In the past 8 days or so, a number of victories both big and small have popped up in courts all over the North East. In Rhode Island, the strict “May Issue” stance of the issuing authorities of concealed carry weapons permits was struck down by the Rhode Island Supreme Court. The ruling was in favor of Norman Gadomski against the Police Chief of East Providence, Joseph Tavares. To wit: Nonetheless, in Mosby, 851 A.2d at 1050, we proclaimed that “[a]s a matter of policy, this Court will not countenance any system of permitting under the Firearms Act that would be committed to the unfettered discretion of an executive agency.” Indeed, we noted that any rights flowing from article 1, section 22 of the Rhode Island Constitution[2] would be “illusory, of course, if [they] could be abrogated entirely on the basis of an unreviewable unrestricted licensing scheme.” Mosby, 851...
