“Reported Charges Triple Against Pistol Permit Holders”.  That was the front page, top left newspaper headline.  Not a supermarket tabloid, either.  A lot of folks here in West Michigan probably saw it - -  a lot of those probably started to read the story that followed.  I read the story that followed, all the way to the end. I was looking for the “fire”, so to speak.  You know, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.  Well, that much smoke, I inferred, must mean there’s a pretty significant “fire”.

Well, I didn’t find it.  It’s not that it was there, and I overlooked it.  In my opinion, it just wasn’t there.  I am not a pistol permit holder.  I do own pistols, and they are registered, but I don’t have a permit to carry a pistol concealed.  I did have, years ago, but I don’t anymore.

I was just naturally interested in the topic.  What charges?  What about the reference to triple?  If I inferred accurately from the article’s implications, a lot of counties simply are not reporting all the violations and dispositions of those charges, as they are brought against CCW permit holders.  In Shiawassee, which has never filed the requisite report, Prosecutor  Randy Colbry is quoted as having said, “The state is acting outside the law, when they say you should do this, and not providing funds, and they know that.”  He’s quoted further as saying, “We simply do not have enough manpower to do what we need to do in a work week.”

Can we afford to just let this matter lie there, virtually unattended?  Well, may be - - It certainly doesn’t appear to me to be nearly as serious as the headline seems to be saying.  Ultimately, we find that, apparently being notified that this investigation was under way, a lot more counties reported a lot more offenses than was the case in the year ending July 1, 2010..

So, the number of reports ballooned from 1,005 to 2,711 a year later.  There are now more than 300,000 permit holders in the state.

Now, to be fair to the reporting medium, I acknowledge the part of the article which observes, “Lawbreakers still are a fraction of the state’s permit holders . . . .”

Here’s another interesting part of the article . . .of the 2711 violations reported, there were 1162 convictions. Another part I found interesting - - Alcohol offenses dominate the annual lists; violent crimes are a much smaller part of the reports; many crimes do not involve the use of a gun, and the permit holder in the report, may not have had one at the time.

I did spend valuable time reading the article, which I’ve concluded really didn’t say very much... and for that, I’m really very glad.

Karl Guenther is a retired Kalamazoo farm broadcaster from WKZO and can be reached at khguenther@att.net. He is a member of Michigan Farm Bureau and an emeritus member of the National Association of Farm Broadcasting.