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Good News!

If you bothered to get a carry permit, you are very unlikely to be the kind of person who breaks the law thus generating a search warrant for your house.

Bad News!

If you are one of the teeny minority that does get searched, it'll be a no-knock-shoot-the-dog style warrant service.

SIGH

I look at this from the perspective of someone who has both a carry permit, and has had the cops serve a warrant twice since getting the permit.

Thank you Kevin Bartmess!

He hit his wife and absconded the first time.  The wife thought, perhaps, that he'd run to my place since he was (WAS) a long time friend of The Lovely Harvey.  I had just gotten up to take a leak and saw someone in the back yard.  I was on the way back to the bedroom for a light, phone and a gun when the cops knocked.  There was a bit of comedy since they didn't actually HAVE a warrant to search OUR property.  I insisted that they get one before they came in, and would they like some of the coffee we're brewing since we're all up now?  It took all of ten minutes for a real warrant to show up at my door with Kevin's name on it and my address.  By that time the cops were damn sure he wasn't there anyway and before the search really got started, they'd found him at his girlfriend's house (the reason Mr and Mrs Bartmess were fighting in the first place).  The cops, deputies really, were understanding about the need for the warrant and polite to us.

This was his first arrest for hitting his wife.  Not his last.  Several more arrests, convictions, time served, parole/probation, divorce.  She bailed back to Iowa, and he followed her without permission from his probation officer.  This led to a bench warrant for his arrest being issued.  A traffic stop in Iowa revealed two things; first he had no license, second the warrant.  Further, we found out that neither Iowa or Florida is willing to spend a penny to process such a warrant and send the fugitive back here.

A bit later...  Things seem to have been patched up between everyone.  Kevin and Harvey are talking again and we're assured that this whole warrant thing is taken care of, all legal and shit.  He and his new bride plan a trip down here to see a Buccaneers game and visit his grandkids from Son One's Ex Wife One.

Things were going well until the fourth night...  I have irregular sleeping hours so I am up trying to get an Apple AirPort Extreme to stop blinking "PROBLEM"...  Knock on the door at 3am...

Yeah, that arrest warrant that was all taken care of?  Nope.  He took the refusal to extradite as meaning it was expunged; you know, without checking with a lawyer or anything.

So they knock, I say, "who's there?" They say, "Sheriff's Office with a warrant for Kevin Bartmess." Me, after seeing the warrant, "he's in the spare bedroom, c'mon on in." Kevin, to this day, is convinced Harvey dropped a dime on him.  He's stopped speaking to us, and I am fine with that because without contact from him, I stopped being contacted by the Sheriff in the wee hours of the day.

But notice that not once did the cops need to break down my door or shoot my dog?  There is assuredly more than a gun here.  Heck, we even looked up the laws about locking them all up when we had a felon visiting.

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