A whole bunch of gun-toting Lake County residents recently learned their CCW licenses were invalid after their instructor was busted for offering “fast track classes” to get them certified.
The News-Herald was the first to report that after someone complained to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office in March, the department began investigating. They found that the NRA-certified instructor from Mentor charged people $100 and didn’t do nearly as much as was required, offering much less than the required six hours of classroom instruction and completely skipping the mandatory two hours of instruction at a gun range.
So now, 170 folks were informed by a letter from the sheriff’s office that their concealed carry permits are invalid. They’ve got to do the course over again, and this time they’ve got to do all of it.
The sheriff’s office handed their investigation off to the Lake County prosecutor’s office last week and County Prosecutor Charles Coulson explained to Scene it’ll probably be a couple weeks before decisions on any charges against the instructor would be handed down (and, finally, the authorities will not release the guy’s name — all we know now is the instructor was an NRA-certified man from Mentor).
Coulson explained that his office is currently treating the 170 phony-permit holders as victims and witnesses, and not suspects in the scheme. But Lake County Sheriff Daniel Dunlap told WEWS last week that “they’re offenders in a sense too. They signed that they received the training.”
This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2015.
