Anyway, I'll have to dig out my old copy of "The Original Golden Oldies" and listen to it again.  It's been too long.

I use this site quite often.

My fav "throw yer hands in the air-er" has gotta be Outkast.  

If you think you have something worth saying. . . .

One of these friends went for the application.  This friend was told that the (since-retired) (literally son-of-a-bookie) police chief had decreed (in his Tony Soprano voice) that he didn't want anyone to have any guns, so there was no point in even applying.  

What about the presumption in favor of approval?  The cops had an answer to that, in several parts.

First, they would let the application sit in the inbox until the day before the automatic approval deadline, doing as little work on it as possible.  Then, they would deny the application "in the interest of public safety and welfare" (or whatever the magic words of the statute were).  When the aggrieved applicant would go to court to get it approved, the applicant would run into a wall of decisions which indicated that, in that state, "the possession of firearms is a highly regulated activity and (without saying so explicitly) we resolve all doubts in favor of the determination by the Chief of Police, who best knows the public safety needs of his jurisdiction."

Then, the applicant discovered that, in order to get the application completed, the applicant would have to waive all his Fourth Amendment rights as against the local and state police so they could investigate to make sure the applicant had good character and to make sure the applicant would store the guns safely.  And the applicant would have to submit fingerprints, and all sorts of personal information.

Likely now, they ask for all your blog posts, too.  I dunno.

And those waivers would persist even after the application was granted.

And then, the applicant discovered that, in the event of the application being denied, if the applicant moved to any other state and was going to seek a permit there, he would have to answer "yes" to the question of whether he had ever applied for a gun permit and been denied (making a false statement on such an application is, we are told, a federal crime punishable by IIRC up to 5 years in prison), and explicate why "contrary to public safety, yadda yadda".  Of course, the magic words from the first jurisdiction would have no "legal term of art" meaning in the second, which would both immediately cast a real pall over that applicant and his application and extend the arbitrary obnoxiousness of the son-of-a-bookie chief of police's exercise of power into another state.

And, nowadays, all this would be entered into a permanent computer record somewhere.

The net results were that the applicant either moved to a state with a more congenial gun registration law, kept any existing gun without a permit (allowable under the first state's law, but in very limited circumstances not understood by cops, and the lack of a permit precluded him from buying, selling, or trading for a new one or getting rid of the old one), or gave up entirely.  The corollary net result was that the only people who got permits were (a) cops, (b)friends, relatives and supplicants of the chief of police and/or local politicos (i.e., the connected) or (c) people who were willing to litigate to the ends of the court system and had the tens of thousands of dollars to spend on that (i.e., the rich).

It is stupid gun-control legislation like this - the NRA trolls the hoppers where the bills get filed and go to die - that hurt Democrats and provide plenty of grist for the propaganda mill.  I would bet that "I told you so" was the common post on all the shooting-sports blogs the morning after Holder announced going back after the assault weapon ban and that gun and ammunition sales spiked beginning that day.

And the idiots who think that "banning guns" will make for The Millenium and The End of Violence, and sponsor gun control legislation are just that.  People killed and hurt each other for thousands of years before guns were invented.  And, to be sure, that hatchet in the garage can do about the same as a gun - if wielded incorrectly.

When my husband was called to the jail the next day to see if he could identify him, he said he doubted his own mother could have...beaten quite badly.

They wanted to know where the guy had gotten the alcohol, didn't much care about the 6 counts of breaking and entering.

There was little solace on the Internet either. Two "Save Roland Burris" groups have popped up on the popular Facebook Web site. The groups have less than 70 members combined, and their ranks include a handful of GOP political operatives