My only other arrest happened over fifty years ago and I'm not eighteen any longer. The shotgun is for home defense and I hope it is never used for that situation.
I got snagged by an administrative error that occurred sometime between buying my first handgun (decades ago) and going during covid to buy a 38.
It probably happened during digitalization, and it took me 18 months and several thousand dollars in attorney fees to fix.
In the interim years I was a TIPS Proctor, a person of record, sold alcohol and tobacco, GM'd a restaurant, a nightclub and grocery store (all involving alcohol sales, which felons are prohibited from doing in my state).
I was denied entry into Canada, although I misunderstood at the time what the reason was, and only a couple of years later pieced together that this was for the same reason, as Canada refuses entry to felons.
To be a trainer for the TIPS program you have to register with the State Police, as you are administering their training. The State Police who would eventually have me flagged as a felon also licensed me to train people in how to properly retail and handle alcohol, which you cannot do as a felon, and for which you will be charged quite possibly with a felony.
I ended having to go to several superior courts, multiple district courts, and a few police stations, as well as ended up on a first name basis with the NHSP officer who made it her mission to help me.
There was zero paperwork anywhere showing me to be a felon, because I am not a felon, and was never tried or convicted of a felony. The one case that precipitated all this was an arrest for very serious charges, including attempted murder, that never made it out of grand jury or even had a finding of probable cause, because it was clearly self defense, as even sworn in affidavit by the alleged victim.
But sometime during digitalization of records, which was done manually, a box was erroneously checked and I was transmuted into a felon. As the NHSP at the time was still working off some paper records, they signed off on me handling alcohol and teaching the safe handling of alcohol.
I write all this, because the process was laborious, and I had to collect every last bit of extant paper to try to prove that I was not a felon, because the system now
knew I was one.
And I also needed luck, because the original police department had the box with every bit of paper, was in the process of uploading and then destroying them because it was decades after the case, but hadn't gotten to mine yet. I then had to wait months for an overworked check to hand redact 35 or so pages of the file, because some of the interviewed parties at the time were minors.
But, stuck to the top of the first page was a yellow paper note with the police prosecutor's signature reading "no probable cause", and "grand jury declined to indict". Which was the literal and improbable smoking gun I needed to prove the negative.
But, this isn't about my personal anecdote, to be clear. The extra details matter, because if it is an administrative or digitalization error, prepare yourself for a slog that will not resolve in a timely fashion, dealing almost exclusively with overworked clerks, cops who have no rational cause to care about decades old arrests, courthouse functionaries who want you to be anywhere else but in front of them, and don't mind letting you know it, and institutional inertia.
I hired an expensive, very competent ex-Navy lawyer accustomed to bureaucratic labrynths and got lucky in the person of NHSP Sergeant who gave an actual ****.
Strap in.
