A while back Fairfax county denied my CHP application because I refused to provide proof that I live in Fairfax County, notwithstanding the clear language of Virginia state law which does not permit counties to bolt on additional requirements for carry permits.

My attorney, Richard Gardiner, sent me a letter articulating his position that the Fairfax requirement was extra-legal, which I submitted with my new CHP application in place of the residency proof. Today marks 47 days since I submitted the app, and since Virginia law requires the court to issue a temporary permit after 45 days I called the permit desk to see about getting my temporary permit. I spoke to the deputy clerk responsible for permits, and she reported my permit was approved and about to be mailed out! I stopped by a picked it up today without incident.

So, the morale of the story is, justice is expensive and time-consuming, while capitulation pays off right away. Make of that what you will.

UPDATE: I’ve posted digital scans of the Gardiner letter for others to use. The raw PNG images of each page are 10MB in total, while the PDFs of the two are 9MB or so. I’m afraid I don’t have Adobe Acrobat installed, so I just used the PDF save-as option in Photoshop CS2, hence the enormous file size.

You can access the PNG scans at the corresponding Gallery album (click each thumbnail to see the bigger version of the image, and click that bigger version to download the huge full-rez version).

The PDFs are also available, and will make for easier printing:

• [Page 1 (PDF, 8MB)](files/Richard Gardiner CHP Letter Page 1 Redacted.pdf)
• [Page 2 (PDF, 1MB)](files/Richard Gardiner CHP Letter Page 2.pdf)