County issues thousands of concealed-carry permits

Story posted March 1, 2013 in News by Stephen Shiflett

BELLEFONTE – The Centre County Sheriff’s Office has issued thousands of permits to carry concealed guns in recent years -- many to out-of-state residents – and the process has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for the county.

Before state law changes in 2011 made applying more difficult, the office would often handle more than 1,000 License to Carry Firearms applications each month, Sheriff Denny Nau said.

“We have one person who pretty much just processes applications all day in our office,” Nau said.

Applications peaked in 2010 and 2011, and more than 22,000 permits have been issued over the past three years, according to Nau. He said on one particular day his office received about 500 applications in the mail.

The cost to apply is $20, with the county retaining $19 of it, Nau said. This has generated approximately $418,000 for the county over the last three years.  But Nau said the amount of revenue per year has been declining.  In January the county received about $9,000 from applications, he said.

A state law passed in the spring of 2011 requires applicants to submit a photo ID in person to the sheriff’s office; this has reduced the number of out-of-state applicants, who previously could mail in their forms.

One of the reasons Centre County has received so many applications is because gun owners and organizations from out-of-state got wind of the office’s willingness to process a large number of permits.  Nau said that a concealed-carry license in Pennsylvania has reciprocity with 18 other states and is much less expensive and time-consuming to get.

“A lot of people also want to have them if they’re just traveling through Pennsylvania,” Nau said. “There are a lot of camps here, too.”

Nau said the number of applications his office denies is very low, “probably around 3 percent.”  He explained that the low rejection rate is probably because it’s known that the applicant must undergo an instant photo background check, so many with prior arrest records don’t apply.

Nau said his office processed about 250 per month in 2012 but that the number rose dramatically following the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14.

“They were lined up there outside the office,” Nau said. “It was crazy.”

It is unclear how many of the applications processed over the past five years came from Centre County residents since the sheriff’s office records don’t readily distinguish between county and out-of-state applicants.

Nau said he “guesstimates” the number to be somewhere between 16,000 and 22,000 permits issued to county residents.  A permit is valid for five years. According the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the county as of July 2011 was 154,722.

According to state law, residents of Pennsylvania must register with their own counties, with the exception of college students living long-term in a different county. However, Nau said his office hasn’t received a lot of applications from Penn State students.

Although the number of applications will never reach pre-2011 levels, Nau said, other sheriff’s offices throughout the state are becoming more willing to process out-of-state applications.

Though the process is less time-consuming than in other states, he said, he thinks the background checks required by Pennsylvania are effective. Part of that process requires submitting mental health history checks to the federal government.  That is something other states don’t do, Nau said.

“Right now it’s a flaw in the system,” he said.

(Stephen Shiflett is a Penn State journalism student.)