Last year, 38 Minnesotans successfully appealed their denial or revocation of a permit to carry a handgun. This is despite some of them being denied permits for reasons such as having active orders for protection filed against them, histories of drug crimes or assaults, or numerous arrests.

That's according to the 2012 permit to carry report released today by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Thanks to the BCA providing the Star Tribune some of the information early, we've already reported on permits issued last year (a record 31,657), and the number of crimes by permit holders and justifiable uses reported, (though we now know those numbers are too low). And we did a story on permit applicants who were initially denied, only to get those permits on appeal up to 2011.

What we didn't have was the 2012 appeal information until today, which shows that last year of the 252 applicants initially denied, 61 of those appealed. Of those, about 62 percent were successful. Some of those permit holders were initially denied for reasons like:

  • "2008 and 2009 domestic assault arrests. Police reports state you said you were going to kill the victim and the children and that you didn't care if there was a no contact order, you would go back to the address."
  • "Pattern of drug use documented through contacts with law enforcement."
  • "Numerous arrests and convictions including assault, disorderly conduct, theft, receiving and concealing property, giving police officer false information show pattern of poor decision making and lack of good judgement."
  • "History of anger management issues including threatening to kill an employer and domestic assault."

While the permit-to-carry statute requires sheriffs departments to report denial reasons, it doesn't require providing information on why an appeal was successful. The reports also don't provide the name of any permit applicant, which is protected by state law. Since 2003, 337 applicants have successfully appealed their denial, seeing about a 50 percent success rate.

Click here for a sortable database of all of the permit to carry denials and appeals since 2003, collected from the BCA reports.