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Bad news. Yesterday, I
bought my hunting licenses and stamps for the upcoming season. The young man filling out my licenses said, “You won’t have to go through this next year. It will all be online. They want to get more information so they have told us that licenses will no longer be sold by clerks.”
It was bad enough that this eliminated one more reason to tell my wife I had to go to the sporting goods store. It was even worse contemplating all the problems that arise from computer transactions — from stolen credit card numbers to w orms and viruses, and just plain ineptitude on the part of us pre-World War II babies.
The worst thing was that the licensing process was going from a cut-and-dried process to information-gathering by bureaucrats with Lord only knows what kind of agendas.
How much of state licensing “requirements” could be simplified and turned over to clerks, to minimize citizen inconvenience? A whole lot, I’d guess. But that would involve fewer bureaucrats, smaller budgets and ultimately less governmental control.
There is an even greater concern about bureaucrats controlling licensing processes: they have their own agendas, regardless of law
Case in point: Last month my concealed weapons permit expired. I started^ the renewal process two months early.
Let me digress for a moment. About seven years ago when Sen. (then Governor) George Allen successfully obtained passage of a right to carry law for Virginians, Northern Virginia went bonkers. This rich urban area in which I live predicted mayhem and fought being forced to issue permits.
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