'll get your permit approved if you "donated" $300k to the judge, police chief, and mayor. NY is full of graft and corruption. It reminds me of third world countries like Thailand or Vietnam. My uncle "donated" money and gave gifts of diamonds to the judge, police chief, and mayor to the tune of $80,000 to get his gun license approved in the 1980s. It sucks. There is no liberty in NY, only graft and corruption. The law only applies to the poor. If you are rich and politically connected, you are above the law, just like Thailand and Vietnam. You couldn't pay me enough to live in NY! (God bless Texas)
I think you would have better luck conducting a sting operation on them to expose their corruption than suing them. Oh, wait, but then you'd end up "missing" or "suddenly commit suicide".
There's a reason why that judge grabbed all the gun license approval cases, because it is PROFITABLE to selectively approve them! That's why nobody wants "shall issue" in NY, because that would mean lost corruption money profits. There are over 2000 concealed carry permits in NYC (city only, not state). At $300k a piece, that's over $600 MILLION dollars in corruption and graft profits!!! The total amount of graft money up for grabs for selectively approving gun licenses is probably worth several BILLION dollars!!!!
P.S. I came up with the $300k figure by calculating inflation. $300k is $80k in today's dollars.
jimlongley wrote:Probably not.
NY has judges in place who will consistently deny permit applications for any reason at all, and other judges in higher courts that support them, and so on. The last case like this (2013) that got as far as SCOTUS was declined by them.
And believe it or not this is an improvement over the way things were decades ago. We had a judge (John J. Clyne) in Albany County who would routinely just move all permit applications to the bottom of his docket, and although there were several judges who were supposed to get the applications in rotation, for some reason they kept going preferentially to him (machine politics). If forced by odd circumstance to actually process an application, he would deny it unless the applicant had enough political pull, and it needed to be a LOT of political pull (machine politics). If you wanted to get a pistol permit in Albany City or County, the best thing to do was be hired as a part time armed security guard or establish residence in a county that had a more lenient approach to issuing permits. There was a full time pistol permit "licensing officer" out in the Buffalo area who was an employee of the sheriff's office, not a judge, and that one would issue you a permit just for being able to stand up long enough to get the paper on his desk. I knew people who did both, with limited success. One of the problems was that a change of address approval was not guaranteed, and another was that if they wrote on the license, there being no mechanism to limit it otherwise, that the permit was only good if you were on the job.
We sued this judge multiple times, one of the first suits being for not putting a reason for denying the permit (not required under the law BTW) and when we won, he denied the permit because the applicant did not own a pistol. The "Catch-22" conundrum being that in order to purchase a pistol, or even to handle one in a gun store, you had to have a permit for that pistol. We sued a second time and lost because the appeal judge said that the applicant did not have to be in possession of the pistol, but that, since permits were issued for the specific gun not to the person, the gun actually had to have been paid for.
If the dealer has the gun in his inventory, all well and good, if you don't get your permit, he can charge you a small administrative fee, give you your money back, and put the gun back in inventory. If it's a gun he has to order, unless he has some reason to believe that having that gun in inventory to sell to someone else, he is unlikely to want to order it for you if there is any chance at all that you won't get the permit. And that is always a high likelyhood. BTW, the serial number of the gun has to be on the application, so you can't just have an order in that has not been fulfilled.
As chairman of a little political action committee in one gun club, I found myself thrust to the fore when all of the clubs in the county, and there were many, formed a coalition to see if we could force this guy to issue permits. We actually had kind of a pipeline into his office because one of his clerks was the wife of one of our members and she kept us posted on some of the nefarious doings regarding pistol permits.
In the mid 70s we had a young lady join our club who we thought fit the bill as a test case, and she was willing, with our backing. She was an active and highly rated pistol target shooter at the Blue Trail Range in CT. She already owned guns and she fit a laundry list of other qualifications. She applied, was denied, we sued again because he didn't include a reason, his response was that the previous case in which he had to provide a reason applied only to that case. He lost again, and he put down a reason that she was too young (in her mid 20s). We sued again, he put down that she had young children in the house. We sued until our funds ran out, winning virtually every time, and yet he went right on finding reasons to deny.
Eventually she and her husband moved.
We even won a case where we sued because the licensing officers were hand writing on the face of the permit that it was only good under some circumstances, such as hunting, or fishing, or target shooting, or as a security guard, as "defacing" the document. The following year the NY legislature passed a change to the law allowing the licensing officers to add such limitations as they saw fit.
In NY it's virtually a losing battle because the overwhelming mass of political weight is concentrated in NY City.
