You may recall that TTAG took a circumspect view of the incident involving New York pistol permit holder David Lewis. Mr. Lewis’ lawyer claimed the Empire State Police had trolled his client’s HIPAA-protected medical records, found a Zoloft script, and yanked his chain. And now . . . “County Clerk Chris Jacobs received a voicemail from State Police in Albany, saying it was all a mistake and that they had the wrong man,” wivb.com reports. “‘Now we find out that State Police and the Division of Criminal Justice in Albany got it wrong. They did not do their due diligence; they did not appropriately and fully investigate this to make sure it was the right person. And now, we have to quickly act to reinstate that right,’ Jacobs said.” That’s not all the clerk had to say about that . . .

Jacobs believes David’s case shows there is a serious flaw with that part of the [SAFE Act]. “If you try to read the legislation on the mental health provision and how this is supposed to work, it doesn’t look like it’s going to work on paper, and now we know it really doesn’t work,” Jacobs said. “And as a result, in this case, we had somebody who was, I think, probably embarrassed. Name was dragged out in public; they were deprived of their property and their rights here.”

As Lewis attorney might say (in private), cha-ching. In public he says “Due process should come before the suspension. That’s where due process comes in. Before your rights are taken, due process must occur. That’s our constitutional right, not the reverse.”

Also not mentioned: with ANY gun control law there is ALWAYS the possibility of a bureaucratic screw-up. In fact, it happens all the time. For example, the FBI isn’t saying how many “false positives” NICS has generated but they number well into the hundreds of thousands.

And then there’s abuse of laws and their “evolution” by not-so-well-meaning gun grabbers. Cough. Terrorist watch list. Cough. If you think about it, the NY po-po’s SAFE Act “screw-up” could well be the harbinger of things to come.