Commish presses appeal to revoke Hub man’s firearm license

Police Commissioner William B. Evans is appealing a West Roxbury District Court decision that found his decision to revoke a Boston man’s license to carry was “arbitrary and capricious.”

According to the appeal filed in Suffolk Superior Court, Evans is contesting the West Roxbury court’s ruling in favor of a Boston man who challenged the revocation of his gun license. A court spokeswoman would not comment on a pending matter and Evans also said he could not discuss the specific case. But he defended the ability of local police to deny or revoke licenses for people they believed to be unfit.

“We have to be real diligent on who’s suited to possess a gun, we can’t have light laws,” Evans told the Herald. “Obviously people are entitled to a hearing but we all have to really safeguard guns floating around the city and state.”

According to Evans’ filing, the man received a license to carry from BPD in March 2016, and had a gun in his car when he went to a party in Dedham that November. Shots were fired at the party and the man took the gun from an unsecured area in his trunk and put it in his driver’s side door.

Dedham police confiscated the man’s gun and BPD revoked his license. But the man appealed in West Roxbury District Court, which ruled that the man “did what most people would have done in the same circumstances” and reversed the revocation, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.”

Evans’ appeal says the court misinterpreted the law and makes the city less safe.

“The ruling of the West Roxbury Court ordering the Commissioner to reinstate (the) license to carry firearms adversely affects the real interests of the general public in limiting the access irresponsible persons have to deadly weapons,” the appeal reads.

Jim Wallace of the Gun Owners Action League, said the authority that state law gives local police to regulate gun licenses leads to inconsistency.

“Unfortunately, it’s where we live and how we’re treated and, to some extent, social bigotry we face as gun owners,” he said.