A grand jury has issued two indictments charging the Santa Clara County Undersheriff, a previously indicted sheriff’s captain, a local business owner, and the head of Global Security for Apple, Inc. with bribery.
Undersheriff Rick Sung, 48, and Captain James Jensen, 43, are accused of requesting bribes for concealed firearms (CCW) licenses, while insurance broker Harpreet Chadha, 49, and Apple’s Chief Security Officer Thomas Moyer, 50, are accused of offering bribes to get them.
It is sadly repetitive by now: May Issue leads to abuse and corruption. It has been since local government started to use it as Jim Crow policy to keep blacks unarmed and they figured out they could squeeze money from everybody else.
The Concealed Carry License movement has been an absolute success, specially on stated where stats have been kept to see what kind of people would be the ones with guns. And sadly for the doomsayers, we turned out to be the most Law Abiding SOBs the country has. We are now slowly turning the states into the next logical and rightful step: Constitutional Carry.
Long ways to go, but we will get there.
Hat Tip Scrappycrow
I have some sympathy for the insurance broker. Stuck between the rock of paying a bribe to carry “legally,” and the hard place of carrying illegally. Either way you have to break the law to exercise the right of self defense.
In CA there is a third option – move to a county where the sheriff is friendly to concealed carry, then your permit is valid throughout CA. But that also takes considerable resources that the average person just doesn’t have: affording two residences, one probably in a very expensive part of CA..
Do you actually have to move to get a license from a friendly sheriff? There’s a nice story in Neil Schulman’s “Stopping Power” on that. He describes the Santa Monica county CC license review board, which prides itself in only issuing one license during a multi-year period. But then one of its members wanted to get a permit. He was too embarrassed to get it from his own board, so instead he went to the Beverly Hills sheriff. Unfortunately for him, Neil found out about this (from the Sheriff, I think) and published that fact in the LA Times. Result: a Gavin Newsom style s***-storm. Lovely.
I’m glad I live in a Constitutional Carry state. Then again, they still issue CC permits (for reciprocity purposes). A friend of ours recently got one, took a simple form (no fingerprinting), a very modest fee, and a couple of days. I think the local cops actually dropped off the approved permit at her house. Nice. NH is shall-issue, and explicitly pre-empts any attempt by any local authority to modify the forms, add requirements, or in any other way mess with our rights. I think the law even makes officials personally liable for violations.
And liquor licenses and every other time something is at the discretion of some bureaucrat, they figure out how to enrich themselves using that authority to grant licenses.